Directed by Stanley Kramer and premiered in 1959, the final hour presents us with a scenario in which a nuclear holocaust wipes out virtually all life on Earth, except for a group of people in Australia awaiting the fateful end.
The film is a film adaptation of the novel by Nevil Shute On the Beach (1957). It is a post-apocalyptic drama with a luxury cast -in it we find Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner o Fred Astaire– that can be worked on, in the classroom or in the family, analyzing the human person as a subject of decisions. Human action shapes each life making it more or less significant. Giving meaning, going beyond the ephemeral is, after all, a free decision.
The director, the son of German emigrants, offers a work that seems European. It almost recalls some aspects of German expressionism due to the symbolism of some scenes. Without being Murnau or Lang, Kramer offers oppressive images in which he plays with chiaroscuro, leads the viewer to experience the contained panic of each of the protagonists and achieves a realistic style when it comes to showing the different faces of death in the faces of the characters.
the problem of death
About the current wars, Now more than ever, the philosophical problem of death is not an irrelevant topic. It is not a topic anchored to the past; on the contrary, it constitutes one of the fundamental problems in the entire history of philosophy, and, of course, it continues to be so in contemporary philosophy as well.
If philosophy is completely inaugurated by Plato, it will be necessary to bear in mind that the central theme of one of his main works, PhaedoIt is precisely death.
Death in general, told through the particular death of Socrates, where the end of life is even presented as a profit. Hence, one of the most famous mottos of ancient thought, attributed to Plato, is that philosophy consists in learning to die. Thus it was transmitted from Greece to Rome, by affirming Cicero that all philosophical life is a reflection on death. In this sense, learning to die is nothing more than learning to live, to live well, even knowing that life is limited and finite. The affirmation of death, paradoxically, is transformed at the same time into the affirmation of existence.
Thus, analyzing how each of the protagonists faces death is an exercise that can lead us to reflect to what extent human beings can be friends or enemies of themselves. Without forgetting that the decisions he makes affect the entire planet earth. That we can end up self-destructing with the same foolishness with which the sailor who, fleeing from the protective submarine, starts fishing in waters contaminated by radiation.
2023-08-11 21:18:12
#Cinema #literature #final #hour #power #decision
