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January 18, 2013

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Mobius: 25 Years Later: The Review, Part 10 – It Goes Full Circle, If Only Halfway

Everyone loves a good disaster movie. A group of people living their normal lives, suddenly forced to deal with natural forces beyond their control. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, you name it. Some people watch them just so they can see famous landmarks explode. Others because they like to imagine themselves in a similar situation, wondering if they could get out of it alive. A classic form of the human struggle, people banding together against incredible odds.

Most of these stories don’t have a crazed antagonist behind them. There might be some selfish person who looks to capitalize on what is going on for their own personal gain, but rarely are they the one behind it. Not to say there aren’t movies where a crazy scientist has figured out how to make earthquakes and terrorizes the world for money. You just don’t find that in most fiction of this sort. That slips into science-fiction territory, which has entirely different goals in mind.

When you’re dealing with the type of disasters like the one presented in Mobius: 25 Years Later, however, you can’t just leave it be as something out of the character’s hands. If you are building the final chapter to a sweeping epic, you need an antagonist worthy of what is happening around the characters. Crisis On Infinite Earths, the DC maxi-series I cited earlier and a clear inspiration to the “crazy weather” plot, knew this. The weather was a precursor to the end of existence, but as the story unfolded, it was discovered that it was all part of a design by a character known as the Anti-Monitor. A being so evil that he wanted to destroy the universe, leaving only that which he controlled. There was something the heroes could actually fight against. A final chapter that stayed true to everything that had come before it. Not panel after panel of scientists trying to find a solution.

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