Krakatit

 Krakatit is the name of an explosive with an unimaginable destructive force. Even its inventor, engineer Prokop, is afraid of it while for many others it represents their desired tool for absolute power. In a novel of the same name by Karel Čapek, published in 1924, Prokop’s experiments and their results were pure fiction, while the film adaptation, which originated not long after World War II and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki partly reflects reality. Besides its argent moral appeal the film still amazes to this day by its delirious atmosphere and visual inventiveness within both real exteriors and fantastical sets. Otakar Várvra returned to the same topic in the normalisation era and it was introduced in 1980 under the title Dark Sun as a loose adaptation of Krakatit, this time with connections to the context of the Cold War. It, however, never reached the same impact or popularity of the original.