Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/29/the-apocalypse-in-film-and-fiction.html
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Good list, but they always miss two of my faves:
12 monkeys; I just love gilliams style and the love story has actually meaning.
Soylent green; first dystopian film I saw as a child and understood. gave me nightmares for weeks back then.
Threads; highly recommended! feels most real. in my opinion way “better” and depressing than the day after. scared the fucking shit outta me.
The road (film); end-of-the-world in all its bleakness without compromise (well, till…). dis send me straight into depression (for real). only recommended, if you feel quite stable, but you wont forget it.
but I miss something in the list, which may be my favourite (at least in my top five); children of man. I love that film. its nearly perfect.
I’ll just put this here…
Adventure Time
Z for Zachariah (The book , not the disappointing movie)
And Damnation Alley for the giant scorpions.
Depending on how you define apocalypse:
I hear that a lot, but thinking of that woman and her baby going off to be part of a research project/experiment just depressed me. If you care to share, what do you like/love about it?
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. It has a pretty thorough apocalypse, but humans not only survive, but thrive. It may take thousands of years, though.
There’s a moment.
They are trying to get to the boat. The baby has been born, but was taken by the Fishes. There’s a huge firefight between soldiers and the Fishes in an apartment building where they are holding them.
Theo finds them and starts to leave, and the baby is crying, and the fighting just… stops. The moment the awareness of the baby reaches people, there’s a sudden silence. The soldiers yell “Cease Firing!” It’s complete reverence and awe.
That’s what the movie is about. The death and horror is the absence of what the movie is about.
It’s described by the final lines of a story the nurse tells earlier in the movie.
“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd what happens in a world without children’s voices.”
The story describes what is good through the absence of it, and the brief, tragic moments we see it in others. There are probably a hundred more examples in the movie. Well worth the time to study and find them.
favorite apocalyptic plots from fiction and film
This is a bit confusing as, even on the short list, the plots for some of these books and the movies ostensibly based on them are actually quite different. (In some cases, the complete opposite, even.)
Interesting that only 28 Days Later is the only zombie movie on there, as technically Night of the Living Dead is also a film adaptation of I Am Legend (and at least as faithful as some of the other versions), and it’s the most common apocalyptic scenario in films of recent decades. Considered too low-brow, I guess.
For whatever reason, the link to “Where Have All The People Gone” didn’t work for me. This one did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Have_All_the_People_Gone%3F
mostly everything? as I said; in my opinion its nearly perfect, meaning its more than the sum of its parts, but I do love the worldbuilding (not realy SF anmore), the writing, dialogue and camera in particular. the interactions between characters feel real.
well, its a dystopian film, right? but as far as I saw it, I was quite happy she and her child made it and was not exploited by you-know-who (which was the whole point of her escape with theo)
great guilty pleasure. but my favourite in that regard is probably
ZARDOZ
just marvelous what boorman did with the little he got at hand.
You know, I didn’t find The Road to be depressing at all, really. Maybe I am weird, but to me it is about the goodness of the world surviving. Not sure if you have seen and/or read No Country for Old Men, but:
There’s a little hint of connection between the two. The Sheriff has a dream about seeing his Father passing him, carrying fire in an old horn. The father and son share an ideal of “carrying the fire” in The Road. I think that is really what the story is about. Sort of a relay race where goodness is what is carried.
He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
also:
She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man all of time.
Not unlike Children of Men, really.
Frank Herbert’s “The White Plague.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague
A really fun book on the subject
so, the goodness of the child, actualy.