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Roland Emmerich's The Imagination Of Disaster: Movie Analysis

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Roland Emmerich's The Imagination Of Disaster: Movie Analysis
Every change in film history implies a change in its address to the spectator, and each period constructs it spectator in a new way. – Tom Gunning
Since the time of silent cinema, disasters have been a subject of film-goers fascination which continues to the present date which tends to create “sensual or psychological impact” on their spectator. These catastrophes can be in varied forms likes manmade, natural, alien invasions , planetary related etc. but tends to follow the same clichéd form of narrative that Susan Sontag talks about in her article “The Imagination of Disaster”, she claims that’s that from a psychological point of view, different periods of history hasn’t seen any great difference in the imagination of a disaster but it has
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The movie is undoubtedly shaped with best CGI disasters and visual simulation technologies that give a chance to people to mix fact and fiction imaginatively. After coming of the digital, science fiction films are most benefitted since earlier visualization of destroying the entire city only exist in imagination but now with the developments in the film making techniques have made it possible for the spectacles accompanying the massive destruction of buildings, cities and then finally leading it to the entire planet. 2012, was exactly the dramatic version of the apocalypse where the opportunist rich and powerful class cunningly escaped the disaster leaving the common man to die. The elite learns about the catastrophe that will happen in 2012 few years in advance so forth they secretly plan an escape mission ,keeping the masses in dark and leaving them to die while they fly to their new world which only populated by the elite. Just to show equality they let few common people infiltrate theses elite ships, so forth the happy ending of the movie constitutes only rich power people surviving at the end. Urbanity created at the time of the disasters by …show more content…
The intellectual claim she is trying to make on these movies subsumes the psychological and sociological domains of reasoning temporally and spacially within the communities and their common belief of urbanity emphasizing the conditions of shock and loss and their process of surviving and then rebuilding their lives. But larger questions engulfing science fictions today is its reception by the public and their critical engagement with them as what is shown on the screen is particularly not what happens in the reality, it is just a CGI representation of the worse that can happen to them. However there might be appreciation of these movies on terms of making people ready for these catastrophes but it provides no resolution to them rather it tends to hide the loopholes of the political system which is indeed necessary to tackle such disasters specially in the times of

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