10 Best Postapocalyptic Movies
May 31st, 2011
The end of the world is impossible to predict, as people whoemptied their savings preparing for a Rapture can tell you. Yet the recent rantings about the end of days just confirmed how weirdly fascinated we all are with the destruction of the planet. There’s something compelling about stories involving a widespread ruination of everything around us; maybe it’s the way they focus on true character, and make you wonder just what you would do if you were the last person on Earth. Postapocalyptic movies overlap with their dystopian cousins — both deal with a future that’s almost uninhabitable — but they go a step further by asking big questions about the end of life, not just the death of creativity. Since we all seem to have beaten the Rapture, there’s time to check these movies out:- Mad Max: It’s a classic for a reason. Directed by George Miller (who would go on to helm the two sequels and, curiously, the Babe movies) and brought to life by an impossibly young Mel Gibson, Mad Max is the quintessential tale of a postapocalyptic world ruled by violence. It didn’t create the genre, but it did go a long way toward giving it the flourishes that we now take for granted: warring tribes battling over limited resources, clothing and machines stitched together from old components, and a pervasive sense of doom. The story is set in an Australia in which the rule of law is disintegrating thanks to the rise in mercenary killings tied to the dearth of fossil fuels, so in its own way, Mad Max is a wicked little conservationist movie. Just with more explosions.
- Escape From New York: John Carpenter’s 1981 classic is set in 1997, which back then sounded impossibly futuristic but now just brings back embarrassing memories of the Spice Girls. The premise is straight out of B-movies and comic books: after the end of World War III, the island of Manhattan is turned into a giant prison where criminals are left to their own devices. The president’s plane crashes in the prison zone, so prisoner Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is recruited to save the day. The movie wound up influencing everything from cyberpunk author William Gibson to the Metal Gear video game series, which features a stealth operative named Snake. There’s apparently a remake in the works, but it won’t have a tenth of the charm or fun of the original.
- 28 Days Later: Easily one of the best entries in the field of modern zombie movies, 28 Days Later helped popularize the version of the undead that run fast and take no prisoners. Zombie status (zombiedom?) travels via blood transfers of a disease known simply as "Rage," and after taking out some researchers in England, the entire island is eventually a wasteland of zombies, burned-out buildings, and scattered survivors. Director Danny Boyle captures some impressive shots of a strategically empty London to give the feel of a world gone bye-bye, and the movie finds a nice balance between standard zombie fare and a postapocalyptic run for survival.
- WALL-E: Only Pixar could make the end of the world look adorable. Set around 2800, after the Earth has been polluted and abandoned by a gluttonous population that became reliant on corporate consumerism,WALL-E is at heart a simple chase story about one robot’s quest to save a plant and restore life to the planet. But on another level it’s a haunting look at what happens when we take automation too far and trade active life for passive consumption. There’s a ton of comedy and heart to WALL-E’s adventure and search for love, but the peripheral glimpses of a population gone to rot and a world conquered by trash are downright sobering. It’s enough to make you get back on the treadmill.
- The Quiet Earth: Based on Craig Harrison’s novel, this 1985 New Zealand film plays like a stripped-down version of The Omega Man (which appears later on this list): one morning, a scientist wakes up to find the world deserted. No people, animals, nothing. Everything looks recently deserted, Crotoan-style, but he can’t figure out why. He eventually meets up with a pair of other survivors and pieces together a possible explanation for their presence — they were all at the moment of death when whatever incident made everyone else disappear occurred — and decides to act on new information to make sure such an event doesn’t happen again. It’s a high-concept and enjoyable movie, and places a premium on character interaction instead of just special effects.
- The Road: Cormac McCarthy’s bestselling novel The Road isn’t exactly a whimsical romp, and the film adaptation is suitably brutal. Even for a story about the end of the world, this is a rough go. The year in which the story takes place isn’t clear, nor is the event that brought an end to most of the life on Earth. The plot revolves around a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son who travel the land hoping to find warmer and slightly more hospitable climes. Food is scarce, cannibals are everywhere, and life is generally terrible. It sounds a little weird to talk about a postapocalyptic film as being a downer — shouldn’t they all be kind of depressing? — but The Road is a grim but compelling tale. Not a date movie, but still, worth your time.
- The Omega Man: There was a period where Charlton Heston was a go-to lead for postapocalyptic movies — Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green — but there’s something about 1971′s The Omega Man that gives it an edge. Chalk it up to the source material, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which has been adapted into multiple films since its 1954 publication. Heston plays Robert Neville, a scientist who uses a vaccine to escape the biological warfare that’s wiping out the world’s population. The original book dealt with a virus that caused a kind of vampirism, while in the movie those people that survive the plague become nocturnal albino mutants, which is close enough. It’s got a special kind of 1970s edge to its tale of paranoia and survival of the fittest, and Heston’s a perfect choice.
- 12 Monkeys: Terry Gilliam’s trippy, heartbreaking sci-fi film borrows heavily from the 1962 short French filmLa Jetee; it’s not a remake per se, but there are enough similarities that "inspired by" doesn’t feel strong enough. The story goes that a virus wiped out most of humanity in the mid-1990s, forcing the rest to live underground. In an unspecified future date, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time to stop the virus by learning about its origins and leaving messages for the scientists of the future to find a cure. The film deals with the twisty nature of time and perception, with Cole’s life skipping around erratically as he travels between the future and various points in the past. Gilliam’s trademark style makes for a gorgeous if somewhat cold movie, though it’s one of the better entries in the field.
- The Matrix: Much of the action in The Matrix unfolds within the version of 1999 that the computers emulate for people, but those people who have unplugged from the system are living in 2199, scavenging for sustenance underground as they fight the robots that have enslaved mankind. Forget the clunky early-1990s movies about the dangers of online shopping; this is the real robotic apocalypse, and the Wachowski brothers pull it off with style to spare. The sequels are, well, pretty terrible. They trade a lot of the style away for generic CGI mayhem, and they get even more tangled up in a plot that feels increasingly disconnected with what’s actually happening. (There’s something about a keymaker.) Still, it’s tough to beat the original.
- On the Beach: The story for On the Beach has a great hook: What if the world ended, but you had to wait for death to come? The premise is that World War III has broken out, and retaliatory strikes have left most of the world an irradiated mass of destruction. Australia has survived, but only temporarily, since winds will eventually blow the fallout down south. An American sub that was at sea when the event happened has been spared, and the crew works with the Australian government to monitor what’s happening. Parts of the film are typical 1950s melodrama, but they stand out thanks to the fearsome and intriguing story of life at the end of the world. This one is well worth revisiting.
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