The Guardians is a 13-part dystopian drama series made in 1971 about Britain in the far-off space year of 1980 and was never shown in my neck of the woods (Northern Ireland) on account of terrorists being portrayed as no worse than the British state they opposed, a once-radical notion now sadly overtaken by reality in that the British state is usually far, far worse than terrorists - if only because ISIS don't make any bones about the fact they're going to murder you and at least have the human decency to not make you jump through months of benefits claims and sanctions to get you to the point where you'll walk under the wheels of a truck, they just fly your plane into the ground.
A couple of minutes of screaming and crying and then it's all over - I'm not saying I would definately vote ISIS over the Tories, but... actually no, I probably would. I like the idea that once The Event comes to pass and we have to deal with our political classes once and for all, I want them going to their grave hissing and spitting at me all the way so I know I don't have any choice in the matter and it's them or me, which seems much more preferable to someone blubbing on their way to the guillotine like a baby and trying to bribe me to at least spare their kids and then I spend the next couple of decades only living so that God can make me suffer with the knowledge of what I've done and develop true fear for what judgment awaits me beyond the veil... which is likely how it'll all go down if we're being honest. We'll hate ourselves for what we do during The Event, and we might even come to resent the happiness known by future generations because it wasn't them who paid the cost of it in blood and decades of nightmares, but it's not like we can change course now.
Anyway, I liked how the early episodes would wrong-foot the viewer by making you wonder who the show's protagonists might be, as people get bumped off after being built up more than the characters that actually make it to the final episodes, though if I'm honest it didn't convince me of the country-wide scale of the government's reign of terror, the titular Guardians never really presented as anything other than regular coppers who indulge in brutality, and we have those already.
I liked the downbeat, bummer ending where it all gets a bit theatrical and the only hope you're presented with is "if things get really bad after this point people might not stand for it." HA HA HA I guess we'll see when we build the foundations of our future upon the literal bones of capitalists.
The Wandering Earth is a pretty decent mainland Chinese attempt at replicating dumbass Hollywood moviemaking like what Michael Bay does, and I know China is a repressive authoritarian state, but there really should be some limits to the kind of cruelty you're allowed to inflict on your population.
The story of an impending global catastrophe caused by an expanding sun which can only be escaped by strapping engines to Earth and driving it to Alpha Centauri, the film reminds me greatly of Armageddon both visually and in that for a while you can delude yourself that the movie might make good in the end and not pull anything too stupid out of its ass in the final stretch that makes you go "nope", and even though it does just that, this is essentially a movie version of Space 1999 except with Earth instead of the Moon so I probably can't act like I was expecting better than arguably the dumbest bit of big screen science I've seen in a long long time which in retrospect may actually be pretty ambitious in the scale of its breathtaking stupidity, but here we are anyway.
"Well if Earth is driving through space what happens to the Moon, then?" I hear you ask, to which I reply "you shut the fuck up." This film is not for you.
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