What caused the cataclysm
Okay, I know the film must have stated the exact cause of the cataclysm and, clearly, I missed it. Any help will be appreciated.
shareMeteor impact in the North Atlantic.
shareThis is actually the only problem I have with this movie that I really liked a lot.
Yes the cause of the cataclysm is either an asteroid or comet impact in the North Atlantic Ocean, this is clearly mentioned in the opening scenes of the movie and there's also some footage shown of the asteroid (comet?) entering earths atmosphere.
Now first of all asteroids travel at average velocities between 10 and 70 kilometers per second (with comets this average speed is even higher) so you wouldn't have time to see one travelling across our atmosphere, you would just see a very bright flash.
Secondly and much more important, in order to cause a shock and fire wave to cross the entire planet and lay everything on earth to waste the impactor has to be big, very big! I'm not talking end of the dinosaurs kind of impact here (and that was a big one!), you would need an impactor in the order of 50 to 100 km diameter (depending on the speed and what it's made of, rock or iron or ice or any combination of these).
An impact that huge would cause gigantic earthquakes that would travel across the globe and would lay everything to waste long before any fire wall would hit them. Furthermore asteroids that big are rare and none of the known earthcrossing asteroids is of that size, it could have been a comet though.
Even so this is a great movie and it shows that you do not need millions of dollars of budget to make a good movie about the end of the world.
Eat your heart out Bruce Willis!!
Ironically, I had mentioned the impactor size problem in a previous thread that linked this movie to Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World (which involved a 70 mile - or 112.63 km - wide asteroid.) According to this film's website, the rock that hit was "only" 5 km (or 3.11 miles) wide, which is around the size of the Dino-killer that hit 65 million years ago.
Based on what I read the "worst" an impactor of that size could do is a momentary heat pulse. Yes it would likely set most of the world's vegetation on fire, and at best put humanity on the endangered species list, but that would be "nothing" compared to surface-sterilizing, ocean-boiling "deathcloud" seen at the end of the film.
I can't but wonder if a "0" was overlooked in the writing of the background materials for this film's storyline...
The fact that the world remains "normal" but the wall of fire is coming, and is long off because the impact was on the other side of the earth, is an essential conceit of the movie. Without that, no movie, because you need time, all that "dead" time (pardon the expression), to build tension.
It's just something you have to live with, or you have to assume that an impactor that large has not caused the earthquakes and other planetary disturbances on the opposite side of the immediate impact. It does not affect my enjoyment of the movie at all.
Exactly right.
That an impact event resulting in a globe-destroying wave of molten material is a physics head-scratcher in no way affects the plot. You might as well say that warp speed brings all of Star Trek into question when without that conceit it would have to be called Stop Trek.
All that matters in these things is that the plot remains true to its own internal logic.
I should note, this being an Australian movie, and being an Antipodean myself, that we tend to view some things through the lens of the "tyranny of distance". In many ways, the coming wave of destruction is a metaphor for the isolated, too-far-away-to-matter mindset that used to pervade our part of the world. And to a certain extent it still does.
This made me laugh, I'm not Australian but lived in Oz for 10 years. There was part of me that hoped somehow Australia would be spared at the end of the film. I swear a lot of my friends have that mindset, and it is a microcosm in a way that nobody will understand until they've lived there.
shareWouldn't the poisonous ash cloud kill most things anyway, before the massive wall of fire even reached Australia? Surely that would have dropped and settled way before the fire got there. It would have also increased the temperatures to lethal levels. Not a scientist but the smoke would travel quicker and rise wouldn't it, thus poisoning the air?
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