The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/]

The Gist:
The moment World War II concluded with the advent of the nuclear bomb, a subtle shift in our culture took place that we are now seeing coming to full force in our modern era. Namely, it's the idea that the path humanity has taken is intensely capable of future self-destruction, that our actions as a whole could lead to our unraveling, where our improbable stint of life in this vast cosmic desert will be snuffed out as soon as it began like a brilliant star that cannot contain the energy it emits. The Day the Earth Stood Still is an excellent allegory for all this, and leaves the viewer with only doubt as to our capacity to recover from our headstrong and ignorant and selfish and passive and defeatist and head-in-the-sand tendencies. Now, in a time where overpopulation threatens our natural resources and fisheries are being depleted from over fishing and climate change and oil is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico unceasingly and countries like Iran are trying to obtain nuclear power and a country like North Korea already has nuclear power and our political system still seems so corrupt and divisive that even with the good intentions of a president that I still have faith in its dubious whether anything significant can in fact happen to show a change as drastic as is needed and whales are dying and whooping cranes are dying and the Japanese are slaughtering dolphins and people are getting mercury poisoning from the fish from the pollution and the entire food industry is filled with cows eating cows and eating corn and then there's genetically altered chickens and then there's corn syrup in everything and...well, in these modern times, I find some odd personal connection to this film and regard it as something of a prophetic vision of our own collapse.