(Oct 2, 2015 06:47 PM)C C Wrote: http://www.zmescience.com/science/could-...n-discuss/
EXCERPT: StarTalk’s Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye The Science Guy sat down with Sally Le Page of General Electric to explore the science behind whether the post-apocalyptic world of "Mad Max Fury Road" is actually a likely scenario. You know, the movie where the world is turned into a desert and bands of lightly dressed people continually try to kill each other. While the scientific accuracy of Mad Max is highly debatable since the movie doesn’t give us much to chew on, the discussion was inevitably drawn to the risks of climate change....
Ironically, the original '
Mad Max' movie didn't take place in a desert wilderness at all. It seemed to be set in rural eastern Australia, in the near future after a social breakdown of some kind. The vegetation and the climate seemed to be Australian normal. None of the characters seems to have ever remarked about the climate, as far as I can recall.
Instead, there was lots of talk about how the cities had become hell-holes overrun by criminals who were being supported and protected by the government as the economy and social order collapsed. The villains in the movie, apart from the criminals the end up killing policeman Max's beloved family, were the snake-like government lawyers that defend the criminals. The big showdown is when they cut an insane murderer-rapist free because he hadn't been given all of his 'rights'. Max's friend and police commander tells Max to do whatever it takes to stop the criminal gang that the criminal belongs to, which is absolutely terrorizing the area, so long as there's no paperwork for the government lawyers to get their hooks into. The gang kills the police commander soon after and then Max's wife and son are chased down and savagely killed. Max, a man living close to the edge in the best of times, goes crazy, tossing his badge, grabbing a sawed-off shotgun and dispenses some brutal justice himself, in so doing contributing to the same social breakdown he had been sworn to prevent.
In other words,
Mad Max had a message, but it wasn't a message that our brave new world wants to hear.
The second
Mad Max,
The Road Warrior, was quite different. It was set deep in the remote desert outback, with only brief references to how a nuclear war had destroyed most of the population and urban civilization. So it was a more typical post-apocalyptic movie, without the overt (and politically-incorrect) political edge. But like the first movie, Max finds himself using his own brutal methods to combat social breakdown and the tendency for human beings to revert to an animalistic state.
This second one didn't seem to have anything to do with climate change either, it was more of a Cold War post-nuclear apocalyptic tale. It's set deep in the desert outback because those areas were thousands of miles from where the nukes detonated, so there were survivors out there.
Oct 2, 2015 06:47 PM
