Inferred Holocaust: Difference between revisions

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[[File:SymbionicOwnedCity_4646.jpg|link=Sym-Bionic Titan|frame|[[Conveniently Empty Building|Only fourteen billion dollars lost in damage.]] [[Sarcasm Mode|Yep]]... [[Never Say "Die"|nothing else to report]].]]
 
 
{{quote|[reading a poster] ''[[Motivational Poster|"'Hang in there, baby!']] You said it, kitty. ''[looking more closely]'' 'Copyright 1968.' Hmm, determined or not, that cat must be long dead. That's kind of a downer."''|'''Marge''', ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'', "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson"}}
 
 
''What happens when you detonate a spherical metal honeycomb over a hundred miles wide just above the atmosphere of a habitable world? Regardless of specifics, the world won't remain habitable for long.''
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** Parts of ''[[The Dark Knight Saga]]'s'' viral marketing campaign focused on the aftermath of the city being exposed to the toxin in ''Begins''. The results was a sudden increase of insanity in city because of the contaminated drinking water. But there's no indicator that the people infected by the toxin were permanently damaged by the toxin. Rachel was a special case, as she was given a "concentrated dose" as said by Scarecrow. Odds are, most of the people infected by the fear toxin were able to recover after a time when the water vaporizer was destroyed.
*** [[Fridge Brilliance]], actually, mixed with a bit of [[Viewers Are Geniuses]]. This is part of the explanation for why Gotham's got so many madmen, and why Arkham's got a revolving door. Sure, some may have recovered, but some did not. Gotham's now got a disproportionately large number of lunatics, many of whom Joker tapped as his gang.
* ''[[It's a Wonderful Life|Its a Wonderful Life]]'': The tropes of [[Straw Man Has a Point]] and [[Inferred Holocaust]] overlap.
** Pottersville has more excitement and a superior economic infrastructure. Bedford Falls only has a moderate manufacturing economy and no obvious places to find excitement. Once the factory closes down Bedford Falls will suffer depression and unemployment. Pottersville has backup industries, such as the nightclubs, that can encourage outside investment.
** George makes it clear that he wants to leave Bedford Falls, go to college, and travel the world. All of his dreams are destroyed and he feels he must commit suicide to regain hope. Potter is correct that George’s life has not resulted in personal happiness. [http://www.agonybooth.com/movies/Its_a_Wonderful_Life_1946.aspx Agony Booth], [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19wond.html The New York Times], [http://www.salon.com/entertainment/feature/2001/12/22/pottersville/index.html Salon], [http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/12/24/its_wonderful_life_terrifying_movie_ever/index.html Salon again], [[wikipedia:It's a Wonderful Life#Reception|Wikipedia]], and apparently Cracked.com
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* Although not a "Holocaust" exactly, in ''[[Con Air]]'', Garland Greene manages to survive the events of the film, and is last seen happily engaged in casino gaming. As we all know, demented, crazed serial killers, ''don't just "get better".'' Had the movie run just a bit longer, we might have gotten to see him convert Casino patrons into headgear.
* ''[[Dawn of the Dead (film)|Dawn of the Dead]]'' and ''[[Land of the Dead]]'' have the remnants of humanity holed up and later get eaten, save for a handful of survivors. At least in the case of ''Land of the Dead'' the zombies were growing smarter, so maybe they'll evolve back to a human intelligence and live happy but smelly lives themselves.
** The original ''[[Night of the Living Dead]]'' is less explicit in its implication that the remainder of humanity is doomed at the hands and mouths of hoardshordes of zombies, and more implicit that the remainder of humanity will destroy itself due to paranoia and mob rule. At the end of the film, Ben is the only survivor of his group. Upon trying to signal a posse of gun-toting zombie hunters, he's mistaken for a zombie, shot in the head and killed. The posse piles him up with other dead zombies, specifically laying him next to the first zombie seen in the movie. The implication is that this posse will shoot first, ask questions later, a rather hopeless situation for Ben and other surviving humans in his same position.
* ''[[The Day After Tomorrow]]''. The super-storm may be over, but the world's problems are just beginning. An entire hemisphere now buried under uninhabitable ice, major cities destroyed, some serious overcrowding and resources issues imminent for the refugees who fled south... The astronaut's hopeful line that "the air never looked so clear" demonstrates that the writers did not quite think this through.
*** In the real world, it is likely the remaining American citizens and soldiers may face violence and/or persecution in Mexico given the resource issues and the sheer flood of refugees (and soldiers who could be seen as invaders) - and the fact that the United States is now near-powerless. The film tries to hand-wave this by saying the US President had forgiven Latin American debt in return for accepting refugees: surely the present global economic system would collapse with North America, Europe and Russia uninhabitable, and how can debts be owed to a country that no longer exists?
 
*** In the real world, it is likely the remaining American citizens and soldiers may face violence and/or persecution in Mexico given the resource issues and the sheer flood of refugees (and soldiers who could be seen as invaders) - and the fact that the United States is now near-powerless. The film tries to hand-wave this by saying the US President had forgiven Latin American debt in return for accepting refugees: surely the present global economic system would collapse with North America, Europe and Russia uninhabitable, and how can debts be owed to a country that no longer exists?
 
** Not to mention the astronauts fail to consider ''who'' exactly is going to rescue ''[[But What About the Astronauts?|them?]]''
*** The ISS has a Soyuz docked at all times for use as an escape pod.
* At the end of the remake of ''[[The Day the Earth Stood Still]]'' Klaatu sacrifices his physical form to stop the Gort nanobot cloud... by unleashing a massive EMP -like pulse that covers the entire Earth. The last few minutes of the movie show ''entire cities'' shutting down... and the movie ends. Now, there are two ways to interpret this: the pulse shut down all electronics temporarily (maybe even shutting down all mechanical devices as shown by how Helen's simple mechanical watch no longer works after the blast), which would cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people (such as airplane passengers, people dependent on life support, people with pacemakers...) or it shut down all electronics on Earth ''permanently'' which would not only cause the ''aforementioned'' deaths but eventually lead to the further deaths of ''millions'' due to lack of heating, food spoilage, and the inevitable global mayhem. The implications and the actual effect of such an event are simply ignored due to the movie's abrupt end. The lack of global communications also means that those who knew what happened and why would be unable to warn everyone else why they needed to change. Thus creating the very likely possibility that Klaatu will come back and think we 'squandered' our second chance (when the warning was actually lost) and kill us all.
** In the original a general says "as far as we can tell, all power's been cut off everywhere -- with a few exceptions: hospitals, planes in flight -- that sort of thing..." Maybe things work the same here.
*** Well as we see that all the power sources are stopped that still means they're only running on emergency back-up power which won't last long.
* In ''[[Escape From L.A.]]'', Snake Plissken stops all electricity, all over the Earth. Actually, it does not seem like anyone could really consider there to be any "winners" in that movie, unless you think that cutting the power was going to stop the world from tearing itself apart. Even though the president's daughter is last seen alive in a suddenly-useless electric chair, she was also last seen in a compound of armed guards who had been about to execute her so that one bright spot seems to have faded too.
** Don't forget the [[Escape from New York|original film]], where Snake destroys the [[McGuffin|nuclear fusion tape]], sabotaging the post-war conference between the United States, the Soviet Union and China and thus damning the world to another, future war.
* ''[[Fantastic Four (film)|Fantastic Four]]: Rise of the [[Silver Surfer]]'' ends with [[Galactus]] (who in the film appears as a huge sentient cloud ''several times'' the size of Earth) '''exploding''' in a suitably impressive fashion, all while he was about halfway through munching on the Earth's core. Basically, it's the ''[[Independence Day]]'' mothership times a hundred, plus whatever damage you would expect from having huge, miles -deep holes burieddrilled ininto the planet's crust.
* The [[Cult Classic]] ''[[Flash Gordon (film)|Flash Gordon]]'' movie has Gordon stopping Ming from sending the [[Colony Drop|moon crashing]] into earth. Gordon tracks how long this will take, using a [[Magic Countdown]], device, stopping the collision [[Just in Time]]. Even if that's enough to save the world, the moon's orbit is now royally screwed, and the Earth should have already been subject to catastrophic tidal effects. Still, ''Flash Gordon'' is hardly a movie full of gritty realism.
** It could be argued that the moon had not actually been moved out of orbit ''yet'', and at the countdown ending, it would launch forward. But the opening sequence of the movie indicated Ming was playing with Earth's geological and meteorological events for fun, so that wouldn't be much of an improvement.