The Anti-Banality Union, the anonymous collective who re-cuts Hollywood blockbusters into new feature-length films, will be joining us to share their latest feature EARTH II.

With EARTH II, ABU explores the impending doom of climate change and environmental collapse through an assembled narrative that collages some of the most epic and far-reaching moments from Hollywood’s biggest disaster films unearthing a potent new resonance. Mining sci-fli or cli-fi films like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), The Core (2003), Geostorm (2017) as well as superhero movies and war films, Earth II adheres not so much to a genre specific logic, but is anchored more in the three-act plot structure. Caroline Gollum called it a “… Herculean undertaking” and said that it’s “not only coherent, but wickedly topical, unfurling its converging storylines of haves and have-nots scrambling for survival in almost real-time” over at Screenslate. 

The Anonymous Collective spoke this Spring to The Brooklyn Rail a bit about their intentions and practice:

“We follow Hollywood’s formula in a lot of ways. We have our own ideology and things that we want to say through it. But it’s been said already, and it’s really just a matter of moving things around to make that message clearer. One thing that Hollywood often does is trivialize real fears, emotions, and revolutionary impulses. So what we’re trying to do in most cases is to show that these tools, these emotionally manipulative cinematic tools, can actually be used in a way that doesn’t insult the viewer and doesn’t trivialize their emotions.”

We’re thrilled to get into it with three members of the Anti-Banality Union who will be in attendance for a conversation following the program. Seats are limited, grab your ticket today!

Program

Earth, present day. With human civilization facing ever-worsening climate calamities, the captains of industry set their sights on a new planet. Soon, a secret public-private partnership is selling tickets to Mars at a premium out of reach for the majority of the population, for whom the choice is either indentured servitude in the new offworld colony or perishing in the coming cataclysm. When the world’s governments decide to speed things up by declaring war on Earth and the rabble they’re leaving behind, the planet forges a strategic alliance with an unlikely partner: an underground luddite movement. Some will join the uprising, others will become fanatical defenders of entrenched power structures, while yet others will do everything in their power to continue living exactly the same way they always have. Its star-studded cast and astronomical production values — painstakingly purloined from some of the biggest blockbusters of the past three decades — make Earth II the most expensive climate disaster epic to be produced for no money.

Hollywood has been imagining the destruction of Earth’s biosphere for years, playing out every conceivable simulation of this once-unthinkable scenario in orgies of CGI. Meanwhile, we’ve witnessed explosive wealth inequality and the emergence of a tech elite convinced that their salvation lies in interplanetary colonization. In Earth II, we have tried to address the swiftly unfolding reality of climate collapse by scouring the disaster movies of the past four decades and combining them into a single narrative. We landed on the form of an experimental documentary disguised as an action comedy, a nonfiction film assembled from blockbusters, because the reality is often too brutal to face head-on; we laugh so as not to weep.

97 mins

The Anti-Banality Union is an anonymous collective who re-cut Hollywood blockbusters into new feature-length films. Their work has been screened at the Museum of Art and Design, Maysles Documentary Center, Anthology Film Archives, and several undisclosed squats & communes.