EARTH II
dir. Anti-Banality Union, 2021
97 mins. “United States”.
In English.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 22 – 7 PM and 10 PM with Q&A!
(These events are $10.)

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Earth, present day. With human civilization facing ever-worsening climate calamities, the captains of industry set their sights on a new planet. Soon, a secret public-private partnership is selling tickets to Mars at a premium out of reach for the majority of the population, for whom the choice is either indentured servitude in the new offworld colony or perishing in the coming cataclysm. When the world’s governments decide to speed things up by declaring war on Earth and the rabble they’re leaving behind, the planet forges a strategic alliance with an unlikely partner: an underground luddite movement. Some will join the uprising, others will become fanatical defenders of entrenched power structures, while yet others will do everything in their power to continue living exactly the same way they always have. Its star-studded cast and astronomical production values — painstakingly purloined from some of the biggest blockbusters of the past three decades — make EARTH II the most expensive climate disaster epic to be produced for no money.

Starring Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, and Matt Damon, EARTH II reminds us that no matter how far into its final death spiral our species might be, life finds a way.

THE ANTI-BANALITY UNION is an anonymous collective who recut blockbusters to uncover their latent meaning, chiseling away at them to reveal Hollywood’s shameful, disavowed desires. The collective’s first compilation film was a reaction to the jingoism surrounding the tenth anniversary of September 11th, UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST (2011), which compiled every instance of New York City being destroyed in a Hollywood movie. They followed this up with POLICE MORTALITY (2013), which revealed the suicidal internal logic of the police apparatus by taking dozens of cop movies and cutting out the “bad guys,” leaving the cops free to massacre each other. STATE OF EMERGENCE (2014) was a zombie movie with no zombies, a distillation of the entire genre’s narcissistic immunopolitics into one gory feature. Now, the ABU has set its sights on climate collapse, scouring the past four decades of disaster movies and combining them into an action-packed analysis of Hollywood’s pathological climate grief in EARTH II.