chaos-rampant

I saw this when it was new and had the good fortune to revisit for this year's Halloween this time together with the kids. It's interesting to note a few things that stand out.

• the digital video was surprisingly ugly, a sign of how the bar has been raised since in digital. It was touted at the time as a breakthrough; but for the first time this was really shot on a camera you could go out and buy.

• the opening in deserted London streets is now probably as iconic, part of the lore, as the openings of similar films we were finding out then it referenced; I Am Legend etc. It's still a good example to showcase concepts of emerging into a world and broadening. But it has a music video feel to it I'm not a fan of.

• fast zombies (the "infected") was heresy, probably the first time for this depiction if you exclude some Italian oddities from the 1980s. It's now commonplace.

• But what works to this day is that it's really from the same fabric that began with Night of the Living Dead; the fabric of the known world has been ruptured and we move here and there, exploring odd places, broadening horizon as we go. Night was springing from Vietnam-era America, a world that had ruptured from what you knew growing up, this is the version with British trappings of urban malaise.

This was unexpectedly worthwhile for a night of observing larger swathes of world dynamics. It seemed as if it might be on the lurid and potboiler side as Netflix docs tend to, reducing to what will hold attention.

It's one thing to simply trace the story of predicament or crisis and quite another to be able to get grounding in the world that gives rise to it. One does not guarantee the other, and we have the politics of the last decade to judge from. America is reeling right now and on the slide towards real fascism.

Turn to this to have a look at how the world is put together, unravels and comes back through the storytelling we do.

One layer is the story as has largely seeped into public consciousness; a new drug tearing through already precarious communities, devastating the lower reaches of society, appalling the rest.

The film does well to zoom in: decrepit neighborhoods, exuberant capitalism as drug money poors into them, and with it gangs and gang violence to safeguard it. Local police in on it and taking their cut to look the other way. Harlem and Compton streets were on the brink before and barely holding on, but with crack they implode.

There is the story of what Nancy Reagan and cable news was telling people is going on, a moral crisis ripping through America and we should be appalled; negligent black mothers and other increasingly shrill stories, predatory youth, out-of-control inner cities. (crack babies, addicted at birth)

The response? A punitive anti-drug bill is haphazardly slapped together in Congress and passed, the result of which is going to be 150,000 people in prison in a few years.

There is of course the underlying story of what we later found out was actually going on but people didn't know then; Nancy's husband and CIA looking the other way and funneling drug money to fund illegal war abroad, the Iran/Contra affair.

But the most eye-opening aspect here is that somehow none of this was allowed to register at all for maybe a good 15 years until, with communities hollowed out many times over, people paused and started asking questions.

We get to see the director of the CIA facing questions about CIA involvement from an angry black audience and of course denying knowledge.

Most of our predicaments and crises are haphazardly resolved in the moment, we are somehow through and onto a next world, but they leave karmic residues that continue. No?

There was no crisis more precarious than WWII, we somehow went through it. But it left reflexes and systemic thinking in place: a huge military machine, Curtis Le May-style worldviews, and having to empower intelligence services beyond the pale. In JFK's few years a battle was fought (and lost) about the extent of CIA influence and bringing it under control and that was the last time anyone tried.

On one hand here the point is the granular detail, panicked meetings in top govenrment situation rooms, an ICBM has just been detected over the Pacific and is flying overhead aiming for Chicago.

There's some effort to prop up our understanding of a world now so complex it's eclipsing our ability to make sense of it - for all the trillion-dollar systems in place an ICBM has slipped in the air and no one can tell who launched.

This is all reminding of that Cold War moment, the before and after when nuclear annihilation was the biggest threat.

We stop and rewind a few times, picking up the thread of that day from different rooms, to have contrasting views of crisis.

But that's all to prop up something eventually contrived. We do not have a particularly interesting room here - the hawkish general, a Curtis LeMay, advising preemptive strikes on everyone, the NSA deputy urging humane restraint.

Not much is said and you'll know it in a last scene with the US president in soliloquy of contrived rumination. It ends without knowing if a US city was annihilated or not after all, another contrivance of plot but it would have been thankless either way.