Well... this certainly isn't one for the kids. You'll know the reviews from them, because they'll say things like "WTF?" or "Sooo boooooring","Dumb ending", etc. So, they'll have quickly been distracted back to their phones - which isn't a thousand miles removed from what the film is actually about. It won't have been the 'disaster' movie they were expecting. But it certainly is one. The true 'disaster' it depicts lies beneath the surface: the disaster of the world we've created, and are destroying with the kind of passive indifference to things that is embedded in our throw-away, junk food, instant gratification lifestyle now - a passivity that the advent of smartphone culture and 'instant connectedness all day everywhere' has exacerbated hugely. The irony of all of that, of course, is that as we have become more 'connected', and now that we have instant access to more information than we could ever have dreamed about, the more 'disconnected', divided and ignorant we are. "Is that a deer?" the girl says at one point. Without her phone available to check it, can she be sure anymore?
So, here we have the seemingly worldy-wise, ultra-smart, ultra-trendy, ultra-connected, well-educated and well-off family, heading off for a relaxing weekend in a luxurious rental home in the Hamptons. A weekend that, we guess, will just be about time at the beach, time by the pool, time getting soused, time to try to avoid talking about those unspoken things that really need talking about... and hours and hours of doing what they do every day: mindlessly and passively scrolling through content. The money is, as it always has been, one form of insulation. But the ironic 'breakdown of connection' becomes very plausible with the actual loss of connection they experience when all of the networks go down. Suddenly they simply have no idea what's going on, or why, and are isolated in this increasingly strange buffer zone between their actual reality and the virtual reality that has hitherto fed them information. If anything, I think this is one weakness of the plot - that the downing of the networks doesn't have a more drastic impact on them than it probably would in reality. I've often thought and argued that it would only need some enemy invading power to knock out our smartphone networks to lead people en masse into total mental crisis and meltdown. Not just Gen Zers, but also those in the Boomer generations who've become hooked (subtly coerced into using would be a more salient term) on the gadgetry. Such a large and vital part of their life is suddenly not there. No TikTok. No YouTube. No WhatsApp. No Instagram. No porn or dating sites. How would they possibly cope? Heaven forbid... would they actually have to listen to music properly instead of idiot-scrolling it? Would they have to read books? Would they have to daydream, imagine, create? Would they have to have uninterrupted conversations? Would they have to pay attention at last?
That aside, though, the film examines those issues very well, and with some excellent examples of the 'disengagement' we are experiencing. The idea, for instance, that we can simply take over someone else's home - then be shocked and disconcerted when they turn up to seek shelter in it because of being stranded. Whose property is it? Who has the most rights? Why should we offer sanctuary in a crisis to the people who are our own hosts? Then there's the disengagement with the natural world. I love the scene where the mother and daughter are standing outside the cabin surrounded by dozens of deer simply looking at them. The sense of menace in it - even though it's simply a herd of largely benign and (previously) shy fellow creatures. The women are so freaked at this turning of the tables - animals looking at them for a change, instead of the other way around in zoos, etc - that all they can think of to do is scare them away. Maybe there's an element of white liberal guilt, too, showing up in it and confronting them. Perhaps that's giving them too much benefit of the doubt, though.
Another scene I hugely enjoyed - a real PMSFL moment, as the kids would say - was the huge traffic jam caused by those hundreds of driverless Teslas all slamming into one another on the highway back into the city. Such a symbolic scene, too - encapsulating the 'lemming-like' nature of our own lives as we become more and more sucked into the 'Bladerunner' dystopia of Big Tech - controlling, as it does, pretty much everything we do. Everything. From the first iPhone onwards, in 2007, it's crept up and crept up... and now it's almost completely consumed us, like semi-conductor quicksand. The generations coming up now will never be able to know a life without the gadget either permanently in their pocket or bag, or in their hand. Like diabetics who can't go anywhere without their insulin and their candy bars, they won't be able to function without the phone. And as that scene so neatly demonstrates, without any other form of guidance in our lives - nothing else to steer us in the direction we're supposed to take - then we'll just crash. In that sense, the penultimate scene showing the actual destruction of New York is superfluous, really. The seeds of destruction are right there, in our hands - and yet we don't view them as such, of course. We view them as miracles, liberators, enablers.
People often cite Orwell as the prophet for a forthcoming repressive, authoritarian society based on mass-surveillance. But Aldous Huxley was the one who actually had it right. We won't regard these objects as facilitators of oppression, mind-control and social engineering. Instead, we'll embrace them, love them, be willing to spend huge sums on them. And we won't be able to imagine ever living our lives without them.
That's the true 'disaster' at the heart of this story. That's what we need to take from it.
I wonder how many will?
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