No Hollywood Mogul has announced making a disaster movie about the year 2020, unlike many movies that are usually shot even as real-life events are unfolding. I love the multi-star movies where huge chunks of humanity is in trouble while our hero, his girlfriend and a child from our protagonist’s previous marriage escape from utter chaos to massive destruction, without a scratch.
The first such movie I watched on the big screen had the handsome star Paul Newman with other big names like Steve McQueen and William Holden, and was called Towering Inferno, I am not sure, but it may have been in 70mm, where the negative is more than three times the size of the regular 35mm film, and wider, giving the viewer a humongous view of events.
My friends and I enjoyed this blockbuster from the front row seats, after we barely managed to get into the theatre, escaping the disappointed and angry queue of fans outside, with our precious tickets that we finally snatched from the box office window after waiting in line for hours. The neck ache and the blasting that our ears got from the blaring speakers was an experience that well, could not be forgotten.
The only problem with such movies was that your favourites characters are killed off as fast as they come on screen and die a horrendous death even as the star’s back story is being built up. The Pandemic of 2020 may not be very cinematic for filmmakers because while the fear is palpable (you keep on hearing of someone or the other dying, or a celebrity struggling in a hospital bed), the events are happening without any special effects and so very quietly, and that does not pull in the audiences.
Movies based on disease transmitted from animals have been made before. Movies such as Outbreak, Pandemic, the horrifying Quarantine, and the zombie movie, World War Z and Contagion, that killed off the heroine right in the beginning. I have lived through another outbreak from animals where scientists were at first not sure whether it was animals that were killing off people.
The illness had an impressive name, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, and as the name suggests, it attacked your breathing capability and the victims had high fever and a bad cough. Then we found out that it could be bats and strangely the bats themselves never got sick. It travelled rapidly from Saudi Arabia (where I was) and stories started emerging of nurses and front-line medical staff dying or getting very sick and it was attacking people that were unfortunately already sick from other diseases.
Push back against wearing a mask
A movie about Coronavirus (with the politically correct name of Covid-19) would still make a compelling story, about how people across the world pushed back against a basic thing such as wearing a mask, or how different leaders reacted to a national emergency.
And sadly, given the inkling that the pandemic was far worse than initially thought of, some nations did not issue urgent warnings regarding the same. Perhaps early warnings from experts were not dire enough to take action and pre-empt it. Who knows?
One of the many things that Coronavirus has subdued are movie theatres and pleasurable stuff such as mall walking. Even though the theatres were opened after the first wave of the pandemic, people in India were hesitant of sitting with their own kind in a darkened and enclosed place.
Movies about the pandemic will eventually be made in the future. Either it will be featured on the OTT (Over-The-Top) media service that is streamed on to your Tv screen, or maybe Bollywood will make it. They would scratch their heads hard though — whether to put songs and scenic locales in such a movie.
Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. Twitter: @mahmood_saberi
