Long live the apocalypse

16 October 2009

John Howell

Watching Science fiction and fantasy films is a fantastic way to experience the end of everything without the hassle of you or your friends dying horribly at the same time. Luckily for those in love with depictions of death and destruction, Hollywood appears fixated lately. Apocalyptic scenarios are all the rage. Chaos is in. Nuclear Armageddon, natural calamities, zombies, alien invasions, there are numerous ways the human race could be wiped from the face of the earth and films and TV shows appear to be adopting them as creative premises in a frantic rush of entertainment.

Based on the bestselling book by Cormac McCarthy, The Road is a particularly grim future vision. Starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, the film depicts a post-apocalyptic US nightmare, in which a father and son travel across a bleak landscape blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that has destroyed civilization and almost all life on earth. Featuring cannibals and bucket loads of despair, it's a grim survivalist tale not for the faint hearted. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. Viggo Mortensen is an underrated actor and this should be just the type of role he can sink his teeth into (no pun intended). The Road will be released 28 January 2010.

With a lot more humour, Zombieland, in direct contrast to the stark despair of The Road, tells the story of an apocalyptic infection which turns almost everyone into zombies. It has spread across the globe as the infected zombies bite anyone they can. Zombieland star Woody Harrelson leads a small group of survivors against this zombie plague. Apparently his mother told him that one day he would be good at something, but he doubts she would have guessed that it would be his skill at killing zombies. It will be interesting to see how Zombieland compares to the fantastic UK comedy/fantasy zombie movie Shaun of the Dead. Zombieland premiered recently in the US with the second highest-grossing start on record for a zombie film behind the Dawn of the Dead remake and as "the first [American] horror comedy in recent memory to find significant theatrical success," according to Box Office Mojo.

The Book of Eli is yet another upcoming post-apocalyptic film, telling the story of a lone warrior, Eli, played by Denzel Washington. The future is grim, but Eli represents a ray of hope: Eli guards the Book of Eli, which apparently provides knowledge that could redeem humanity, lifting us out of post-apocalyptic decay. Gary Oldman plays the corrupt leader of a small town who plans to take the book from Eli if he can. "Some will kill to have it," is the tag line on the movie poster. "He will kill to protect it." The Book of Eli is out 15 January 2010.

The recently released film 9 too, tells a post-apocalyptic tale, this time though using animation. 9 follows a group of sentient rag dolls as they confront terrifying machines determined to kill them. In this post-apocalyptic world however, humans have been wiped out completely. The rag dolls were created by a brilliant human scientist to seed a desolate Earth with intelligent life after a cataclysmic war. Elijah Wood voices the lead character, 9, who together with his other walking talking rag dolls (9 in all) must discover why the machine creatures are so determined to kill. It's interesting coming across a big budget animated film that has adopted an "apocalyptic" theme. Typically we get fluffier entertainment from Hollywood's big budget animated productions. Toy Story, Up and Shrek look nothing like this!

Instead of a direct post-apocalyptic setting, Roland Emmerich's upcoming film 2012 gives us a frame by frame glimpse of what global destruction may look like as it's actually happening (in slow motion too if the trailer is anything to go by). 2012 is the year that the Mayan calendar ends and many have predicted it will be the apocalyptic end of the Earth. 2012 stars John Cusak, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover and Oliver Platt. If you've watched one of the trailers, you'll know that the special effects are likely to be the film's main selling point. There's more global destruction in a 2012 trailer than a thousand previous Hollywood blockbusters. It's "overkill" in every sense. Let's hope there's some semblance of a plot to go along with all the amazing CGI.

TV too is getting in on the apocalyptic act. The second series of the supernatural science fiction thriller series, Fringe, is revealing glimpses of a future apocalyptic war in its ongoing story arc, a war with people from an alternate parallel universe. If a gate to this other universe is opened, it could lead to the end of everything. Flash Forward, the science fiction show that recently debuted on the ABC in the US, also tells the story of a global incident. The entire population of the world is rendered unconscious simultaneously.

So why this obsession with global calamities and incidents? Maybe September 11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, swine flu, and the recent global financial crisis have all had a cumulative impact on the publics’ mental health. Is the production of these disturbing scenarios a sign of deep seated insecurities in real life? Are the collective bad dreams of the western world percolating out through the entertainment industry? Like someone haunted by reoccurring nightmares, is our collective unconscious trying to tell us something?

Perhaps though, movie producers are simply demonstrating that chaos is popular and mass extinction fun.

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