Are we experiencing a great unveiling in the world today? If so, cinema tells the story in all its bleakness, and also offers us hope.
By Andrew Petiprin
Films that can generally be described as apocalyptic continue to reach a wide audience. Some double as horror films, as in the case of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its many successors, and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. There are campy blockbusters like Independence Day, along with the various Planet of the Apes films. There are also tech-heavy visions of an inhumane future, including Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Others speak to timely concerns of nuclear annihilation, such as The Day After and On the Beach. There is even a sub-genre of Christian apocalyptic cinema, exemplified by Donald Thompson’s low-budget 1972 film, A Thief in the Night and its sequels, which propose a post-rapture world ruled by the anti-Christ. Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys and different adaptations of Stephen King’s novel The Stand are especially timely for their depiction of a worst-case scenario pandemic.
The “apocalypse” or “unveiling” that cinema depicts in various ways is sometimes closely linked to another word, “dystopia” or “bad place,” which is meant to represent the opposite of a “utopia,” which literally means “no place,” but is usually assumed to be an ideal world. Many great films show us places we would want to be, elevating our souls to pursue a heavenly existence; but others show us what we dread, both dissuading us from decisions that could bring about our ruin, or equipping our spirits for the battles that we cannot escape, no matter how much we wish we had gone to our blessed reward before our worst earthly nightmares came true.
Among the most effective apocalyptic or dystopian films are tales of the isolated wanderer – the journeys of the survivors. These are the people who mysteriously remain alive while others die, and who carry on with varying degrees of hope for a renewal of a once-thriving world. In recent film history, no one has depicted this type of hero’s journey better than George Miller.
Miller’s 1979 cult classic Mad Max begins in a near future that feels now like the recent past, where people drive big steel coupes with V8 engines, and the oil supply is running out fast. Society is beginning to fracture as resources become scarce, but honest citizens try to get along as normally as they can, including the upstanding young policeman and family man Max Rockatansky, played by Mel Gibson. We know right away that things could get worse for Max at any moment, and we relate to Max’s situation because of all the uncertainties of our own world. Maybe incendiary rhetoric about climate change or food shortages or natural disasters are all overblown. Or maybe not. On the one hand, the world has certainly seen tough times before and survived. On the other hand, what happened to the dinosaurs?
In Max’ case, the worst-case scenario proves true. He loses his wife and son and almost dies himself, before transforming into a lone vigilante in a landscape of chaos and violence. Somewhat different from zombie movies, Miller’s vision is even more terrifying because of how plausible it is. The system we depend on is more fragile than we know.
The sequels to Mad Max depict how quickly the remaining humans on earth attempt to reset civilization, organizing in fortified structures and vying with brutal force for basic necessities. It’s outlandish; but in some ways, the situation is no more unusual than any American Western movie from the 1950’s. Like heaven, hell begins on earth, and the desert or the frontier is a stand-in for Armageddon, the battleground for the final confrontation between the two spiritual realms. Miller’s films feature the endless expanse of the Australian outback, with wild chases to and from nowhere in particular, and fueled by a precious commodity that would be better used in myriad ways.
In Miller’s vision of an apocalyptic earth, the weird and the ruthless are at least temporarily the top dogs, represented by Lord Humungus and his gang in The Road Warrior (1981) and Aunty Entity, who controls Master and Blaster, in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). The world in which Max walks alone is naturally poor, and yet grace finds a way to pop up in the unavoidable interactions he has with other people. Max claims, “I only came for the gasoline,” but he always finds a way to help those who seek to expand their squalid circumstances and flourish. As the narrator says at the start of The Road Warrior, “it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to live again.” There’s the real unveiling.
Miller’s theologically richest presentation of post-apocalyptic life is in the long-awaited fourth installment of the series, Mad Max Fury Road (2015). Here we find another dystopos within the wasteland of Max’ wanderings, and this time the scarce resource is water. The organizing principle of society is a perversion of family and procreation, led by the character of Immortan Joe, whose “wives” escape into the desert with Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. Max, played by Tom Hardy, is not quite the lone savior figure of the previous films. And the bad guys are motivated by much loftier concerns this time than before. Immortan Joe’s “War Boys” embrace a neo-pagan desire for a glorious death that leads to an eternity in Valhalla. But it is not enough to sacrifice their lives for their leader or his cause. They must be seen to die, a reckless scheme of works righteousness epitomized by the War Boys’ battle cry, “Witness me!” – an obvious distortion of Christian martyrdom.
All four Mad Max movies shine a light on the anti-Christian overestimation of the idea of scarcity, a common motif in apocalyptic fiction. In Fury Road, Immortan Joe not only enslaves women as childbearers-on-demand, but he takes sick delight in giving and removing water from his people, admonishing them not to be addicted to a natural source of life. At the end of Fury Road we finally witness the re-emergence of the natural state of abundance. Water gushes out of a giant rock in the wasteland after Immortan Joe’s demise, calling to mind the miracles of Moses in exile and the prophecies of Isaiah, including “I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water” (41:18). We may also look ahead to the descent of the New Jerusalem and the consummation of the bride and his beloved at the end of the age in the book of Revelation: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life” (22:1).
Another great apocalyptic film – indeed, one of the best films of this century – makes the same point about abundance over scarcity, and life winning out in a culture of death. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, based on the novel by P.D. James, is set in the very near future of 2027, where women have ceased to be able to conceive and bear children. As fertility rates continue to plummet in many parts of our own world today, the panic of the society the film depicts hits us just as Miller’s original Mad Max did during the oil crisis at the end of the 1970’s. In one of the most stunning scenes in the film, Theo, played by Clive Owen, attempts to rescue the one baby on the planet from an urban warzone, when suddenly the child cries. As the combatants realize there is a miracle in their midst, they stop dead in their tracks. Life serves as a natural ceasefire. A pinprick of light destroys the darkness.
One more apocalyptic film, John Hillcoat’s 2009 adaptation of Cormack McCarthy’s novel, The Road, sums up what Miller, Cuarón, and all the best directors of the genre convey amid the bleakness of the end of the world as we know it. In The Road, we travel with a father and son amid a grey landscape where almost all plant and animal life are dead, and the usual dystopian chaos is embodied this time by bands of cannibals. “We just have to keep carrying the fire,” the father repeats to his son. In the book, McCarthy writes, “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be.” Contemplating the end of the world may have the surprising effect of turning our attention to our Creator and his marvelous works, evoking gratitude for all that is. Again, more real unveiling.
Just before the father dies at the end of The Road, he takes comfort in the inextinguishable fire within his boy, whom McCarthy describes as “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.” Despite the extreme bleakness of the film, as with so many classics in the apocalyptic genre, hope perseveres. The truly nihilistic films, on the other hand, are few and far between, and usually poorly received.
For us who appreciate the apocalyptic film genre, we keep carrying the fire as we keep watching, repeating in our hearts the hopeful words of Revelation 22:20, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”
This article is adapted from an earlier version published in Evangelization & Culture, Issue No. 11 “The Four Last Things,” Spring 2022.