It must have been at least a year since we had a high-profile end of humanity/end of the world movie to enjoy. But ‘thankfully’ now we have four on their way! Oblivion, World War Z, Elysium and the comedy This is The End are all set to hit cinema screens this year and despite all of these movies looking and sounding pretty good, I can’t help but get the feeling we’ve seen all this before.
Normally a director can throw a few zombies, a Tom Cruise or a Brad Pitt and even a Morgan Freeman into a film and people will come to watch it in their millions. However movie lovers continue to act a bit like zombies themselves by watching and hence creating a market for these flicks. Undoubtedly, if there has been one genre of film that has been grossly over-exposed in the past 20 years it has to be those that play out a society-destroying disaster scenario. In the space this article has it would be impossible to list the amount of films that play to this theme, but blockbusters like War of the Worlds, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Dawn of the Dead and Falling Skies are perhaps some of the more conformist examples. Even the British film industry has got involved with Danny Boyle’s largely successful 28 days and 28 weeks later.
It’s not that some of these films aren’t good, it’s just that they have become so predictable! It’s not fun or exciting to see a post-apocalyptic wasteland anymore, and it certainly isn’t new to walk into a cinema and watch a group of people fight off infected zombies whilst, inevitably, one of the group gets bitten or goes crazy (as I imagine most people would at the end of all things!).
One of this summers’ new apocalyptic blockbusters might just turn out to be awesome, but before you go and think that makes this article pointless, I can guarantee they will all tell a story we’ve heard a million times before!
