Aug

6

Weird Weather Machine Movies: Superstorm vs. Killer Wave

August 6, 2007 |

Okay… Discovery Channel and Ion TV (which apparently is the new name for PAX TV) pit two movies against each other on a Sunday night, that are both products of our free-floating anxiety about… just about everything.

Discovery’s Superstorm had Tom Sizemore and Chris Potter (who somehow, years ago, juggled cop roles on TV landmarks Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and Silk Stalkings) using a weather control system to inadvertently steer a killer hurricane to New York. (Lots of stock footage of storms and after-storm recovery efforts, lots of B-grade acting… though not nearly as awful as it might have been.) But at least here, “science” was bsaically dancing with nature, with good intentions, if disastrous results, and Discovery followed up with an educational program to look at weather manipulation, storms and global warming in a minimally sensationalized way, including previous attempts at actual manipulations of hurricanes.  And even the movie was peppered with scientific jargon and ideas more or less in line with the science as described in the subsequent documentary. Cloud seeding, they suggest, changed the course of “Hurricane Grace” (which hit New York) in the movie, just as a computer model suggests seeding (on a scale not currently feasible) could have been used to move Katrina by 50 miles or so– enough to spare New Orleans the worst.

Ion’s Killer Waves (which, in fairness, I didn’t have a chance to watch) recounted the use of artifical tsunami-type waves as weapons of mass destruction by a multinational corporation looking for work building seawalls to protect the American Homeland against tusnami-type waves. Angus Macfayden (who?) clashes with Tom Skerritt as the CEO of the killer corporation. This is just silly from start to finish, and grounded in nothing in particular.  I’m thinking propaganda. And they follow up with “Live from Liberty”, a religious program.

So.. there are so many angles to this:

  • B-networks now battle in a way that used to be left to the Big 3 (when there were only 3). Peculiar to watch.
  • To understand a people, look to how they dream, especially when those dreams are recurring. We’re afraid of Katrina’s sisters, global warming, tsunamis, well-meaning scientists, evil-hearted corporations, terrorist attacks, WMD… It has been suggested that all of this anxiety– especially that over terrorism, since the al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington– is actually a form of nostalgia for the cold war. Interesting for me in looking for the recent reference was the fact that this suggestion predated the Sept. 11 attacks, or even the election of 2000. Uncanny how many of us seem to have dreamed all that has come to pass, for years before it happened…
  • La morale nue apporte de l’ennui; le conte fait passer le précepte avec lui, La Fontaine once said, and if that’s what distraction-hungry America needs to learn the lesson, so be it.
  • Meanwhile, back in the places we mostly think of as emerging markets, unprecedented flooding displaces ~100M people (think: one-third of the US population, undergoing Katrina-like conditions.) And you mostly hear about this on the BBC.

Alas, I’m too fried to do any thorough reflection beyond tossing out these few conversation starters.


Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind