First, my casual take on the movie that is largely responsible for prom
pting this notion (if you want the educational perspective you can skip to below the pictures):
Let's take a look back over the course of movie disasters.
1996: Independence Day
To be fair, I loved this movie. It and Twister both came out summer '96 and they were awesome. "ID4" was I think the last blockbuster that relied heavily on studio models rather than computer generated models. That's an actual model of the White House we're seeing blow up right there. They built it to 1/10 scale or something like that. The detail is excellent and it shows. I'd put that explosion above any CG destruction you see these days.
Anyway, we got to see a lot of people killed by these scary alien space ships. All attempts to return fire are blocked by their shields (which handily absorb even our best nukes). By day 3 of the invasion (conveniently July 4th) it looks like humanity is done for.
THEN Jeff Goldblum, Will Smith, and kick-ass, fighter-pilot president Bill Pulman use missiles, nukes, and a computer virus to bring them all crashing down in about an hour or so. HA! Take that aliens. Don't mess with humans. Curtain rises, all cheer, and the studio made millions.
By the end of the movie you can assume most major metropolitan centers have been destroyed but after the surprise attack (which would have taken out 20 cities around the world at most) it's reasonable to assume that the cities were largely deserted as citizens fled.
Peter's Estimated Movie Death Toll: 100 Million people.
2004: The Day After Tomorrow
This one was instantly scarier and less fun to watch. The reason for this is that our destructor is Mother Nature and we brought on our demise with global warming. The premise right away seems a LOT more plausible than an alien invasion. An what's worse? You can't nuke a tidal wave or a tornado. (Not yet! HA!)
So anyway by the end of the film the giant storm that brings the awef
ul weather just conveniently stops. The governments of the world enter a new age of peaceful relations in the face of the need to accommodate a now-frozen Northern Hemisphere (if you're American and you survived you ended up living in Mexico). Intrepid families are reunited, people fall in love. It's ridiculous.
Peter's Estimated Movie Death Toll: 1-2 Billion (pretty much anyone caught above the Latitudes of Dallas froze to death).
Today: 2012
See that? That's Los Angeles SLIPPING INTO THE OCEAN! Not a tidal wave this time. Indeed, the ocean is just sitting there going "Don't look at me, I'm not moving. It's you're stupid land that won't hold still like it's supposed to." You can watch a clip of the scene that pre-empts this poster here. It's pretty scary stuff. It makes that tidal wave that swallowed New York in the poster for the Day After Tomorrow above look silly by comparison. I mean, in the Day After Tomorrow teenage heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal survived that wave by just hiding in a New York library. Try that trick in 2012 and you quickly find the library and everything for miles around it under water.
And speaking of tidal waves, look at this bad boy to the left. Yeah, you're seeing it right. That's The Tidal Wave the Crests the Himalayas. Forget looking for high ground guys. There's no ground high enough. Sorry.
Anyway I haven't seen this one yet and I don't intend to but from what I can gather from the trailers the plot centers around a few plucky (and extremely lucky. If you watched that clip count how many near-death close calls they had in just 5 minutes) folks who try to work their way to some sort of modern day Arks that government has been building and survive floating on the water for...I don't know, the rest of their lives? 40 Days and 40 Nights? Who knows.
Peter's Estimated Movie Death Toll: EVERYBODY minus maybe about 10,000
These films are all being made by the same director. I guess he's either not planning ahead or he's planning to retire after 2012 because one glance at the trailer shows he's basically pulled out every stop in terms of disaster movies. The only thing worse would be a space station that simply destroys planets but of course that's been done.
WHAT'S THE POINT HARTLEY?
Well, beyond having a little chuckle at the shear ridiculousness of The Tidal Wave That Crests the Himalayas after I first saw it in a teaser preview a year or so ago, I hadn't thought much about this whole 2012 thing until this school year when, as I said, kids started asking me with surprising frequency "Is the world going to end."
I didn't think much of it. I just always told them, "No, that's just a movie. There are a few people who think it will but they really have no way of knowing." And much to my satisfaction that seemed to take care of it. The child would smile re-assuredly and head back to class.
Then of course we had our excitement in Killeen on Thursday and everyone was in an apocalyptic mood on Friday. That's perhaps an overstatement but all of the kids were talking about it and all of the teachers were doing their best to keep their cool and let everyone talk/write, do what they needed to do. I was very pleased with our staff and their resilience. I got off lucky not having a class of my own to deal with.
And then later that day I was at lunch when one of our P.E. teachers told me SHE was worried about 2012. I usually make it a rule not to laugh AT people but I had a tough time keeping a grin off my face. "But it's scientific! Haven't you seen the shows on the History Channel?" she said. I promised to find her some good websites debunking the 2012 thing. Which I did. And in the course of doing so I had a few realizations regarding today's learners:
Number 1: We normally condemn using Wikipedia as a source for research at all but it some cases it is an excellent spring board. Naturally you have to be skeptical of that you read since anyone can write things for Wikipedia but the article about 2012 was rife with in-text citations and sources, most all of which are very reputable like articles from scientific journals. A frequent policy is to very simply say "No Wikipedia" but as long as we teach students to be good consumers of information there's no reason for such blanket statements. Bottom line: a lot of article on Wikipedia have fantastic peer-review, with many more critical eyes checking the sources than are available on the review boards for the journals we find out sources in. That said, you're still better off going to the original source they cite for the info. The convenience of Wikipedia is that the searching for that outside source has already been done for you.
Number 2: There are apparently a LOT of kids out there who are scared out of their wits by all of this 2012 mess. I also found this site while trying to debunk 2012 and was stunned to learn about kids who wanted to kill themselves rather than drown in The Tidal Wave That Crests the Himalayas. The marketing for that 2012 movie prompts people to "Go online and find the truth". Now, clever internet marketing is a common thing for movies these days. Films and video games undergoing massive promotion will often hide funny little clues like GPS coordinates of movie locations, establish phony websites with fake news articles, and things like that. For my part I tend to think of that as clever marketing and using all the tools they have available. Indeed, I would call it Daniel Pink's Symphony at its best: Don't just put out commercials, put out all kinds of info in all media venues.
I 2012's case, this clever marketing involves finding links to a website that is offering entry into a lottery in which winners will get a seat on one of those government arks. It also provides all of the possible reasons people use for why 2012 will kill us all. By the way, if you didn't know already: The Mayans predicted it (they didn't), Earth will align with the galactic plane and the gravity flux will throw us out of orbit (both statements are false), solar flares will fry us (again, nope), OR a rogue planet called Nibiri will collide with us (we'd see it in the sky already if that was going to happen).
However, permissiveness for clever marketing aside, I agree with the people writing about 2012's campaign on both of the debunking websites I linked above: it's going a little too far when you're trying to make a dollar by seriously convincing kids that their whole world is doomed in a very short time. It's hard to draw the line in the sand between doing it with the 2012 phenomenon or marketing a movie about the coming Zombie apocalypse (where will YOU be when the zombies arise?) but I think that the degree to which alternative sources like the History Channel, many other websites, and books are also backing up the movie's destructive claims lends the whole thing some extra credibility that gives it teeth.
At any rate, it comes down to the same thing with Wikipedia: Kids really need to be taught to recognize trustworthy information and non-trustworthy information. A few years back it was enough to say "Look at how crummy this website looks. You can tell an amateur made this. Do you really trust what they say?" Nowadays we have high-dollar companies like movie studios and television stations paying big bucks to make their false websites look credible. The need to check sources and be a critical thinker is increasing quickly.
I'm tempted to say it's irresponsible of movie studios to scare kids (and P.E. teachers) like that but at the end of the day I think it's more irresponsible for us as educators to fail to give students to tools they need to see through the lies out there. Of course all of the old problems crop up: how can I take time out to teach how to tell a good/bad website when I have to get ready for TAKS? It's a rich tapestry but somehow we have to figure it out.
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