Six Films That Depict the Definitive (or at Least Probable) Eradication of the Human Species

SCREEN

By Matt Prigge

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Nov. 14, 2007

Southland Tales

On the Beach (1959): Released not long after When Worlds Collide showed mankind simply relocating to another planet, Stanley Kramer depicted the last days of man (i.e., Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, et al.) thanks to nuclear fallout. This being noble, boring Kramer (The Defiant Ones, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), the proceedings aren't terribly imaginative--but at least it got there first.

The Crazies (1973): George A. Romero's Dead films all end semi-optimistically, suggesting humankind may find a niche after all. But there's no hope in this corrosive satire, which has the army first infecting a western Pennsylvania town with military nerve gas, then ensuring it'll only spread further when they can't contain the raging nutbags it's created.

Quintet (1979): Word in the '70s was an ice age was coming, prompting Robert Altman to make this stubbornly slow, bleak-o-rama portrait of an enclave of the last humans (headlined by Paul Newman) whiling away their last days in the icy remains of Canada's Expo 67 site. Critics and audiences initially pounced, but why expect anything but misery from this doomsday scenario?

The Rapture (1991): Those crazy Christian fundamentalists are right in Michael Tolkin's bone-chilling hypothetical, which ends with born-again Mimi Rogers--having recently executed her own daughter in the name of the Lord--denying rapture on the grounds that God is a cruel, heartless fuckhead.

Children of Men (2006): Reads a scrawl of graffiti early on in Alfonso Cuar�n's vision of mankind perishing (or perhaps not) through widespread infertility: "Last one left turn off the lights."

Southland Tales (2007): "This is how the world ends--not with a bang but with a whimper," Justin Timberlake repeatedly recites throughout Richard Kelly's unwieldy, maddening and all-around batshit apocalypto, which posits an alternate 2008 with more terrorism, less civil rights and plenty of SNL vets scampering about with guns. That sounds about right.