This video makes Live at Pompeii strangely prescient, recalling one of my favorite Walter Benjamin quotes:

[Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

It begs the question, why are we so fascinated by visualizing our own destruction and those of past civilizations? One theory is that media are containers for catastrophe– if we make a film about it, like a magical invocation it will trap the event in perpetuity. Consider how often we experience a real life disaster and say to ourselves, “it looks like a movie.” This is why I agree with the sentiment that all blockbusters are ecological, because they normalize certain perceptions of the environment, namely that destruction is OK as long as it’s beautiful (remember “shock and awe“?).