NAKED CITY – OZAPOCALYPYSE: SOMETIME SOON!

NAKED CITY – OZAPOCALYPYSE: SOMETIME SOON!

Bogus reports that a giant asteroid was scheduled to hit earth this September should have inspired every Australian filmmaker. Sure, we’ve had Peter Weir’s watery vision of the apocalypse in The Last Wave and seen the Opera House trashed in Independence Day – but when oh when will we be treated to the great Australian, CGI-generated vision of our very own gum leaf Armageddon?

Sydney, of course, is the premiere location for such a movie, and Melbourne has already had their crack in the doomsday classic On The Beach. Let’s face it, the harbour city has all the big ticket items when it comes to mass destruction – like the Opera House, the Bridge and even the giant smiley face at Luna Park. American writer Mike Davis calls it the ‘slapstick apocalypse’, our bizarre fascination in seeing humanity reduced to an enormous pile of rubble – and who doesn’t love a big screen dose of seat rumbling, surround sound, disaster porn?

The scenario was even touched upon briefly on the ABC’s Drum program recently, when panellists we asked what they would do if we had only had a few days to live. Some predicted total anarchy whilst others suggested the community might unite in the face of total annihilation.  Disaster movies usually exploit both the good and the bad when it comes to human behaviour and we would expect nothing less in the homegrown product. We’d love to see both the City of Sydney Council and the State Government get behind our own version of Deep Impact, and what better time to film it than this year’s NYE, when hundreds of thousands of unpaid extras will gather on our harbour foreshores.

So here’s the pitch and let the funding dollars flow. The asteroid is destined to hit right on the stroke of midnight (NYE) and civic leaders, families and religious groups of all denominations have assembled on the harbour, bound together in both prayer and solemn contemplation. Meanwhile, the lockout laws across Kings Cross and the CBD have gone completely out the door as the party people engage in an orgy of binging, gratuitous groping and drug taking – a display of untamed hedonism not witnessed since the final days Sodom and Gomorrah.

Whilst thousands have remained in Sydney to meet their maker, others have decided to escape the metropolis and seek sanctuary from the impending firestorm and tsunami in the presumed safety of the Blue Mountains and beyond. The roads are gridlocked and chaos prevails (a bit like the Easter weekend) as the major Sydney freeways become a 24 hour demolition derby.

Yet the asteroid is so huge that not even the most remote part of the continent will be spared, and even Uluru is set to become an enormous pile of rubble. As midnight approaches, the zombie-like, stoned-out party people desert the Kings Cross boozers and descend en masse upon the harbour (just like they do every year). Family groups are jostled, spat upon and abused as the good and the bad square off in the desperate final hours of human civilization.

The Lord Mayor, a cameo perhaps from Meryl Streep as our own Clover Moore, calls for calm and reflection as the greatly outnumbered police and security forces tazer anybody who even smells of alcohol. Then right on the stroke of midnight, a giant fireball explodes atop the Harbour Bridge and an illuminated fireworks sign declares that it’s all a massive hoax engineered by Destination NSW. It’s a helluva clean up the next day, but humanity is spared and we all hold our breath until the next “big event”…

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