8 Great...Ways to End the World
In the movie version of Cormac McCarthy’s best-selling novel The Road (out on DVD and Blu-ray May 25th), an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) leads his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) through the blasted, empty remains of America as he fights to keep the boy alive at all costs. It’s never explained what exactly left the country -- and, we assume, the rest of the world -- so horribly devastated. Was it a meteor? A nuclear war? The effects of catastrophic climate change?
Although it’s never spelled out what caused the cataclysm in The Road, each of those scenarios above has been the basis of one or more post-apocalyptic movies. In fact, Hollywood has always done a good job of finding ways to destroy the Earth, or at the very least wipe most of mankind off its surface. Here’s a look at eight ways filmmakers have found to take us out -- and the movies that have best realized their vision of Armageddon.
Fear of nuclear war dominated the culture from the ‘50s through the end of the Cold War, and atomic apocalypse was a favorite theme of scores of movies and TV projects. Stanley Kubrick’s satiric Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) offered perhaps the worst scenario of all: a nuclear war set off by mistake. A couple of wrong signals, a burnt-out radio or two, a handful of overzealous patriots -- and presto! The movie (and the world) ends in a fusillade of thermonuclear explosions. You’ve got to either laugh or cry -- and Kubrick makes the whole thing hilarious.
Most movies about the end of the world don’t actually feature the destruction of the planet itself -- usually the surface is scorched or the human race is decimated, but the Earth itself is left intact. That was not the case with Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Star Charlton Heston wanted to ensure that he wouldn’t be called back for more sequels, so at the end of the 1970 film he detonates a bomb powerful enough to blow up the planet. Earth is utterly destroyed -- but the producers found a way to make more sequels anyway.
There’s nothing like unleashing a global pandemic to give the human race a wake-up call. Or in most cases, to permanently take the phone off the hook. Cillian Murphy emerges from a coma in 28 Days Later to find a nasty virus has escaped from a lab and decimated an eerily deserted London -- with the survivors turned into zombie-like psychopaths -- while all of America calls in sick in Carriers. And let’s not forget the cure for cancer that turns into a virus and kills 5.4 billion in I Am Legend, while mutating the rest into raging monsters.
We’ve seen what happens when vicious man-made viruses run rampant, but what about when even bigger experiments go off the rails? In The Day the Earth Caught Fire, twin nuclear explosions push the Earth out of orbit and onto a collision course with the sun, leading to record profits for air conditioner sales. In the cult Australian flick The Quiet Earth, a massive attempt to launch a global energy grid zaps the entire population into another dimension, literally leaving the lights on with nobody home.
Our favorite chronicler of all things catastrophic, Roland Emmerich, invoked the Mayan legend that the world will come to an end just two years from now in last fall's 2012, although he suggested that solar flares and not an angry Mexican spirit god would bring down the curtain. Meanwhile, acclaimed Australian filmmaker Peter Weir’s 1977 movie The Last Wave finds Aboriginals predicting a gigantic tidal wave that will pretty much hose the human race off the planet. The ultimate lesson of these movies? When the planet, the sun or the spirit world get angry at us, all bets are off. They like to clean house once in a while.
Director Roland Emmerich made the king of all climate change movies with The Day After Tomorrow, in which Manhattan goes underwater (talk about a real estate meltdown), a hailstorm flattens Tokyo and tornadoes whip their way through downtown Los Angeles. Before that there was Waterworld, in which Kevin Costner had to stay afloat on a submerged planet, while even Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence set its finale in a far future Earth buried under ice. To these guys, climate change is real -- and if you look at the headlines lately about floods and earthquakes, these movies are looking less and less like sci-fi.
Did you hear about that asteroid that passed by Earth the other day? Neither did we. Apparently we’ve had a few close calls over the years, and movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact (both released in 1998) explore the effects of an asteroid or meteor hitting the Earth. Both those movies, however, end with the planet still standing, even if it’s going to be difficult to find a Starbucks or free wi-fi for a while. In When Worlds Collide (1951), there’s no such luck -- our only hope is to catch a cab off Earth just before it’s demolished by a rogue star.
As if we didn’t have enough problems keeping our civilization in one piece, it doesn’t help when alien invaders decide they want to take over the planet themselves and flick us off like pesky little bugs. Roland Emmerich parked massive spaceships all over the globe and laid waste to every major city in 1996’s Independence Day, building on the scenarios concocted in ‘50s sci-fi classics like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and War of the Worlds (later remade as a 9/11 allegory by Steven Spielberg). As hard as we keep trying to blow ourselves up, it’s frightening to know that someone else is all too eager to step up and finish the job.
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