Antarctica in Popular Culture
Antarctica features a lot in movies and these range from adventure, horror or even comedies. In these stories the point of Antarctica is always hostile: an icy maze, a cold last stand or a battlefield. For example in the movie Captain America Antarctica is featured as a battlefield to stop a horrible weapon from being unleashed on the world but in the book At the Mountains of Madness by Howard Phillip Lovecraft he turned Antarctica into a death trap, well more of a death trap than it was already.
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In these movies, Antarctica is dangerous, it's cold and hardly ever rains. It's an alien land that everyone has heard of but few have ever visited. Lovecraft shows it as a death trap left behind by alien ancient beings beyond our understanding. But in the movie The Thing it is showed as a discovery waiting to happen. Lovecraft shows that we don't know that much about Antarctica, just as we know little about the universe. The subject of the title in the movie 'The Thing' is an alien that can adopt anything living things form and with this threat the team turn on each other.
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In all these stories Antarctica isn't described in detail, it's just there. It always seems that they plan to go to Antarctica, then everyone forgets they are in Antarctica and focuses on the beastie that’s chasing them. That's not just in horror stories, in the recently released children's illustrated book The Little Dinosaur after they first mention the dinosaurs the narrative then jumps straight into the big scary stuff lurking just around the frozen bush. In H.P Lovercraft's story, while taking longer to get there, it is the same idea of something lurking. In At the Mountains of Madness, a British team are trying to explore this unknown land and discover above this incredibly tall mountain range there in an ancient city and in very little time the explorers are running from weird alien monsters. The recent movie Captain America released in 2011 has Captain America highlighted in his red, white and blue on the Nazi black jet against Antarctica's pure white background a contrast.
In all this books and movies Antarctica stays the same, permanent unchanging. Strangely all this activity in popular fiction would seem to be in violation of the Antarctic treaty. Fortunately for the writers, the treaty doesn't apply to offences that are created in works of fiction.
Going on number of films made, a successful franchise began with the book by John W. Campbell's Who goes there written in 1938 about an expedition in Antarctica that finds a crashed alien space ship that holds a frozen alien that can morph into anyone and if escapes could destroy civilization. In 1951 it was made into a film called The thing from another world then in 1982 it was remade, very successfully, by John Carpenter as The Thing which led to a prequel in 2011. |
In all of these tales there is an enemy other than the extreme climate and in most of this stories, the good guys deal with them by burning them with flamethrowers, blowing them up with grenades or tearing them to bits with bullets. If the governing body for the Antarctic Treaty heard about this they would have their heads on a spike. The reason why I think this is because in Article 9 of the Antarctic treaty which says Antarctica is only to be used for peaceful purposes. Why do these fictional scientists need so much firepower? I mean it's not a military occupation of rebellious penguins and seals. abut while I may complain about these things they still make for cracking good stories.
Antarctica is still largely undiscovered, a deadly frozen desert so a perfect place for writers to use to give their stories strange and mysterious setting. |
How long until?
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Given that Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of H.P.Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness is now on hold perhaps Steven Spielberg would like to take a different spin with the next adventures of the boy journalist.