How will Hollywood ever make a film about all this chaos? – Helen Martin

A film about the year 2020 might have to be a cartoon given how crazy it has been, writes Helen Martin.

Maybe it’s only a cartoon film like The Flintstones that could capture these crazy times (Picture: Amblin/Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock)

PEOPLE who love history have homes full of bookshelves, or a room turned into a library. Of course, anything can be researched online nowadays, but historians adore and trust books which make them feel the past is in reach of their fingertips.

Nowadays film producers and directors try to make the most of yesteryear events, albeit sometimes with a bit of fiction added to boost the drama. That may irritate historians and academics, but most of us go to the cinema to see movies covering the Titanic, Dunkirk, and Hidden Figures, about the black, female, genius mathematicians who helped Nasa in the ’60s Space Race despite the other members of the team being white and male.

It seems predictable that at some point in the future Hollywood will roll out a movie on Black Lives Matter. Fascinating to wonder who will play Donald Trump or if his role will be confined to old news clips and the film devoted to the protesters’ drama. Even more fascinating is how any such movie could include anything else that was happening across the globe at the time.

We are currently living in a world of complete chaos, fear, and downright depression. It seems the Earth has never been so bleak and miserable with some people doubting we can ever find solutions.

Wars, oppression and conflicts such as Syria, Israel vs Palestine, China and Hong Kong, were hitting headlines before coronavirus gradually spread across the world and became the lead story everywhere. Lives and businesses in many countries are shut down, well over six million cases so far, fears of another wave, no available vaccine, and several economies shattered.

Animals at risk of extinction are being hunted, killed and tortured, unbelievably for “fun”. Horrific cruelty is being imposed on wild or stray animals and even domesticated or working creatures. Even many farming practices are being revealed as much more evil and barbaric than most of us expected.

Part of the horror that affects all creatures in the world is climate change, loss of habitat wiped out by human industries, and the pollution, debris and carbon emissions people create. Sea life is suffering and declining as well as all those on land. Eventually, humans could be eradicated too if we can’t stop this environmental doom.

For the UK we have our own set of “local” tension on top of all that. Whether people support the Conservatives or not, the harsh truth is that we have a weird and incapable Prime Minister. We have a UK Government which thinks it’s fine to exclude MPs who can’t, under the circumstances, make it to the House of Commons even though people are not supposed to travel from the North of Scotland to the South of England, and shouldn’t fill all the seats in Parliament. We also have Brexit and potential Scottish independence.

But all that British stuff is trivial compared to global catastrophes, and no single movie could pull all of them together. Nor could every disaster be portrayed by a movie of its own or cinemas would end up as a source of depression rather than “entertainment”.

Assuming we recover from all this (don’t know how but let’s hope so) it wouldn’t be surprising if a vast series of books, a string of online education, and entire futuristic university degrees would be based on the start of the 21st century, one of the worst times the world has ever experienced since dinosaurs were eliminated.

Still, we’ve had The Flintstones, The Land Before Time and Ice Age. Maybe cartoon movies would still be crazy enough to encompass 2020 – even with a few laughs.

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