Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Miracle Mile / USA / 1988

Miracle Mile is a modestly-budgeted film with ample imagination and exemplarily resourceful direction. It’s about a potential apocalypse (it directly recalls The Rapture, but it’s much more bombastic), and it’s pervaded by a gathering sense of dread—this sense is amplified in the film’s final two-thirds, which are told nearly in real time. Reportedly, Miracle Mile originated as an episode in The Twilight Zone movie; it does have a simplistic and fantastical narrative (a man picks up a ringing pay phone, and the voice on the other end foretells a nuclear bomb in less than one hour), but it also indulges in aspects that sustain instead of abbreviate the atmosphere of total urgency. In one scene, the characters must find a helicopter pilot; in another author’s hands, a hero pedestrian would responsibly step up to the helm, but here the escape plan is delayed by a frantic search for the pilot. Safety – of both the principle characters and that of humanity in whole – is never certain, not for an instant.

There are so many reasons why this premise should falter, but for the most part it never does. It’s crucial that Harry, receiver of the aforementioned phone call, convince us of an imminent apocalypse as well as his falling for the girl of his dreams—he meets her in the opening scenes, and his instinctive desire for survival is compromised only by his necessity to see to her safety before his own. The film creates an imaginative doomsday scenario, and commits to it with such fierceness that the familiar cinematic scenario is rendered uniquely frightening. This was a near-relevatory discovery for me, and it’s a shame to find that its director, Steve De Jarnatt, has resorted to directing television ever since.

by Rumsey Taylor | Source: MGM DVD
13 Apr 2008 10:05 PM | Submit Comment