Films: Down With The Apocalypse!!

There was a time when I used to enjoy a good end of the world movie. But I’ve gotten to the point where I really can’t stand them anymore. This has me a little perplexed. What’s changed my opinion about these movies? After careful deliberation, I’ve concluded that the nature of these films has changed: they no longer have a point except to present grotesque imagery. And that makes them kind of sick.

Apocalyptic films trace their history way back. Indeed, the term “apocalypse,” a Greek word meaning “lifting the veil,” derives from the Bible’s Book of Revelations, though every culture had its own version of the end of the world story. It seems that as a species, we are fascinated with our own demise. And I suppose that’s natural because humans are social creatures and we’re big on trying to control our own destinies. Apocalyptic stories sit at the crossroads of these two impulses, as they are warnings about what can go wrong if we let society do the wrong thing.

This, I think, is what made the early apocalyptic films so interesting: they were warnings, i.e. message movies. The writers/directors saw something in our world or in our behavior that troubled them, and they created their movies as a warning about what they saw. Hence, you had films warning about everything from the dangers of nuclear/biological/chemical weapons to the dangers of robots and automation to the dangers of not being able to cooperate to meet challenges to the dangers of divine retribution for our sins. And because these were message films, the majority of the film was about showing us both how we could avoid such a fate or, alternatively, how we could end up rushing head-long into it. In other words, they were lessons.

Now let me be clear: I am not saying that these films were all great or that I believed the messages. In fact, most of the messages were laughable, e.g. their “science” was usually truly awful, and the apocalypts’ interpretation of human nature was pathetic, they seem incapable of grasping that there is a good side to human nature that balances and checks the bad. But at least these films were working on exploring something worth exploring, and the themes were interesting: will weapon X be our undoing? If we give in to our darker sides, what kind of damage can we cause? How will humans respond to such horrors? Etc.

But today, this has all changed. And nothing shows this more than the change in what causes our demise in the films. In the past, our demise was always caused by something that society found acceptable, like our own chemical or nuclear weapons, or science that we marveled at even though we were not yet ready to control it. Because of this, these films always gave us something to think about. When Chuck Heston cursed us all in Planet of the Apes, we wondered if we could really knock ourselves down the food chain if we pushed the button. When we saw humanity enslaved by a computer in Colossus: The Forbin Project, we wondered how far we should trust computers to control our weapons. When Matthew Broderick nearly kill us all in War Games, we wondered how secure our weapons really were? And so on. In each instance, our comfort with the status quo was questioned, and we were asked if we really felt comfortable with things as they were.

Conversely, today the causes are either beyond our control (like an asteroid) or they are the result of criminal behavior by clichéd bad guys. Consequently, there is nothing for us to consider anymore. Indeed, while we may have wondered about the wisdom of hording nuclear weapons after seeing Fail Safe, no one thinks “gee, maybe we should make it more illegal for corporations to make killer, mutant viruses” after watching Resident Evil.

Thus, the nature of these films has changed before a single frame of film is even shot: modern apocalypse films all but wipe out the social commentary aspect of the genre.

Moreover, the focus of the story has changed. The older films dealt mainly with the events leading up to the disaster, with the intention being to warn us of the dangers we supposedly faced and how we could bring about our own demise as a result of those dangers. Even when these films did deal with the after-effects, it was done mainly to add emphasis to the story. By comparison, today’s apocalypse films are all about the after-effects. Indeed, whereas the older films were intended as critiques of human nature, the new films are slick CGI snuff films showing the many ways the film crew could come up with for killing human beings.

What this means is that whereas the older films served a purpose, the newer ones are purely gratuitous. In the older films, the slaughter, when shown, was intended to heighten the drama or to heighten the impact of the consequences of ignoring the director’s warning. But in the new films, the slaughter is what is being sold to you. It is the backdrop for an otherwise bland action story, and it is the action itself. The difference between these two approaches is the difference between a treatise on humanity and a book of gory pictures.

And I that’s why I don’t like apocalyptic films anymore. Even though I disagreed with the older ones (and found many of them laughable) at least they were earnest and the drama was interesting. They had a purpose. Today films have lost all of that. They have instead become mass snuff films, whose only purpose is to satisfy our bloodlust.

I guess I just don’t find that cool.