This action movie mixed with some sci-fi elements is placed in 2035 in Budapest called then Dunacity. The Emerald Flame is a virus that has been spreading fast for 20 years, and the infected men and women become sterile. Less and less children are born – and none after 2017. We get to know a strange, threatening world as civilization is reduced to cities and villages decaying because of the virus. The members of the youngest generation are in their twenties but their numbers are quite low. In this world the value of human life becomes much higher and criminals are prosecuted and punished very strictly. As a consequence of the jungle laws Dunacity becomes a police state governed by the tyrant Daryan and his loyal staff. Daryan is forced to fight continuously for his power with the young anarchists hiding in the city. He tries to obtain a nanotechnology weapon thought to be the antidote to the virus. The weapon is brought from overseas in a small, mysterious package. On the Other Side, that is, in America a Russian-American criminal, Gregory is paying for delivering the package. The group entrusted with the delivery is led by a former mercenary of the Balkans wars, Trender. Daryan is killed but not by the anarchists but by his own men. Tyranny, however, is not over as there already is a successor in the just-emptied governor's seat. Trender's special squad successfully completes its missions, and love is formed between Trender and the beautiful Gloria. This ending, however is a bitter happy end as the contents of the package, the antidote to the virus is destroyed so the Emerald Flame becomes unstoppable. The human population of Earth dies out and the planet is taken over by the only indomitable power, the “ <em>snow-white decay
The story is built on the simple plot customary in action movies and the characters are also the usual archetypes. The futuristic pictures, the philosophic and cultural symbols, quotes and references fill the seemingly simple scenes with multiple layers of content. The axioms of humanity's collective consciousness and universal art – like <em>the triumph of human spirit </em>, <em>man conquers nature </em>, <em>love conquers all </em> as well as the well-known parables of the great world religions' holy writings are being put in quotes one after the other in this medium where people have lost faith and where within the greatness of technology there lies the depravity of society. All heroes are anti-heroes in the ancient myth of humanity's destruction with the only difference that the whole story is placed in an age where the power of digital technology, robotics, the manipulation of the mind and genetic engineering made people live like robots, without the ability to have children. In Fritz Lang's Metropolis the main wish was for man's return to nature but in the age of the Emerald Flame this return is realized in the completely de-humanized world.
The movie's apocalyptic pictures are built up of a rhythmic changing of reality, imagination, dream and hallucination while its original music reinforces the atmosphere of the real and unreal scenes. The imperceptible mixing of reality and the virtual world follows the main theme that the simple story of an adventure and action movie placed in the future can be shown from multiple aspects and on multiple levels, with raising basic philosophical questions just like the great predecessors like Tarkovsky, Ridley Scott and Terry Gilliam did.
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