The film boldly imagines the world of 1968 where the North Pole is no longer an impediment to efficent world travel. Enormous submarines now carry passengers and cargo underneath the polar ice caps. Suddenly many of these subs are disappearing and the US Navy has to send out its top atomic submarine with its crack crew to investigate.
What they find is an alien spacecraft populated by enormous one eyed long necked hair orbs and their mission is to melt all the ice and drown all their human competitors and claim earth as their own new Seaworld. Since I am here to write this post it is clear that the Navy triumphed and the aliens were repulsed.
But why does The Atomic Submarine feel so contemporary to me? It is clear that parts of the Polar Ice Caps are now melting. In the grand tradition of "if you want to make an omelet you have to break some eggs" tradition, many conservative voices are now saying that this kind of eco disaster can have positive effects. Now we will have the always treasured northern sea routes that will make navigation quicker and cheaper plus we will get to exploit the mineral wealth of the whole sea floor. Polar bears will just have to learn to share.
But Republicans aren't just content with accepting the scientific measurements of such global climate change with their omelet theory. They insist no such scientific measurements exist and even if they do they will not be accepted as facts. They simply choose not to believe them. Or as GOP Congressman John Shimkus (Chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy) stated in 2009: God told Noah that he would never flood the earth again, so there is no way global climate change or rising temperatures can produce these effects. Done and done.
The next time I watch The Atomic Submarine I will be reassured that those one eyed orbs are not from any other solar system. They're us. The GOP us.
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