Cinema
Several disaster films have also been made: released during the turbulence of World War I, the Danish feature film The End of the World revolves around the near-miss of a comet which causes fire showers and social unrest in Europe. When Worlds Collide (1951) based on a 1933 novel by Philip Wylie, deals with two planets on a collision course with Earth – the smaller planet a "near miss," causing extensive damage and destruction, followed by a direct hit from the larger planet. Meteor (1979) features small asteroid fragments and a large 8 km (5 mi) wide asteroid heading for Earth. Orbiting U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons platforms are turned away from their respective earthbound targets, and toward the incoming threat. In 1998, two films were released in the United States on the subject of attempting to stop impact events: Touchstone Pictures' Armageddon, about an asteroid; and Paramount/DreamWorks' Deep Impact, about a comet. Both involved using Space Shuttle-derived craft to deliver large amounts of nuclear weapons to destroy their targets. The 2008 American Broadcasting Company's miniseries Impact deals about a splinter of a brown dwarf hidden in a meteor shower which strikes the Moon and sends it on a collision course with Earth. The 2011 film Melancholia uses the motif of an impact event incorporated in the aesthetics of romanticism.
Read more about this topic: Impact Event, Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word cinema:
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)