Films about the disaster for every month of 2023 – review

If you read this text, it means that half of 2023 is already behind us, and you are still alive. For this reason, we compiled an apocalyptic film calendar and illustrated with suitable films the cataclysms that have already occurred, as well as those that could, if the Universe finally turns to humanity as a black hole. It is recommended to watch all of the above paintings in a personal bunker, surrounded by canned goods and bags of buckwheat.

January – World War III

The year immediately promised to be fun, because it began with an international military conflict involving Iran and the United States. We will not understand who hit anyone and who threatened with anything, but the bottom line is that a wave of memes about the upcoming Third World War and quickly passed through social networks Fallout in the reality. And films on this subject are divided exactly into two categories – depressive warnings, like “Letters of a Dead Man”, and bright post-apocalyptic attractions. Such as the “Mad Max”. We advise him to view. And specifically the second part – Warrior of the Road. In the first, civilization still holds on, even if it flies into tartarars, but already in the sequel we see the familiar scorched desert. This is a world of roaring engines, crazy bandits dressed up like glam rock stars, and a lone hero who does not want to save anyone and protect anyone, but he has to. Young Mel Gibson is charismatic and harsh, and George Miller has already got his hand in the first part, making the Road Warrior look great even forty years after the release.

February – fires

The causes of real big fires are mostly trivial and depressing – climate change, or, more often, human slovenliness. This is not at all fun. Whether it’s dragons.

It’s easy to forget about this cute detail, but the duration of the film “The power of fire” – just 2023. True, by that time the dragon-apocalypse is already ending – giant lizards crawled to the surface in the zero, after which they ate and burned everything that was on the planet. Only a tiny handful of survivors remained, which can hardly be called resistance. They huddle in the ruins of the United Kingdom and stare at the sky with fear.

“Power of Fire” in the year of release failed terribly at the box office – with a total budget of $ 95 million, she was able to scrape together only 82 million. At the same time, the film is unique in many ways. Firstly, dragons in modern times are fresh. Secondly, post-apocalyptic England is also an atypical setting. Thirdly, there are Christian Bale and Gerard Butler in the cast, but in terms of brutality, both of them are done by Matthew McConaughey. In The Power of Fire, he is bald, tattooed, bearded and completely insane. Well, in the end, it’s just a solid action with a lot of real pyrotechnic effects and well-preserved graphics. What is no reason to read or review?

March – Pandemic

Steven Soderberg’s nearly ten-year-old film “Infection” It gained new popularity in March not by accident. In the year of release, it was not that they would not be understood, but it was hardly fully appreciated. Film critics indulgently praised him for the realism and almost complete absence of the Hollywood flair, but then scolded him for the same reasons. Everything is kind of cold, detached, the characters are not pretty, there is a lot of medical terminology, the events are not spectacular enough. And in general, the disease is, of course, scary, but you could add some terrorists. Or a zombie.

And then the year 2023 came, and it turned out that Soderberg got closer to reality as close as it is possible for a Hollywood filmmaker. A flurry of infected people, officials who arrogantly try to restrain what is impossible to contain, hysterical virus dissidents with faith in a conspiracy – all this could be seen both in the picture and in the news feed. Today, when the pandemic is becoming less and less used to, “Infection” is perceived more calmly, but a couple of months ago, from some episodes, the blood literally froze.

April – isolation

Quarantine 2023 will definitely go down in history. Films about isolation in the coming years will surely spawn inadvertently. However, now with the first month of sitting locked up the best, perhaps, rhymes Cloverfield 10. The main character, Michelle, is quarantined completely suddenly after a car accident. Around the wall of the bunker, and opposite, there is a middle-aged, middle-aged man named Howard, who claims that the air outside is poisoned. At the same time, the main character is not at all sure that she is held captive for the sake of salvation, and some catastrophe befell the outside world.

The film is worth attention at least because of the brilliant play of the three central actors – Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr. and John Goodman. And believe me, the less you know about the picture before viewing, the better.

May – more isolation

“I’m a legend” predicted two phenomena – the film Batman vs. Superman and the deserted streets of New York. True, in the world of the film, not conscious citizens were sitting at home, but bald CGI vampires. And Will Smith, on which the whole picture rests. Fans of the work of Richard Matheson have been smashing the film for thirteen years for completely distorting the original novel in favor of blockbuster, but they can’t argue with one – Smith played amazingly. Not every actor will be able to hold out in the frame almost single-handedly for an entire hour, so much so that you can’t take his eyes off him. And yesterday’s pop pop rapper from “Men in Black” could, than proved to skeptics the deservedness of their success.

June – riots

Thrashing megacities with or without – has long been a national American fun. It doesn’t matter with what good intentions it all starts and how peaceful the participants of rallies and demonstrations are, in the process lovers of freebies and brawls will surely catch up. The tendency of the crowd to base impulses successfully dissected the franchise Doomsday. In it, a group of cunning dealers in conjunction with politicians and scientists proposed a revolutionary concept of the fight against crime – for one night in a year to give citizens to do whatever their heart desires. You can safely rob, smash, kill. Neither the police, nor the military, nor any other service will blink an eye. The rest 364 days, if you please, abide by the law, but on Doomsday come off for health. Of course, this leads to annual massacres, the systematic shooting of people who are objectionable to the authorities, and glossing over the dirtiest cases with false patriotism. This is all for the sake of citizens, for their good and freedom of expression. Only now, sane people would not even think of using freedom to beat someone and break something.

July – Alien Invasion

Okay, from everything real and painful, let’s move on to pessimistic forecasts for the future. On the nose is the fourth of July, celebrated by the Americans as Independence Day, which means it’s time to wait for the flying saucers in the sky. And at the same time to review the film of the same name by Roland Emmerich. We will recall this German director more than once, because he, like no one else, got his hand in films about global catastrophes. And so “Independence Day” – not so much science fiction (all science here is dying in agony at the time of hacking alien software from an Earth computer), but an ode to colorful destruction and bright explosions. The Los Angeles destruction scene is still impressive. Anyway, this is endlessly pathetic, very dumb, but regularly entertaining movie – an exemplary blockbuster of the 90s and one of the best films about alien invasion.

August – climate change

But why do we need some aliens when there is global warming. In winter, fires blazed, and in summer it is appropriate to wait for frosts. No wonder that Greta Thunberg warned us. And no one has depicted the climate changes on the screen more spectacular than the same Emmerich with his “Day after tomorrow” – The ultimate disaster movie. He cleverly balances on the verge between a competent blockbuster with a clear message to the viewer and a brainless attraction – a trick that the director will not be able to repeat in the future. So the giant hurricanes and the icy storm in “The Day After Tomorrow” side by side with a quiet and touching scene, where the doomed character Ian Holma who left us courageously takes her part in the company of colleagues. In addition, one of the main characters is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who even tries to make a template high school student alive and believable.

September – let them be … spiders!

If to prophesy trouble, then the big … And eight-legged! So at the beginning of autumn, just in case, we will appoint an Arachnid uprising and we will prepare for it by watching a movie with the most suitable name – Spider Attack. It is unlikely that anyone will be surprised that this delightful treshak was produced by the same Roland Emmerich, and his hand is felt. Spider Attack is a concentrated movie of the zeros. The main role is played by David Arquette, the Dewey cop from Scream, and in the role of a capricious teenage girl, you can see the very young Scarlett Johansson. The cliches are piled one on top of the other, but the creators, it seems, do not care at all, because they do, damn it, a movie about giant spiders. And those are just gorgeous. Arachnids in the film, attention, make sounds! Roar, scream, grunt, mutter something. And they behave not like the creatures of arachnophobia nightmares, but like some kind of dumb gremlins. If you miss the stupid comedy horror movies, then catch up on Spider Attack.

October – good old zombies

Before Halloween, the dead must certainly rise from the graves – otherwise all those who were waiting for the zombie apocalypse at the beginning of the pandemic will be completely disappointed. There are not just a lot of films on this subject, but too many, but no one has made anything better than old Romero. You can, of course, recall the meat paintings of the Italian Lucio Fulci and provocatively “The Return of the Living Dead” Dan O’Bannon, but neither they, nor the mass of other talentedly shot horror films did not become a turning point in pop culture. AND “Night of the Living Dead” has become. In 1968, she cut off the speechlessness of many viewers – no age ratings then simply did not exist. Children of 10 years old, who are accustomed to the bloodless horror films of Universal, came to the session and saw something that even adults were not ready for.

Walking corpses tore the flesh with their teeth, a little dead girl with a construction trowel chopped her own mother, and in the finale there was not the slightest hint of a happy end. According to eyewitnesses, some young spectators in the hall cried quietly and peed in their pants. But not only in the meat effects and in the first appearance of the zombies familiar to us, the revolutionary nature of The Night. Romero’s first film is still cited as an example of sharp satire wrapped in a simple story. It reads criticism of the Vietnam War, and the American cult of arms, and racism – in the 68th year, all this was nowhere more relevant. In further works, the director began to act much more clumsily, and social commentary often loomed in sight, but in “Night of the Living Dead” everything was in moderation – and meat, and suspense, and meaning.

November – heavenly punishment

From all scientific, pseudoscientific and anti-scientific, we will finally turn to biblical cataclysms. For some reason, the Revelation itself has not yet been decided to film, and the doomsday of other religions has no noticeable on-screen incarnations. Apparently, the reason is in some reverence and fear of insulting someone inadvertently. Which, however, did not stop Sony from releasing ten years ago “Legion” – horror movie about angel apocalypse. Yes, yes, you understood correctly – the winged messengers of heaven become the main source of all ills in the film. Say, God finally became disillusioned with humanity and sent his army to arrange planetary genocide. Only the archangel Michael, who armed himself with a pair of machine guns and dug in with a handful of survivors in a roadside cafe in the middle of the desert, did not agree with the policy of the “final decision”. Well, then the film turns into a typical siege horror of the type “From Dusk Till Dawn” or “Misty”, and the original plot is leveled under a load of stamps. So the angels, having invented nothing better, inhabit the bodies of people and turn them into the same zombies, only very dexterous.

Despite the modest cash desk, the thrash “Legion” by some miracle was continued in the form of no less than a trash series “Dominion”. True, its merits are also limited only to the original setting near the biblical post-apocalypse.

December – all at once

Well, let’s end with a relatively fresh news duck that, they say, the Mayan memorable calendar was misinterpreted, and in fact the end of time is set just for this year. Which means the quickly outdated Emmerich film “2012” relevant again.

What a picture, damn it, what a picture! It seems that the German so desperately wanted to devote himself that he completely forgot about a sense of proportion. In “The Day After Tomorrow” the director destroyed half the world – in “2012” the world will collapse entirely. In “The Day After Tomorrow” there were hurricanes, tsunamis and glaciation – in “2012” there will be … That’s it! That’s all! California breaks away from the mainland and goes under water, Nevada turns into a fiery hell, A colossal wave covers Everest. It seems that if somewhere in the middle of the film Godzilla emerged from the depths of the sea, no one would be surprised. All this is going through, of course, not the talented scientist who predicted everything, and not the brave military man, the master of his craft, but the failed writer, whose main talent lies in an inexhaustible supply of luck. However, seriously criticizing the 2012 script is like playing bouncers with Stephen Hawking. This is the most brainless, excessive, but spectacular movie. So beautiful the world really has not yet been smashed.

Of course, in fact, we hope that the remaining six months will pass calmly, boringly and safely. Well, if the world really wants to collapse, you will at least have a selection of noteworthy films for the marathon on the occasion of Armageddon.