Word: beastes
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...nukes and Cylons, respectively). The video game Half-Life 2 is set on an earth conquered and picked over by alien invaders (you play a resistance fighter). And then there's Cloverfield, which opened on Jan. 18 and follows a group of unsuspecting partygoers on the night a massive beast attacks New York City. (See review, page...
Granted, it's rarely been out of fashion. The apocalypse probably seeped into Western thought via the Book of Daniel, with its 10-horned beast devouring the world, and the Book of Revelation's four grim horsemen. Shelley was among the first major writers to convert the tale into a secular narrative, with no beast, but far from the last. It was taken up by, among others, T.S. Eliot, whose "The Hollow Men" ends with the famous lines "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper...
...Just about every other plot and effects element in Cloverfield is familiar. The movie is basically the 1954 Godzilla (itself a gloss on Ray Harryhausen's 1953 The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, in which a prehistoric beast is roused by atomic tests to terrorize New York City) told in the style of, and with the characters from, The Blair Witch Project (but with a lot less internal cohesion; this could be called "The Blair Witch Reject"). The State of Liberty head comes from the poster for John Carpenter's Escape from New York (though that shot...
...press center; there used to be only two. Everything is permissions and clearances; passes and badges of various colors and sizes. And what is clear is that the closer and higher you are to the U.S. military the easier you move, the smoother you glide through to the beast's belly: the U.S. embassy. It is the tackiest, strangest circus attraction this side of Vegas. A Starbucks-like coffee shop with baristas from Madras sells cappuccinos in the main rotunda. Heavy blast-proof doors - identical to those at U.S. embassies around the world - are fitted into the regal marble lintels...
...ordinary residential neighborhood, has none of the grandeur and mystery of Hogwarts, let alone its cavernous dining hall. But here, as in the books from which it drew inspiration, the key to success has been the wondrous power of a child's imagination. "By the nature of the beast, children are more creative than we are," Chambers says. "So they will make the connections and do it enthusiastically." The Robert Mellors School proves that when education is packaged to encourage those connections, it can cast a powerful spell - just like the Ollivander wand favored by Harry Potter...