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\u00a9 Val Guest Productions \/ Pax Films \/ British Lion Films<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n One my favourite British science-fiction movies is The Day the Earth Caught Fire<\/em> (1961), starring Edward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern, directed by Val Guest and scripted by Guest and Wolf Mankowitz.\u00a0 (The underrated Guest made three other movies, 1955\u2019s The Quatermass Experiment<\/em>, 1957\u2019s Quatermass II<\/em> and 1960\u2019s Hell is a City<\/em>, that I also like a lot.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Day the Earth Caught Fire<\/em> is an apocalyptic tale wherein the USA and the Soviet Union carry out simultaneous nuclear-bomb tests at the earth\u2019s poles and, subsequently, the planet experiences weird meteorological events.\u00a0 Rivers dry up in some places and rain falls in unexpected torrents in others.\u00a0 The general trend, though, is that temperatures rise.\u00a0 The film\u2019s heroes \u2013 a pair of London-based journalists \u2013 discover that those nuclear tests have disrupted the earth\u2019s nutation, its axis of rotation.\u00a0 Our planet is now spiralling closer and closer to the sun and in a few months\u2019 time will plunge into it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yes, the film\u2019s science is wonky.\u00a0 A full-force hurricane has a heat-release every 20 minutes that\u2019s similar to one 10-megaton nuclear bomb going off, so a few such nuclear explosions are nowhere near enough to knock the earth out of its orbit.\u00a0 Also, what\u2019s amusing about the film from a 2024 viewpoint is that its journalist heroes work for the Daily Express \u2013 a newspaper now so moon-howlingly rubbish it makes the Daily Mail look comparatively sane and reasonable.\u00a0 Today, while the Thames evaporated, the Express would be denouncing the earth-knocked-out-of-orbit \/ crashing-into-the-sun scenario as a woke hoax and politically-correct fearmongering.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n However, as a dystopian sci-fi movie showing a gradually-unfolding catastrophe through the eyes of some ordinary people who are powerless to do anything about it, The Day the Earth Caught Fire<\/em> is both affecting and chilling.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The film ends ambiguously.\u00a0 The world\u2019s governments make a last-ditch attempt to reverse the damage, exploding more nuclear bombs in the desperate hope they\u2019ll nudge the earth back into its proper orbit.\u00a0 Meanwhile, in the Daily Express\u2019s offices in now-utterly-sweltering London, we see that two versions of the next day\u2019s front page have been prepared.\u00a0 One bears the headline WORLD SAVED, the other the headline WORLD DOOMED.\u00a0 And we leave the film’s characters there, not knowing their fate.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve been thinking about the ending of The Day the Earth Caught Fire<\/em> a lot today.\u00a0 November 5th<\/sup>, 2024, is when Americans go to the polls to elect a new president.\u00a0 That will either be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.\u00a0 The latter was once memorably and accurately described by the New Yorker writer Mark Singer as someone whose existence is \u2018unmolested by the rumbling of a soul<\/a>\u2019.\u00a0 A few years ago, less eloquently, I called him \u2018that rancid man-slug of evil.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Trump has been open about what he\u2019ll do to the USA if he\u2019s re-elected president.\u00a0 He\u2019ll transform the world’s most powerful country from a democracy into an authoritarian state, with him as despot-in-chief.\u00a0 Even if the American public are stricken with buyers\u2019 remorse after voting him in, he\u2019ll change the election laws and fiddle the constitution so that they can\u2019t ever get rid of him and his far-right Republican successors (who\u2019ll no doubt be led by the repulsive J.D. Vance).\u00a0 The Trump Reich will be here to stay.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Along the way, he\u2019ll also embolden other fascists in other countries around the world, hand over Ukraine to his buddy, hero and idol Vladimir Putin and allow Putin\u2019s malignant influence to extend right into Europe, make American women second-class citizens with zero control over their bodies, persecute LGBT people and probably erase trans ones, put the lunatic anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy in charge of American health policy<\/a> and appoint Elon Musk as his Joseph Goebbels-style head of propaganda who\u2019ll pump out misinformation and hate on Twitter (or \u2018X\u2019 as Musk calls his debased platform these days).\u00a0 Science will be derided, suppressed and defunded.\u00a0 Pig-ignorance will be lauded, promoted and revelled in.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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