The
other day, my husband and I watched a movie we’d never heard of. The setting of
the story was that Earth had been in winter for the past 300 years, and it would
continue for thousands of years. The only humans that still existed lived 10
kilometers under the surface, where they used geothermal energy as their power
source. They had created a race of ‘humans’ to do their work for them,
including sex workers, but nobody ever indicated what type of work this ‘inferior’
race did, except for the one sex worker.
Hubby
had difficulty with Arizona being covered in snow and ice, with daytime
temperatures of -60° F. In the latest ice age, the glaciers never reached the
sw states. To me, that said the the earth was not just in
an ice age, but had entered a ‘snowball earth’ ice age, where the entire globe
is frozen.
How
did the ice age winter begin? The characters gave 2 theories, but didn’t know
which was right. The first theory was that an asteroid had struck the earth,
throwing up so much dust and debris into the atmosphere that most of the
sunlight couldn’t get to the ground. The second theory was that it was a bomb
that threw up all that dust and debris.
Okay,
yes, a lot of dust and debris in the atmosphere can reflect enough sunlight to
produce some very chilly results. Large volcanos can produce enough dust to
chill the entire globe as the dust rides through the atmosphere. BUT, such dust
doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.
What
about the asteroid that ‘killed the dinosaurs’? you may ask. Yes, that threw up
a lot of dust and debris. But what killed so much of the flora and fauna was
the firestorm produced by the heat released when the asteroid hit. Think of it
as a huge explosion, so hot the heat wave raced around the globe, burning
almost everything it touched. There may have been a long winter afterwards, but
all that dust and stuff did settle out in a fairly short amount of time.
The
plot was that a squad of ‘normal’ military-type humans had to go out into the
world to track down a renegade ‘inferior’ made human. The squad's DNA was changed to
allow them to survive in the far-below-zero temperatures, but that would only
last for 48 hours. I had a little trouble accepting that, but... okay, let’s
see what they do with it.
The
scene that got me was right after they arrived on the surface. It had been
stated that ‘all the animals’ were gone. But what they see right after they
arrive on the surface was a man fishing. He had chopped a hole in the top of a
small rivulet of water racing over the snow/ice, and had actually caught a
fish, but seeing that he was going to be interrupted, he put the fish back.
I
really couldn’t accept that. If all the animals had died, where did this fish
come from? Okay, maybe they were mistaken. But at the temperatures they were
talking about, I would expect that little rivulet to be frozen solid, and the
fish with it.
It
didn’t help that long after the main character had been on the surface for 48
hours, the main character was still chasing the renegade, with his head bare
and no gloves. Frostbite was completely ignored.
It
was not a good movie. If you are going to change the rules of life (daytime
temperatures of -60F), then you (the writer) have to follow those new rules.
And it is easy to have characters who don’t know what happened to end the
civilization we (the audience) are familiar with. It’s easy for the writer, but
it’s not satisfying to the audience.
