Road To Hell Film Reviews

By: Nicky P & Danny Mcarthy
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  • Summary

  • Utopian history expert Danny McCarthy of The Story Of Nowhere podcast and Marketer/Pop Culture guy Nicky P of the Iron Age Marketing Podcast unite monthly to look at a popular science fiction movie and discuss the historical and pop culture implications of the work. Each episode references the history behind the concepts and sometimes the connections of the creators to determine is the movie a dire warning of a future not yet realized or a limited hangout acclimating us toward an inevitable hellscape? One thing is important though. Keep one eye over your shoulder and the other on the screen!
    2022
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Art Philosophy Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • Soylent Green Review: Road To Hell Film Reviews Podcast Episode 009

    Soylent Green Review: Road To Hell Film Reviews Podcast Episode 009
    Jul 12 2023
    In today's episode, Nicky P and Danny review Soylent Green a film classic starring Charlton Heston in a post apocalyptic world ruined by global warming.   What's To Review In Soylent Green?   The year is 2022; the place, New York City. The world is on fire. A rash of heat waves has completed the desertification of Planet Earth, drastically reducing the global food supply and subjecting the majority of the population to lives of squalid poverty. New York is hot, dirty, and over-crowded. Only the elderly can recall a time when streams flowed freely, when deer roamed the woods, and when singing birds sailed in the sky. Only the elderly can remember a time when real food—steak, strawberries, apples, and cheese—was taken for granted. In 2022, with global agriculture nearly scorched out of existence, the only readily-available comestible is “Soylent,” a wafer apparently made from the ocean’s plankton.   When a former director of the Soylent Corporation is found brutally murdered in his home, the cynical detective Robert Thorn is assigned the case. Soon encountering political pressure to drop the case, Thorn—along with his archivist friend Sol—discover that the dead executive was enmeshed in a mysterious and sordid conspiracy which, in the end, nearly drove him mad. Though hotly pursued by corporate hitmen, Thorn vows to uncover the conspiracy at the center of the Soylent Corporation and to prove it to the world.   In this edition of The Road to Hell, Nicky and Danny discuss the meaning behind this sci-fi classic (while also addressing the film’s implicit and explicit reliance upon the controversial issues of man-made climate change and overpopulation). He who controls a nation’s food supply controls the nation. In Thorn’s 2022, the Soylent Corporation effectively controls America. Dive into the nightmarish world of monopolies and corporate crime, and discover the secret of “Soylent Green,” in this episode of The Road to Hell film review podcast!   A Tropical Planet And Accidental Cannibalism   In today's episode, we begin with Danny laying out his reasoning behind loving the film. He sees it as being a gritty archetypal police thriller with some strange dreamlike qualities. My own thoughts are slightly less enthusiastic. I see the film as a thinly veiled excuse to propagandize the fear of global warming. The flawed idea of global warming in which the entire planet continuously heats up is a fantasy used to push fascist plans of the elites. The way global warming would actually play out is by making a tropical planet with a better ability to produce plants and derivatively the things that eat plants.   Politics aside, the heart of the story is Detective Thorn investigating a murder of a high-ranking member of the Soylent company. This leads down a rabbit hole ending in the unsettling secret at the heart of the dystopian society created in the film. The Soylent company which makes all the food required by an overpopulated planet, ostensibly out of plankton. But with loads of living people being scooped up and taken away and few people asking questions we have to wonder if the people are conditioned to ignore the obvious clues to the real origin of their food supply. The parallels to our own world give me shivers.   A Hard World Makes Hard People But Humanity Lives On   One of the first ideas that they hammer home is how different the world is. There are several scenes that show us that the standards of humanity have changed, the best of these include Detective Thorn. Thorn behaves like an aggressive, self-seeking, opportunist. He pilfers crime scenes for his own gain and bullies all witnesses to his own end. There's a scene in which Thorn is ransacking the dead man's apartment. He appears to be simply stealing things like meat, which have become luxuries in a world of scarcity.   The truth is that even in a hard world not all of our humanity drains out. In another scene, Thorn interacts with a group of women companions, including one who belonged to the victim. Thorn interrupts and threatens the man acting as the defacto pimp for the women in his building for no direct gain for himself. In yet another scene Thorn refuses to back off of the case despite being directed to by his superiors. Despite the changes present, Thorn's humanity remains as intact as it can in the context of the world.   Can Civility Reign In A Collapsing Society   One of the big talking points we notice is the sexual environment of the movie. There are a number of interactions between Thorn and the female characters in the movie. Women are basically reduced to the playthings of the powerful men around them. This does not suggest that they aren't human but that there are serious changes in the gender roles of this far more scarce world.   There is an implication that material conditions have a marked effect on the roles of individuals in society. In a world based on absolute physical power as a byproduct...
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    53 mins
  • Children Of Men Review: Road To Hell Film Reviews Episode 008

    Children Of Men Review: Road To Hell Film Reviews Episode 008
    Apr 10 2023
    In today's episode, Nicky P and Danny review Children Of Men and discuss the origin of Eugenics as well as collapse economics.   What's To Review In Children Of Men?   Global civilization has fallen. Britain alone hangs on by a thread. Migrants and refugees are flooding into a nation that can’t sustain them. The government, struggling to maintain order, exerts whatever power it has with as much force as it can as the bombs of desperate terrorists explode in the streets and as more and more people succumb to misery. This vision of England in the year 2027 is bleak indeed, for no baby has been born on Earth for eighteen long years. Suddenly, without explanation, people just stopped being able to reproduce. There are no more children. There is just a world of adults—sullen, hopeless adults—with no future to fight for and no reason to live.   Theo Faron, a jaded former activist turned low-level government bureaucrat, is introduced by his estranged wife to Kee, a poor refugee seeking passage through England. Theo’s wife is killed in an ambush, leaving Kee in his reluctant hands. Kee reveals to the cynical Theo that she is pregnant; she is the first person to be pregnant in nearly two decades. Discovering that his wife’s ambitious comrades were responsible for her death and that they planned to use Kee’s baby as a political tool, Theo and Kee flee their wicked designs and set out to get Kee to the mysterious Human Project, a much-fabled band of scientists working to cure humanity’s infertility.    Fear And Self-Loathing In A Children Of Men Review   In this episode of The Road to Hell, Nicky and Danny explore the dismal subject of human infertility and how, as Children of Men aptly displays, a world without children is not worth living in. Nonetheless, there are those in power here in the real world who would like to limit human reproduction, supposedly in order to “save the planet.” However, the control of human breeding has always been a key element in political Utopianism throughout history. For an introduction to eugenics in the United States and much more, tune into this episode of The Road to Hell film review podcast!   Today's episode was certainly a doozy. We covered the failing modern economic model when applied to the natural plateauing of human population growth. We also covered the origins of the Eugenics movement as well as it's connections to the current antihuman population movement. It sounds impossible not to be more informed than you were beforehand.     Director Alfonso Cuarón Writers Alfonso Cuarón Timothy J. Sexton David Arata Mark Fergus Hawk Ostby Starring Clive Owen as “Theo Faron” Clare-Hope Ashitey as “Kee” Michael Caine as “Jasper Palmer” Chiwetel Ejiofor as “Luke” Julianne Moore as “Julian Taylor”   Children Of Men Review Resources & Extra Media Children of Men (2006): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/ War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race – Edwin Black: https://edwinblack.com/war-against-the-weak “The Scientific Racism of Eugenics and Social Darwinism” – Peace Revolution Podcast #64: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/peacerevolution/episodes/2012-10-05T12_01_59-07_00 UNESCO: Its Purpose and its Philosophy – Julian Huxley: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000068197 Excerpt from pg. 19: “At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for Unesco to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.” “Forced Sterilizations are Still Legal in 31 States, New Report Shows” – TruthOut: https://truthout.org/articles/forced-sterilizations-are-still-legal-in-31-states-new-report-shows/ “How & Why Big Oil Conquered the World” – The Corbett Report: https://www.corbettreport.com/bigoil/ “Meet Paul Ehrlich, Pseudoscience Charlatan” – The Corbett Report: https://www.corbettreport.com/ehrlich/   Shill Want to learn more about the Utopian Project throughout history or have an interest in esoterica & the classics? Check out Danny's work @ Story Of Nowhere or the Story Of Nowhere Library.   Need help connecting with your audience for your business or creative endeavor? Check out Nicky P @ Iron Age Marketing or Nicky P Copywriter.
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • RoboCop Review: Road To Hell Film Reviews Episode 007

    RoboCop Review: Road To Hell Film Reviews Episode 007
    Mar 13 2023
    In today's episode, Nicky P and Danny review RoboCop and examine it's take on the deep state and transhumanism.   What's To Review In RoboCop   In the future, the city of Detroit is overrun with crime. Violence occurs daily, drugs flood the streets, and no one feels safe. Even the police are powerless to protect the citizenry; police are routinely (and viciously) murdered. In an effort to combat this dystopian state of affairs, the city has granted control of the police department to Omni Consumer Products, hoping that the corporation will come up with some technological solution to the problem. It’s a difficult and highly-competitive challenge within OCP: two competing programs vie for the CEO’s approval. The first has totally robotic walking battle-tanks patrolling the streets. The second has a human police officer merged with cybernetic technology in order to make the perfect cop. When the former program causes disaster in a demonstration, the latter is given the green light. So, murdered cop Alex Murphy is technologically revived and becomes “RoboCop.”   RoboCop proves highly effective, until memories of his human life begin to seep into his consciousness. As the memories persist, he tracks down his murders, leading him to the city’s biggest and most ruthless crime boss. As he climbs to the top of this criminal organization, he finds that the city’s problem is much bigger than was first thought, and that there is more to OCP than meets the eye. With everyone against him save for his former partner, RoboCop fights a lone crusade against power, corruption, and the technological Utopianism of the city’s corporate government!   RoboCop And Lessons On The Deep State   In this episode of The Road to Hell, Nicky and Danny analyze the messages of this seemingly silly 80s action movie. Behind the gore and the cheese, there are valuable insights to be gleaned concerning the complicated relationship between technology and power. This movie also touches brilliantly on the nature of the true “Deep State,” a term whose meaning has unfortunately been obfuscated in recent years. For all this and more on the message behind the movie, tune into this episode of The Road to Hell film review podcast!   Hopefully, you walk away from today's episode with a clearer idea of what a "deep state" really is. Don't fall prey to the cartoonish versions touted by either side of today's political pundits.     Writers
    • Edward Neumeier
    • Michael Miner
    Directors
    • Paul Verhoeven
    Starring
    • Peter Weller as “Alex Murphy”/“RoboCop”
    • Nancy Allen as “Anne Lewis”
    • Daniel O’Herlihy as “The Old Man”
    • Ronny Cox as “Dick Jones”
    • Kurtwood Smith as “Clarence Boddicker”

     

    Branded Review Resources & Extra Media
    • RoboCop (1987)
    • “RoboCop Tech: Science Fact and Fiction”
    • “Knightscope’s New Crime-Fighting Robots”

     

    Shill Want to learn more about the Utopian Project throughout history or have an interest in esoterica & the classics? Check out Danny's work @ Story Of Nowhere or the Story Of Nowhere Library.   Need help connecting with your audience for your business or creative endeavor? Check out Nicky P @ Iron Age Marketing or Nicky P Copywriter.
    Show More Show Less
    53 mins

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