The End of the World as We Know It. For a Postcolonial Investigation of the Meaning(s) of Environmental Catastrophe in Sci-Fi Films

Abstract

This article explores fantasies behind ideas of disaster in terms of a regeneration of human society through or against a catastrophe generated by a non-human entity. I will investigate two products of mass visual culture, Annihilation by Alex Garland (2018), and Arrival by Denis Villeneuve (2016). My analysis will rely on a reading against the grain of Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness (2008), M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), and Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible (2012), which I have examined in earlier studies (Giuliani, 2016a, 2017b). I will seek to compare and contrast these films, tracing how they developed out of a series of events and texts while also contextualising them in relation to contemporary conceptualisations of crisis, risk, catastrophe and disaster.

Keywords

• science fiction
• disaster
• postcolonial studies
• posthuman communication