Doomsday Book (2012)
7/10
This is the way the world ends...
11 October 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Three short entertaining and intriguing films about the end of the world or humanity. The first features a put-upon hero left to clean up the family flat while his parents and sister go on holiday who meets a beautiful girl with whom he becomes a zombie, whether from a variant of 'flu, a kind of B.S.E. or North Korean biological warfare isn't made clear and doesn'tmatter. The second is about a robot in a Buddhist monastery which appears to have 'become Buddha'- achieved nirvana- the monks want to know if this is possible or if it is a defect in the robot and the repair man sent to examine it and from there we move to a strange meditation on robots and machines and humanity and what might be the differences between them- a philosophical Blade Runner. We also catch strange glimpses of a possible future world. Paradoxically, in some ways this episode is the one least suited to cinema and the one I'd like to have seen expanded. It ends with a quiet chilling revelation that changes the way we have seen everything before.

The third part involves a little girl who throws away a pool ball and orders another on the 'net. Owing to a galactic error worthy of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, the ball arrives in the form of a meteor ten kilometres across and liable to wipe out humanity...Cue (as in the first episode) satire on T.V, personalities, politicians, scientists, weather forecasters etc.and a curious happy ending.
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