It's The End Of The World At The Movies

Don Kaye researched and wrote this article.

We've been wondering how the world will end almost as long as we've been trying to figure out how it began.

Naturally, in the past 100 years, movies have dutifully played their part in bringing our most nightmarish visions of the apocalypse to big-screen life, with results ranging from silly ("Beneath the Planet of the Apes") to almost unwatchably horrific ("The War Game").

Natural disaster wiped us out as early as 1933's "Deluge," while cosmic catastrophe claimed us in "When Worlds Collide."

Giant monsters and aliens have overrun civilization in pictures ranging from "Godzilla" to "Mars Attacks," while the Devil himself, if not his son or a few lesser demons, has attempted to bring down the curtain in "The Seventh Sign" and "In the Mouth of Madness."

But the prevailing cause of man's demise in movies has usually been man himself, most often through atomic war between the superpowers.

"Our apocalypses are usually keyed to whatever we're worried about," says Kim Newman, the British author of "Apocalypse Movies," a comprehensive look at end-of-the-world cinema. "There were end of the world films before the invention of the atom bomb, though nuclear fears dominated 50 years of apocalypse movies."

In later decades, however, environmental and population issues have taken center stage, with nuclear or bio-terrorism recently creeping into the mix as well.

Hitting screens this week and touching on all three of these issues is director Alfonso Cuaron's "Children of Men," based on the novel by P.D. James.

In this grim look at the state of the world in the year 2027, no human child has been born in 18 years due to a worldwide plague of infertility, with an unknown cause.

With the race destined to die out and having nothing essentially to live for, humankind has given up on the environment, tolerance for other races, and indeed any notion of democracy or benevolence.

"There's nobody investing in the future because there's no future," says star Clive Owen, whose character, Theo Faren, becomes the unwitting guardian of what could be the first pregnant woman on Earth in a generation.

"We worry about the environment not for ourselves, but for our children."

What makes this particular entry into the end-of-the-world genre especially hard-hitting, whether you buy its premise or not, is Cuaron's insistence on making the movie's world as close to ours as possible.

"We decided, in terms of what you see, not to see the future but try to recognize the present," says the filmmaker. "But together with that, we took this more documentary approach, as if you were just following characters with your TV camera in the year 2027."

Eschewing the nuclear mutants, blasted landscapes and giant spaceships of so many previous films in favor of a crumbling society not too far removed from ours may remind audiences that the end of the world could be just a headline away.

"Oddly, there's a comforting element in seeing the worst played out on screen," says Newman. "When you leave the cinema, you feel like a survivor."
By Don Kaye