Apocalypse
There have been many stories written about the apocalypse or the end of human civilization. They often focus on man’s struggle to avoid annihilation. "War of the Worlds", by H.G. Wells and "Independence Day", directed by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, are examples of the unique qualities of films concerning the end of human civilization. Such Apocalyptic films offer a unique perspective on human character in an extreme setting.
Apocalyptic stories are unique because there is no historical event to use as a reference. There have been events where a small group has faced annihilation but humanity as a species has never faced assured destruction. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963, there was some belief that any use of force could trigger a nuclear holocaust. However, few people knew how close the United States and the Soviet Union were to nuclear war. There are no examples of the entire human species facing annihilation.
Doomsday stories are common in literature on a smaller scale. Movies such as "Remember the Alamo", "Gettysburg", and "Saving Private Ryan" have characters that face death or destruction, but they face it with bravery and honor. Audiences respect and admire such behavior when one faces death. Apocalyptic stories are an expanded form of this type of writing. They are stories where humanity as a whole can be admired for their positive attributes in addition to the bravery or focus on one hero or heroine.
It is not often that one characterizes the entire human race. Usually we divide into cultural or political units and then we evaluate them as a group. We can be organized or divided by religion, social class, political allegiance, cultural beliefs and physical appearance. For example, Ja...
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... hero or protagonist, are allocated to several characters or sometimes on all of man. The allocation of qualities among more then one character can often be more profound then a typical story. Combined with the threat of total annihilation of humanity and its culture, Apocalyptic Films and the situations they pose, are very unique.
Works Cited
Independence Day. Dir. Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 1997.
War of the Worlds. Dir. Byron Haskin. Perf. Gene Barry. Paramount Pictures, 1952.
Mullen, R. D. "The definitive War of the worlds". Science-Fiction Studies. v. 20, Nov. 1993, p. 440-3.
Seed, David. "A critical edition of the War of the worlds; H.G. Wells's scientific romance". Essays in Criticism. v. 44, July 1994, p. 258-64.
Strozier, Charles B. Apocalypse : on the psychology of fundamentalism in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Culture, Not Race, Explains Human Diversity, Mark Nathan Cohen, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 1998, pp.B4-B5. The term race refers to a biological subdivision of a species. At one time, scientists held that there were as few as three such subdivisions in the species Homo sapiens: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Mark Anthony Cohen points out that this is an antiquated view, yet it lingers as a common belief in society. Mark Nathan Cohen makes an interesting point in his article “Culture, Not Race, Explains Human Diversity”. While the article does deal wholly in the realm of the opinion, it is supported by numerous scientific facts. In fact, Cohen’s usual method of drawing in a reader is to make a blanket statement and then “beef it up” with several scientific facts.
Apocalypse Now is a very vivid and sometimes disturbing film centered on the Vietnam War. Because it was based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, it is possible to draw some parallels between the two. Both can be interpreted as metaphors for a journey through the inner self, and each has its own singular message to convey. Apocalypse Now very perspicuously depicts the fact that men have hearts of darkness, and it explores the evils of war. At the same time, however, it seemingly glorifies some aspects. The anti-war sequences were often brutal and portrayed destruction as a result of the human condition. The film Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, can be interpreted both as pro-war and anti-war in its intent, although the latter is a more valid interpretation.
are the last lines of Apocalypse Now, the Francis Ford Coppola directed war-film masterpiece, which truly explores horror. Typical war films, like Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket or Boulle’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, follow the camaraderie of a protagonist and his unit and their struggles that build up to a violent and climactic confrontation where both sides sustain losses to illustrate the tragedy of war. Apocalypse Now is different; there are only two moments of brief violence that the main character participates in and he rarely talks with anyone else. The real conflict of the movie is in the mind of the viewer and not on the screen. Apocalypse Now succeeds in its goal of bringing the audience’s minds into the insanity of war through hauntingly beautiful cinematography paired with an effective soundtrack to create a surreality and delayed editing to cause a desire for violence.
Amtrak is a state-owned, for profit, national railroad Company that provides efficient rail service both long and short distance transportation services. Being the primary provider of passenger-rail service in the U.S has a network that connects more than 500 cities and towns in 46 states. It offers long-distance and short-distance service corridors throughout nationwide operating daily, offering several choice of service class – first class sleeping car, custom class and economic services for different age groups with different travel needs. Amtrak receives federal funds to be used for their operating expenses. Its ridership and revenue growth have progressively increased in the past five-year successfully building relationships with the public and customers, recreating branding, and improving new services/quality, and it projects a continued growth in passenger revenue at about 4% per year with modest growth in passenger ridership (Exhibit C4.1, Page 245).
The idea of an apocalypse can’t help but seem enticing to us. In fact, we seem to like dystopian stories in general, and admire the characters fighting to survive. You don’t have to look any further than the book The Hunger Games, where the protagonist Katniss lives in poverty and has to hunt her own food, later being forced to kill others to stay alive in a battle to the death. Likewise, the TV show The Walking Dead showcases how far its characters will go to survive in a zombie apocalypse, where the characters are constantly put into “them or us” type situations with other survivors, throwing morals to the wind in order to
Why is it impossible to use biological characteristics to sort people into consistent races? Review some of the concepts such as “non-concordance” and “within-group vs. between group variation.”
In the past, races were identified by the imposition of discrete boundaries upon continuous and often discordant biological variation. The concept of race is therefore a historical construct and not one that provides either valid classification or an explanatory process. Popular everyday awareness of race is transmitted from generation to generation through cultural learning. Attributing race to an individual or a population amounts to applying a social and cultural label that lacks scientific consensus and supporting data. While anthropologists continue to study how and why humans vary biologically, it is apparent that human populations differ from one another much less than do populations in other species because we use our cultural, rather than our physical differences to aid us in adapting to various environments.
Compared to women 20-21 children born to this age group live in environments that lack stimulation with minimal support; experience cognitive development delays and have trouble academically; are maltreated; live in poverty and receive welfare assistance; often become teen parents themselves; exhibit more behavioral problems and have higher rates of incarceration. Parenting teens, especially those 15-17 years of age, opposed to non-parenting teens typically drop out of high school and experience parental related stress that are common indicators of maternal depression (Huang, Costeines, Kaufman & Ayala, 2014). Teen birth rates are higher among Hispanic and non-Hispanic blacks, with 52 % of Hispanic teens...
In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University Psychologist conducted a variety of social psychology experiments on obedience to authority figures. His experiments involved three individuals, one of them was a volunteer who played the role of the teacher, one was an actor who played the role of the student, and one was the experimenter who played the role of the authority. The teacher was instructed by the authority to administrate shocks to the student (who claimed to have a heart condition) whenever they answered a question incorrectly. The voltage of the shock would go up after every wrong answer. The experimenter would then instruct the teacher to administrate higher voltages even though pain was being imposed. The teacher would then have to make a choice between his morals and values or the choice of the authority figure. The point of the experiment was to try to comprehend just how far an individual would continue when being ordered by an individual in a trench coat to electrically shock another human being for getting questions incorrect. The experiment consisted of administrating pain to different people and proved that ordinary people will obey people with authority. Some of the various reasons are that the experimenter was wearing a trench coat, fear of the consequences for not cooperating, the experiments were conducted in Yale University a place of prestige, and the authority f...
Factors such as institutional authority, people’s attitude change after the experiment, participants’ interaction with the experimenters or the confederates may play an important role in the results of Milgram’s experiment. People or even social psychologists can also be vulnerable to the situational factors and thus conform or obey.
The aim of this work is a comparison between the novel "Heart of Darkness" and "Apocalypse Now," Francis F. Coppola film loosely adapted from the novel by Conrad. “Apocalypse Now” was performed as film based on the text of Conrad and placing it in the context of the Vietnam War. Although several elements were added, such as characters and situations that are not in the text, the film reflects in many ways “Heart of Darkness” in the history and development. Adapting the work of Conrad, many abstract things that are not in the text, jump to the screen. In other words, text transformation into visual representation vision adds a vision of evil in men, the fear of death, nostalgia for the home, etc. The film has
The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century. Ed. Orson Scott Card. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2001. 212-217.
Russell, Nestar John Charles. "Milgram's Obedience To Authority Experiments: Origins And Early Evolution." British Journal Of Social Psychology 50.1 (2011): 140-162. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection. Web. 12 May 2014.
Americans take great pride in their leadership among nations. Such a distinction becomes embarrassing however when the title is claimed for the highest teenage pregnancy rate of any developed nation with nearly one million pregnancies each year. There has been extensive research on the phenomenon of teenage pregnancy which has yielded important information about pregnancy rates and risk factors. Researchers concur that pregnancy is a time of dramatic transition. A first time pregnancy propels the mother from the status of woman to mother. While these changes are noteworthy for the adult woman confronting pregnancy, their effect is frequently magnified when the expecting mother is an adolescent. Adolescent childbearing has become a prominent social issue because of the broad social and economic consequences (Harvy, 1995).
6. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw and John W. Strong, Religion and Atheism in the U.S.S.R. and