It's The End of the World As We Know It -- And I Feel Fine
On November 24, Arnold Schwarzenegger goes ten rounds with Satan in the new Universal/Buena Vista movie End of Days. Now that the last year of the the millenium approaches (Yes, that's right, "approaches." The 20th Century ends next year.), people with too much time on their hands speculate we can expect a rash of such end-of-the-world films, as though they were somehow unique. SF and fantasy filmfans, however, know that theme has been around for decades in our genre.
Total destruction in SF and fantasy tends to come in two general forms. The four horsemen of the biblical Apocalypse – war, pestilence, famine, and death – are the most common causes of dissolution in SF. Fantasy usually relies on religious themes, related in one way or another to biblical prophesy or some real or fictitious extension of same.
This fascination with civilization's collapse shouldn't surprise anyone. When Hiroshima and Nagasaki melted in a mushroom cloud in 1945, the idea that the world truly could come to an end in a moment took on a new and terrifying reality. Suddenly, we knew everything could be gone with the push of a button, and Dr. Strangelove made us pause to ponder the stability of those in charge of said button.
Two decades later, the growing awareness that we had been systematically destroying the environment for close on two centuries added another element to the boiling pot of Armageddon stew. If something weren't done – and soon – there wouldn't be anyone left to push buttons. We would all have choked on our own waste.
Still, given early SF's focus on space, it's hardly surprising that the first world's-end film of note would be George Pal's When Worlds Collide (1951). A straying planet is on a collision course with Earth, and humankind's only hope for survival is to send a space ship full of a selected portion of the population to a second planetary roamer due to slide conveniently into Earth's orbit once the smash-up is over. The plot is thin, the science laughable, and the premise more than a little far-fetched, but Pal's special effects are always worth watching. This one has a shot of New York City being inundated by a tidal wave, the first of many subsequent instances of Gotham being turned into Big Applesauce.
The next significant entry in the annihilation sweepstakes is The Omega Man (1971), very loosely based on Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Charlton Heston is one of the survivors of a plague that turned another part of the population into pasty-faced religious fanatics who want to kill off anyone who doesn't look like they do. This rather pedestrian film is notable mainly for its production values: the empty, ruined Los Angeles with its unburied corpses is a dreary reminder of how quickly the tinsel can become tarnished and tattered. Unfortunately, screenwriters John William and Joyce Corrington chose to eliminate the plague survivors' vampirism, which takes a lot of the scare out of things. Still, it's a decent film for the time and place.
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