Opinion Disaster,more intimate

Survival is the theme of the season,or at least of Captain Phillips,All Is Lost and Gravity. These movies have been praised for the way they immerse audiences in the details of heroic feats of endurance. But like most movies,even the most ostentatiously naturalistic,these are also fantasies,tapping into the unacknowledged longings and superstitions of the audience. In savouring these tales of danger,we might wonder just how safe we really are,and how safe we should be.

Somewhere off the eastern coast of Africa,Tom Hanks (in the person of Capt. Richard Phillips,with a salt-and-pepper beard and a mouthful of New England vowels) finds himself trapped on a container ship,taken hostage by a gang of Somali buccaneers. Not far from where Phillips and Muse are locked in their nerve-shattering standoff — in an adjacent room at the multiplex,and also in another part of the Indian Ocean — Robert Redford fights a lonely battle with the elements. A character without a name or a history beyond what can be gleaned from his face,the wedding band on his finger and the tasteful décor of his expensive yacht,he spends the virtually wordless duration of J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost entirely by himself. After his boat is rammed by a wayward shipping container,he sets about patching the hull,setting the storm jib and eventually jumping into an inflatable lifeboat.

Up above,Sandra Bullock is floating in the zero-gravity terror of Gravity. Like Redford’s character,her NASA mission specialist,Ryan Stone,faces practical challenges against an allegorical backdrop. The sea and the void of outer space are thematic mirrors of each other,symbols of the sublime and the unknown,the inhuman power that at once seduces the human imagination and mocks our species’ fantasy of mastery.

At first glance,All Is Lost and Gravity resemble other man-against-the-cosmos parables. Chandor’s film will put survivors of the standard high school English syllabus in mind of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea,while Gravity,in its visual grandeur and vivid scariness,solicits the geek ecstasy of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Captain Phillips evokes a slightly different but equally venerable tradition,one that goes back to the popular seafaring adventures of the 19th century,which often pitted brave captains against ruthless pirates and mutineers.

But these are also pointedly contemporary stories. The filmmakers make clever use of familiar set pieces — the spacewalk,the circling sharks,the cat-and-mouse game of hostage negotiation — to explore some of the persistent anxieties of 21st-century life in the developed world. They project both common fears and the fantasies that many of us rely on to address those fears,and while none articulates an explicitly political message,each is rich with latent political meaning. They are the disaster movies of the moment.

We enjoy them as parables of individual heroism under duress,but underneath their can-do spirit is a profound loneliness. These heroes have no world to save,and the world,for its part,cannot necessarily be counted on to save them. It is not only the technical machinery of communication that fails but the social infrastructure as well. When Ryan Stone calls out to Houston,no one can hear her; when she establishes contact with someone else on Earth,she cannot make herself understood. A cargo ship cruises by Our Man [All Is Lost,whose flares and gestures attract no attention. To be invisible in your distress,unheard in your terror — that is a disaster indeed and one that,in much of the world,requires no imagination at all.

NYT