When Worlds Collide
It’s fascinating to realize just how many spins on a narrative the science fiction genre has had over the years. Not surprising, but fascinating. In 1998, we got two end of the world disaster films in “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon.” My thoughts on both are well-documented, but both take an end of the world premise and put their own spin on it. Mimi Leder’s “Deep Impact” had a lot of comparisons to the 1951 film, “When Worlds Collide,” when it came out, so the film has been on my radar for a while.
What is it about humanity that we so often imagine what our own destruction? I think, when it boils down to it, such an idea plays into a fundamental desire to figure out our own moral compass would lead us. All the way back to the story of Noah in the Bible, mass destruction asks us what we would do to save others, and what it says about us if we only save a select few. Based on the novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, “When Worlds Collide” focuses less on the morality of the end of the world, and more the spectacle of it, but it does make us ponder, “What matters most? Protecting the most elite of humanity, or saving as many people as possible?” The spectacle wins out in this George Pal production, however.
When I’m writing this, we just had a return trip around the moon with Artemis II. It’s been fascinating, and sad, to see the conspiracy theorists come out, as well as skeptics about why we need to go to the moon with everything going on on this planet. I think science fiction can help answer their questions. A situation where our own world is dying, and difficult choices might be made, is not just sci-fi; with climate change, it is a certainty. One of the sad realities is that many people, in a situation like “When Worlds Collide,” would be “sacrificed” for the intellectual and political elites of the world. When he finds out that he has a guaranteed slot on the rocket to leave Earth, David Randall (Richard Derr) doesn’t feel like he has any more of a right to be on the ship as anyone else; he’s not wrong, but also, people like him would be necessary for the flight itself, and to figure out what our new world would be like. It’s a fascinating challenge for humanity.
In Rudolph Mate’s film, a group of astronomers discover that a star is on course to hit the Earth. The science here is a bit off, of course, but that is often the case with sci-fi of this era. Will enough people believe in the science to try and save who they can by going off-planet, or will human nature take over as the countdown to the end of the world begins? Like “Deep Impact,” the tone of this film is very bleak; it’s almost like a funeral procession compared to a lot of sci-fi at the time, but it plays into our natural fears of the world not really caring about us, and humanity resulting in a lot of violence and man killing man. The spectacle is what we will take away from “When Worlds Collide,” however, not the emotions. And Pal’s production- when it comes to the destruction of Earth- is top notch. That is something Hollywood has always figured out how to do well; this set a standard for others to follow later.
