You may have read it in the paper: The world is dying, and soon enough. Eight days before the start of the series "Eight Days" switched the transmitter Sky last week in German tabloid newspapers ads on the title pages, which announced in large letters that an asteroid would destroy Europe. The ads were constructed like articles, gave information about chances of survival, bunker places and government failure. 1-a disaster journalism.

Only a fake, fortunately, unfortunately, depending on how you see it. In any case, the campaign did not work as a credibility campaign for German journalism.

The expensive page 1 ads were placed in the tabloids of the troubled DuMont newspaper house, such as the "Hamburger Morgenpost" and the "Berliner Kurier". What could have been a spectacular rescue operation for DuMont, an agency of the German news business. Did not help: This week it became known that the publisher, founded in 1802, apparently would prefer to sell all the leaves in the package.

"Eight days" ad in the "Hamburger Morgenpost"

This fits very well with the tasty, smug and happy in the destruction thrown catastrophic series in which every rescue effort fails terrific and is no longer rely on any authority. Not on the Alliance partner America, not on the European neighbors, and certainly not on the German government.

Bruce Willis is far away

That the US missile systems could destroy the asteroid has turned out to be an illusion; An American hero, such as Bruce Willis, who in Armageddon himself has risen to the celestial bodies that are slipping on the earth in order to destroy him, one seeks in vain in Eight Days. A German hero too. Everywhere only liars and cheats. The state power in the series a right-wing populist bunch, led by a woman named Bettina, well, Gauland.

This dummy of a federal government did for a year as if to build bunkers for the population, now the few usable bunker places are distributed by lottery. And the Bundeswehr plays at the Federal Chancellery poignant a final tattoo, but gets the marauding masses but no longer under control.

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Sky series "Eight Days": apocalypse and ecstasy

Right in the middle of chaos: Mittelstand family Steiner, father, mother, two children, a hamster. She (Christiane Paul) is a doctor and has many gangrene in the series. He (Mark Waschke) is a physicist and as such has high specific know-how - through which he can not stop the asteroid. The marriage has long been broken, the home paradise was already broken before the disaster. And the dream of their own bunker, the Steiners will also be unable to meet.

Prepper grottos with DVD scrap and canned food

Unlike the prepper in this series. Although the doomsday specialists have drastic social deficits, they also have an apocalyptic foresight. They built bunkers early on and are now preparing for the takeover of power after the destruction; Women can gain a place in the Prepper Grottoes made with DVD scrap and canned food through sex with the doomsday fanatics. Also in their element are the Jesus disciples, who bring themselves with crack pipes for the firestorm in the mood, which they see as God-sent.

If you have drugs, you throw them. Anyone who has power abuses them. Who has weapons, kill with them. "Eight Days" creator Stefan Ruzowitzky puts his series genre-like as a release in the picture. The Austrian director and screenwriter was one of the first to consistently import genre material into German-language cinema; With the "Anatomy" films in the early nineties, he translated the conventions of the then-common US Collevo horror into German lecture theaters, with the Oscar-winning concentration camp film "The Counterfeiters" he made in the form of a gangster drama the Holocaust on the subject.

For "Eight Days", Ruzowitzky now tells the story of the erosion of all values ​​in anticipation of the end of the world. From decay before the bang. But also of the reconciliation before the full drone. Apocalypse films are always family films in which the end of the world makes a new beginning of love possible.

And at this point Ruzowitzky's cheery and, admittedly, sometimes a bit mechanical destructive spectacle develops an unexpected depth. The eight Krawumms episodes are preceded by silent preludes, which go far back from the present and psychologically illuminate a figure from the family or their environment. So it goes in a row to the grandfather (Henry Hübchen), who was in the People's Army in the days of the GDR and immortal fell in love with a comrade, whom he now, over 40 years later, visited again. A story reminiscent of the youngest novel by Christoph Hein.

A touching gay East-West drama that spans long breath over the decades, right in the middle of the short-fuse catastrophe - this brings the quality of this series quite well to the point.

"Eight days," Sky