The Aftermath

As fantasy thrillers go (sorry but it's a shame to call them sci-fi), the movie War of the Worlds definitely stands out on its own. Never mind some of the absurd assumptions in the film's plot, I think Spielberg's approach to tell the story is a lot more unique compared to movies such as Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. In the latter ones, you get to see the story from a few people's point of views (usually containing the president of the USA). In War of the Worlds, you experience the story just as you would if it were real in this world. Tom Cruise, while trying to get his kids to safety, desperately struggles in an environment of complete unknowns and neither he nor the viewer gets a chance to understand what the heck is going on in the entire duration of the movie.

Speaking of these movies, what I would really like to see on the silver screen is a movie about the aftermath, explicitly trying to predict how people deal with the near-total destruction of the world if it had happened today.

I remember reading a book as a child that is parallel to this idea. It was by this Turkish author called Halil Ibrahim Balkas and the name is 7 Iklimin Cocuklari (the children of seven climates? - a somewhat crude translation). It starts with the invention of a special weapon that kills anybody greater than 15 years of age but the weapon itself doesn't do any physical damage. By the end of the first chapter practically every nation has this weapon, war breaks out - everybody dies - and the story begins as the kids try to reinvent what has been used before in their quest to take control of the planet again.