★★                  By Z.P. Kibbleworth               December 2, 2089

Films can do lots of things to terrify us. A well-placed jolt of music can give us a momentary shock, a more carefully-constructed sequence of scares can really get under our nerves and keep us awake at night. Often, the films that terrify us the most are the ones that speak to our deepest insecurities, that literalize the things that we are so deeply afraid of we dare not even think about them. But sometimes it is the film itself, a thing of its type merely existing in the world, that scares us. This happened to me as I saw Burning Sky yesterday. The scene in question occurs at the film’s midpoint, as its villains have orchestrated a strike on the major cities of Earth by hijacking several cargo spaceships and turning them into massive magnetonuclear bombs. We watch the chaos unfold on the ground, as skyscrapers are levelled, mountains crumble, and the detritus from the blasts and the volcanic eruptions they cause turn the heavens into hellfire, creating the titular image. But this was not what scared me; it’s all pretty standard disaster movie fare. What scared me was the shot the scene ends on, that of the terrorist mastermind played by Vinny Mocktaw watching the carnage from above with an evil sneer, clad in Europan purple with the moon’s bull-insignia flag draped prominently behind him. This shot confirmed beyond a doubt what I had been fearing for its runtime up to this point: this is no mere action disaster blockbuster, but a volatile piece of political propaganda.

“Propaganda” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in film discussions, often inappropriately. Some people call any film that dares to challenge some of their beliefs propaganda in an effort to discredit the film and excuse themselves from doing any critical thinking, as happened with many of the film movements that have cropped up on worlds beyond the Asteroid Belt that depart from the narratives most Earthlings tend to be familiar with. Sometimes films that depict but do not condone heinous behavior are mislabeled as propaganda, as has happened in cinematic history from deconstructionist Westerns taken to exemplify the myth they are criticizing all the way to Janusz Jeehaw’s Rumble Puffin series on the Texan colonies in Finland. In these cases, though, the predication of such films as propaganda is either an instance of hyperbole or a disappointing lack of media literacy. Most of the time, we tend to think of propaganda as something completely other to what we consume. It’s Leni Riefenstahl’s work for Nazi Germany and the films produced by Promethean Pictures following the Saturnian Secession that sparked years of civil war. We can spot it from a mile away, and it would never fool us. We ought not be so arrogant. Most of the popular films we watch push a specific narrative: one that aims to further the status quo of the environment that produced it, that affirms a value set and a cultural centralism we often take as natural law. We consume propaganda all the time; it just takes a case as blatant as Burning Sky to alert us to this.

The marketing team behind Burning Sky will tell you that this is just another blockbuster film from the Emmerich Dynasty. It’s about an extremist Europan general working as part of the Defense Operations of the Galilean Moon Alliance (DOGMA) who goes rogue and begins launching stolen magnetonuclear weapons at Earth, and about the ragtag band of Earthlings who join together to stop him. The film is about massive disaster sequences and giant stupid space battles and explosions and shots of shirtless muscular men. This is all technically true, but what the film really focuses on is a story of glorified rugged salt-of-the-Earthers against radical terrorist dust-of-the-mooners. The plot point of the villainous general played by Mr. Mocktaw going rogue and not acting on the direct orders of DOGMA is given in a single line of exposition and never brought up again; for the rest of the film the character is visually and thematically associated directly with the Galilean Moon Alliance. The film contains several montages of various crowds all across Earth mourning, readying to fight, celebrating, using the same cinematic language that underpinned the Soviet propaganda films of Eisenstein. The heroes of the film are framed in comic book splash page poses, shot from a low angle and backlit with an American flag frequently thrown in the background for good measure. The Galileans are given a few scenes throughout where they torture children just to make them more unlikeable. Amidst the chaotic political turmoil actually unfolding between Earth and the Galilean Moons, the film could not make a clearer distinction between good and evil.

If propaganda really is part of our regular cinematic diet, why get so strung up about a single film that happens to display its political position a bit more noticeably? The answer is simple: rarely do we find ourselves in a position where a piece of effective propaganda can be so dangerous. As mentioned above, often what films often propagandize is the status quo, the continuance of the dominant sociopolitical systems that produced it. Burning Sky is an exception. It is not a film implicitly furthering existing systems, it is a piece of warmongering. The message that lies only an inch below its popcorn spectacle surface is that we must strike the Galilean Moons before they strike us. The film, in its indulgent visual effects that build a twenty-minute sequence of the Earth being ravaged by the Europan strikes, makes sure to demonstrate exactly what might happen if the Galileans are not defeated, with imagery that invokes the September 11^th attacks and the International Churro Day Massacre. I feel a great sympathy for those thankless diplomats who for weeks have been using every means available to cool the tensions between the governments of Earth and the Galilean Moons, only for this film to come out as a needless slap in the face to the Galileans.

The heavily propagandistic nature of Burning Sky might come as something of a surprise given its makers. Certainly, the Emmerich Dynasty, the creative tradition behind the film of which its director Klaus Werner Boom is a part has a streak of excessive patriotism and military glorification, but almost never does it villainize explicitly another group. More often, the disaster the films are based around is some vague force of nature like the moon crashing into Earth in Moonfall or a toxic fart spreading across the globe in Gas Planet. Making such a blatant political statement at such a fragile time is uncharacteristic of a filmmaking practice that tries to maintain as wide an appeal as possible. Research sheds some light on the matter. While directed by Mr. Boom and produced by the Emmerich Dynasty Brain Trust (which is a single brain shared and held in trust by five people), the film is largely financed by the right-wing nativist group Geocentre, who have long pushed for outright colonization of the Galilean Moons. Apparently, the film industry is so desperate for any kind of investment they will take cash from an organization that has more than once flirted with being recognized as terrorist by the UN. From a cinematic perspective, it’s a real shame that one of the few films that can be made in Hollywood outside of the in-house studio “processes” is one that gets paid to further the political aims of a hate group. From a political perspective, the shamefulness of the film is obvious. This is a rare occasion where I genuinely hope a film fades into obscurity and is forgotten, because the most likely significance this film will have is as a historical document regarding a war between Earth and the Galilean Moons.