Metaphysical environment

Rating: Null/10 (9 December 2012)

Sure this is crap in the usual ways.
However, I dare anyone interested in cinema as cinemaâ€”in the eye as it 'writes' space by mappingâ€”to watch this and not be transfixed by the visual accomplishment. If Harryhausen deserves praise, then how on earth not these guys? You don't just see here masses of metal collapse. There are small renderings in every scene, attention to detail. As we zip past an office building ripped in two, you will see human specks clutching at the edge.
It comes alive.
It is rather wonderful to watch this in the abstract modeâ€”our eye is scudding through space as the fabric of the film is torn to shreds all around us. The film violates every law of physics as it does that, which fits here, because the abstraction is metaphysical, Greek for 'beyond the physics'. The sheer impossibility of anything around the Ark project underscores thisâ€”when in the end survivors get out on the decks, we are really seeing a glimpse of the afterlife.
The overall enterprise captivates not because there is logic in what happens and you can latch on to that as navigation. Rather, there are suddenly cracks in normative reality as the world begins to spontaneously reconfigure itself around us to form the experience, a series of futurist paintings. I am talking in particular of two scenes here, the race through LA and Yellowstone, which are on par with the best of Spielberg's War of the Worldsâ€”another film structuring collapse around the eye in some great ways. The known geography is thrown askew, its gears melt, a train undulates across frame like a piece of ribbon tossed by the gods.
In the macrocosmic plane, the cracks are about the confrontation with the inevitable passing of things, echoed in the Buddhist lama ringing his bell before the cosmic wave of renewal.
In the hero's microcosmic plane, the protagonist is a failed writer who neglected parenthood to work on his book, which incidentally was about the apocalypse. So, in the film he confronts his creation while shielding his kids from it.
The rest is almost not worth it, almost.