Marvel planning Guardians of the Galaxy movie!

[Mister Fandango]

Trying to crunch actual numbers of casualties is beside the point. The real point is the enduring popularity of devastation porn (well, part of the point-- the rest being the generic nature of these movies, the lack of plot and characterization). In Japan, in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a new genre of movie evolved that revolved around the explicit destruction of whole cities by unstoppable radioactive monsters. Now, in the United States, in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, we've seen a growing fetishism involving the sweeping destruction of cities by terrorist figures. Victims of violence becoming obsessed with violence. It says something troubling about the human psyche.

Especially since it started happening long before 9/11.

Movies like Independence Day and Terminator 1 and 2 say hi, by the way.

 

[Harvey]

Not to mention the whole disaster movie craze from the '70s, which Independence Day was explicitly drawing from.

 

[JD]

Scenes of this kind of destruction go back practically to the beginning of movies. Doesn't old the silent film Metropolis have scenes of the citywide destruction?

 

[RJDiogenes]

Of course. It's not a questions of random scenes or random movies. It's about Zeitgeist. The Arts reflect the times. The terrorist attacks of 2001 effected American culture as much as the atomic bombings in WWII effected Japanese culture. There's no way around it.

 

[Mr Light]

Blowing up cities is not a post 9/11 thing. It's an action/disaster movie thing.

 

[JD]

Things have also kind of been escalating for a while now. Idependance Day predates 9/11 and it had tons of mass destruction. Everybody has been trying do bigger, and crazier actions scenes for decades, it's just that our modern CGI effects allow the movies to show more and more realistic destruction than ever before.