Sandra Leaton Gray

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Adding to what others have said about the book, what makes it exceptional is the author’s clever use of a ‘hot chronology’, where she’s documenting events minute by minute (and there are fewer minutes than you’d expect before total global annihilation, which is the whole point). There’s a lot of content, it is very skilfully researched, and it merits at least two readings. Not all aspects of the scenario are as viable as each other (I found the US/Russian total communications failure the most unlikely, given it was being actively blocked at all levels in a way that was most emphatically not in Russia’s own interests, so someone there would have agitated for communication) but it’s a book, not a report. What I found interesting was the psychological vacillation I experienced while reading it, flipping between being determined I wouldn’t retaliate, to wanting to retaliate to protect other nations and regions, as more information unfolds. It gives a good idea of the horrendous competing pressures people are likely to feel when making such decisions. I’d put this book in the same category as Neville Shute’s ‘On The Beach’ for alarming poignancy, and agree it should be required reading for young people aged 16+. I would add that everyone in the military and politics should read it too, so they try harder to find common cause.

This film acts as a commentary on the nature of time and humanity. It tries to show us how humans struggle to impose a narrative upon existence in order to make sense of the world holistically. We see memory in different forms, from someone forgetting they have had a hospital visit earlier in the day, to the misremembering of death, to false memory that might be an hallucination, and ultimately deep folk memory of events long ago, which have a timeless and enduring quality. Unfortunately the film is too self-conscious to do justice to the concept. The direction is glacially slow and quite a lot of the film involves a slightly sweaty Tilda Swinton creeping slowly around gloomy sets with a somewhat tortured expression. We never quite work out why she’s in Columbia, although it’s presented as something vaguely to do with a university, orchids, and plant diseases. The sound is designed to make you pay attention, but they have done this unsubtly by not weaving the scenes together aurally. There are copious lingering shots of things like clouds and rain, reminiscent of filmic displays in fashionable modern art galleries, where you suddenly find a bit of multimedia played in a darkened room with deliberately featureless benches in front, and you find yourself spending ten minutes watching trees blowing in the wind or whatever. You know the kind of thing. Where the film jumps the shark is the sudden appearance of a space ship in the manner of Life of Brian. (That plot device is always a dramatic cop-out). Where it is mean to its viewers is in presenting itself as a thriller in the trailer, but then not being honest about mainly comprising 130-something minutes of one of those filmic art installations with the benches. I love Swinton‘s work generally but this film is problematic for me.