“You maniacs!!! You blew it up!!! DAMN YOU!! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!” With Charlton Heston hollering in anguish at the sight of a ruined Statue of Liberty, the climax of the original 1967 version of PLANET OF THE APES is one of the most famous Movie Endings of all time. Packing in a mind-boggling doozy of a twist that flips the whole movie on it’s head, revealing the Ape-infested planet is in fact a Nuclear-devastated future Earth, the finale gets its bleak power from the sight of the shattered Lady Liberty tapping into the primal, unavoidable fear of our world coming to a sudden and spectacular end.

No matter how frightening life gets, we never seemed to stop being both enthralled and horrified by the concept of the End of the World- and Apocalypse Movies have been exploiting this for the last seventy years, visualising our darkest horrors and imagining the most dangerous possible outcomes for humanity. Whether it’s the aftermath of a Nuclear Conflict, environmental disaster, alien invasion or a plague of Zombies, they hold up a mirror to the times, sometimes exploring contemporary issues, other times simply being an excuse for expensive city-destroying special effects. The reality might be something nobody wants, but Cinema audiences’ hunger to be scared and entertained by fantasy Apocalypses doesn’t look like it’s going to go away…

BEGINNING OF THE END

Fascination with the End of the World isn’t a new idea- it’s been lurking around ever since St. John scribbled down his visions of the Earth’s destruction in the Bible’s book of Revelations- but the Apocalypse Movie trend was kicked off by the Godfather of Science Fiction himself, H.G. Wells, and his screenplay for the 1936 British film THINGS TO COME. It may have been a ponderous production short on gags, car chases or action of any kind- but the tale of an England torn apart by a conflict between 1940 and 1970 essentially acted as the prototype for all the “survival in the ruins” films that followed.

Written as a reaction to the First World War, Well’s vision of the future was proved horribly right when, only three years later, the Second World War broke out, and for the following years everybody was too preoccupied with surviving the current conflict to be creating cinematic Apocalypses. It was only when America ended the War in 1946 by dropping the Atom Bomb on Japan that the idea of the End of the World was irrevocably changed. Suddenly, cities could be destroyed in seconds, and within a few short years the whole world could potentially be wiped out by a Government with an itchy trigger finger. The Nuclear age had begun, and a whole new series of fears were waiting to be exploited by Hollywood.

They found their first outlet in the world of B-Movies, with cheap, lurid monster films like ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS and classic giant ant flick THEM! featuring nuclear tests that cause animals or insects to grow to gigantic proportions and start chowing down on the local populace. While the post-apocalyptic world began to appear in B-Movies like Roger Corman’s THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED, a whole sequence of mainstream Hollywood sci-fi films were more concerned with delivering “nuclear warnings”. Usually involving incredibly polite aliens travelling to Earth to inform us of the danger of Nuclear Weapons, the best of these was Robert Wise’s 1951 classic THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, where the cultured alien Klaatu arrives on the White House lawn with a giant robot named Gort and a stark warning- “Live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.”

Some aliens, however, were still turning up for the pleasure of blowing the crap out of humanity. Byron Haskin’s WAR OF THE WORLDS (1956) played fast and loose with H.G. Well’s classic novel of Martian Invasion, shifting the Victorian action to 1950s California;- it was also the first large-scale Technicolor Apocalypse, with the usually infalliable U.S. Army helpless against the merciless alien conquerors. Annihilating everyone from stalwart army colonels to kindly clergymen, the invaders level whole cities, and it’s only divine intervention that saves humanity, with the aliens wiped out by their lack of immunity to “humble bacteria”.

LEARNING TO LOVE THE BOMB

As the 1960s began, Apocalypse movies started to get a little more serious. Cold War tensions were continuing to escalate, while the Bay of Pigs incident in 1962- with Russian nuclear missiles stationed just off the coast of the USA- brought the planet terrifyingly close to a genuine Nuclear War. The major Hollywood studios responded by producing big, solemn movies about the danger of Nuclear Armageddon like ON THE BEACH and FAIL SAFE, but, ironically, the film with the greatest impact was the least serious of the lot- a bleakly satirical nightmare comedy that dared to look at the End of the World and laugh it’s head off.

The epically titled DR. STRANGELOVE (OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB) was born when legendary director Stanley Kubrick, having just finished slavery saga SPARTACUS, decided the impending threat of Nuclear War would be the subject of his next film. Aiming for a chilling, serious movie, he bought the rights to a thriller about an unauthorised first strike against Russia entitled RED ALERT;- but when he and the book’s author Peter George sat down to work on the script, things didn’t go according to plan.

“As we kept trying to imagine the way in which things would happen”, said Kubrick at the time, “ideas kept coming to us which we’d discard because they were so ludicrous. We kept saying to ourselves, “We can’t do this! People will laugh!!” But after a month or so, I realised the things we were throwing out were the things that were most truthful.” Drafting in cult writer Terry Southern to add to the script’s twisted satire, the end result in 1964 was a nuclear film like no other, featuring Peter Sellers in a trio of bizarre roles, and while the film divided critics, it gained massive success by daring to depict the most powerful men in the world as terrifyingly deluded buffoons.

Once 1967 hit, it was time for Charlton Heston to tell those damn dirty apes to get their stinking paws off him. Developed from Pierre Boulle’s novel MONKEY PLANET and transformed into a metaphor for humanity’s march towards destruction by co-writer and TWILIGHT ZONE mastermind Rod Serling, PLANET OF THE APES combined intelligent writing with eye-catching ape make-up effects to elbow its way into pop culture history. Despite the bleak twist ending, the film caused a sensation, smashing box-office records, and even the climax of the 1970 sequel, with Heston returning simply so that he could blow up the Earth, couldn’t stop the hunger for all things APE.

Three more sequels followed, using a time travel device to send a trio of Apes back in time to “complete the circle”, and the trend for bleakness in Science Fiction caught on. From here onwards, Cinema audiences would find a surprisingly downbeat collection of apocalypses waiting for them at the local movie house, with films like THE OMEGA MAN, SOYLENT GREEN, LOGAN’S RUN and classic Zombie horror DAWN OF THE DEAD.

The cycle finally came to what appeared to be it’s final end in 1977, when STAR WARS bounded onto the scene like a hyperactive teenager, and George Lucas’ brightly optimistic classic seemed to be exactly what people wanted as science fiction from now on. However, a vengeance-driven Australian future cop with a liking for leather was prepared to argue differently…

WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER HERO

At first glance, the Sci-Fi revenge thriller MAD MAX (1978) didn’t look like a film likely to change the face of movies. Set in an unspecified future where society has broken down, and gangs of psychotic bikers with colourful names like “The Toecutter” roam the roads, it was the first major role for a then-little known actor called Mel Gibson, but only managed average business outside Australia and was horrendously dubbed with American accents for U.S. audiences.

Instead of letting his first movie gather dust, MAX director George Miller cranked the accelerator up to maximum in 1981 for a truly delirious sequel, making a superstar out of Gibson in the process. MAD MAX 2 easily eclipses the original by melding the mindset of the classic Western with a devastated world where Petrol is the only currency, and Gibson’s battle-scarred warrior is the traditional soulless gunslinger in need of some redemption.

Barely pausing for breath, Miller’s movie piles on an astonishing demolition derby of vehicle destruction and eye-popping stunts without a shred of CGI;- all the more remarkable when the only serious injury caused during filming was a stuntman having his foot trod on by a Camel between shots. Max returned for one final bout (the flawed but hugely entertaining MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME), but the influence of MAD MAX 2 could be felt everywhere in the 1980s, and every single post-apocalypse movie carried echoes of Max’s brutal world of petrol shortages and insane haircuts.

Back in the real world, the tensions in the Cold War had increased, and once again fingers were hovering over the Nuclear button- but out of all the dramas tackling the subject, it was a modestly budgeted 1982 TV movie that hit home with the greatest force. Director Mick Jackson and KES author Barry Hines were the men behind THREADS, the story of a working class family doing their best to survive in 1980s Sheffield when a Nuclear Bomb is dropped on the city. Giving a whole generation of schoolkids some serious nightmares thanks to the horrific Nuclear detonation sequence, it summed up the fear and cynicism of the time, showing the aftermath with the survivors in a world of anarchy, mutation and radiation sickness, and left nobody in any doubt that a Nuclear War was not something to be allowed to happen.

Also tapping into the fatalism of the time, with the aid of Arnie Schwarzenegger’s unforgettable turn as a killer cyborg with a worrying taste in sunglasses, was classic 1984 action thriller THE TERMINATOR. While it was a world away from the gritty realism of THREADS, underneath all the chase sequences, hardware and Arnie intoning “I’ll be back” in his inimitable style, James Cameron’s first hit movie was a stunningly downbeat tale, where the eventual future of the human race may be saved by Sarah Connor crushing the T-800 into tin-foil, but nothing can stop the oncoming nuclear holocaust- like it or not, we’ll soon be dodging laser blasts and blowing up robot tanks.

OPTMISTIC APOCALYPSE?

The next change came in 1989, when the Soviet Union surprised everybody by abruptly collapsing. Glasnost arrived, the Berlin Wall came down, and having grown accustomed to a Russians being cast-iron bad guys with itchy nuclear trigger fingers, Hollywood suddenly had to survive in a world where the Cold War was over. When James Cameron’s sequel to THE TERMINATOR finally arrived in 1992, he knew that nobody now wanted the original movie’s inevitable war-torn future;- so TERMINATOR 2 lifted a concept cut from the original movie, giving Sarah Connor the chance of changing the future to a more optimistic option, while Arnie’s unstoppable killing machine was changed into a fatherly teddy-bear that shoots to wound.

Without the likelihood of a nuclear Armageddon, Hollywood needed a new End of the World- and the brand new candidates were Killer Viruses and Environmental Catastrophes. OUTBREAK (1994) flirted with the idea of a virus nearly wiping out an American town via a rogue monkey, while the idea was given a time-travel twist in TWELVE MONKEYS with Bruce Willis’ future convict being sent back to the present day to find a cure. Neither film captured the public imagination, with even Kevin Costner’s ocean-bound epic WATERWORLD, set after the melting of the polar ice caps, struggling to recoup it’s colossal $180 million budget.

It wasn’t until gigantic flying saucers arrived to incinerate the White House in 1997’s INDEPENDENCE DAY that Apocalypse Movies started making a serious impact once again. Roland Emmerich’s alien invasion blockbuster effectively ripped off the 1956 version of WAR OF THE WORLDS (even down to an identical sequence where a Nuclear Missile fails to stop the aliens), but jazzed up the story with jaw-dropping special effects and a gung-ho climax;- the end result being pots of cash, and a whole series of copycat disaster-led blockbusters.

This new breed of Apocalypse Movies was too concerned with showing off the special effects budget to ever be particularly scary, with asteroid disaster films ARMAGEDDON and DEEP IMPACT seemingly only existing to exhibit the latest achievements in CGI. It looked like Cinema’s thirst for ever-more elaborate End of the World scenarios was unstoppable… until September 11th 2001 arrived, and the World Trade Centre attacks gave Hollywood a reality wake-up call.

Apocalypse movies once again felt the influence of reality, but in this case it was the hasty removal of a sequence from the appalling 2002 remake of THE TIME MACHINE. Spectacular effects shots showing fragments of the Moon bombarding New York City had been completed, but were swiftly chopped out leaving only truncated remnants of the sequence in the final film, while elsewhere many End of the World films in development found themselves grinding to a halt. Despite this, films were soon back in the world of the post-apocalyptic future with another retread of the MAD MAX 2 storyline in the entertaining but stodgy Dragon flick REIGN OF FIRE, while a welcome edge of scary relevance was injected back into the genre by the terrifying 28 DAYS LATER.

“Violence today is just as bad as in the 40s and 50s,“ said director Danny Boyle, “What’s different now is that ‘rage’ thing. Air rage, road rage, trolley rage in supermarkets. Why have we become so intolerant? What’s making us like this?” Urgently shot on digital video, Boyle’s film showed a world where a psychological “Rage virus” has transformed the population into psychotic zombies, and the sequences showing the main character wandering the deserted streets of London packed even more power in the post-September 11th world.

PLANET OF THE APES
Stranded astronaut Charlton Heston finds love, liberty and a loincloth on a world where Apes rule the roost, humans are treated like animals, and a Statue of Liberty-sized secret lurks in the “Forbidden Zone”...

DR STRANGELOVE
“Gentlemen!! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!!” Kubrick’s pitch-black nightmare comedy turns the Nuclear threat into a demented cartoon, as three separate versions of Peter Sellers stop worrying and learn to love the Bomb.

THE TERMINATOR
The original, and still the best. James Cameron’s low-budget action classic rocks with punky energy and style, while Arnie bulldozes his way through the film with minimum dialogue and maximum impact as the leather-clad killer cyborg.

MAD MAX 2
Streets ahead of the first movie, Mel Gibson lets out his inner Road Rage in this astonishing post-apocalyptic action thriller, coming to the aid of a beleaguered township with a combination of funky driving and surly ultraviolence.

INDEPENDENCE DAY
Ignore the awful dialogue, wooden acting and some gaping plot holes- just sit back and watch in gob-smacked awe as most of America gets blown into tiny pieces by tentacled aliens with a severe attitude problem.