Disaster Movies 101: Hollywood has 4 ways to end the world

ROLAND EMMERICH is a man who seeks closure. Big time.

The director who blew up the White House in "Independence Day" - and unleashed a new Ice Age in "The Day After Tomorrow" - goes for the gold, apocalypse-wise, in "2012."

More than just a disaster movie, "2012" is an uber-disaster movie. It offers up nothing less than the end of the world, as predicted by the Mayan calendar (2012 is a year, not a truncated ZIP code). The many subsidiary disasters are endured on-screen by John Cusack, Amanda Peet, and the rest of humankind.

Disaster movies have long been a Hollywood cottage industry. A dark and rather forbidding room in that cottage has belonged to disaster movies that deal with the end of the world. "2012" may or may not be the end-of-the-world disaster movie to end all end-of-the-world disaster movies. It's certainly not the first.

Murphy's Law states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. That formulation might seem to imply there are a lot of ways for the world to end. Apparently, not at the movies.

Ending the world filmically has tended to fall into four basic categories:

A comet does the damage, or threatens to, in both "Deep Impact" (1998) and "Night of the Comet" (1984). Another planet wipes out Earth in "When Worlds Collide" (1951), directed by the great cinematographer Rudolph Maté. Certainly, no end-of-the-world movie has had a better crash-bang title.

Aliens are a serious threat, too. Earthlings are usually able to foil them - either comically, as in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (2005), or violently, as in the two versions of "War of the Worlds" (1953, 2005). The destruction wrought in the latter is enormous, though. The result may not quite be the end of the world but it's certainly the end of the world as its inhabitants formerly knew it. As Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once said of what the aftermath of nuclear war would be like, "The living will envy the dead."

This genre flourished during the Cold War. It was a cinematic twofer: an opportunity for big-time spectacle combined with high-liberal seriousness. Actually, it was a three-fer. Special-effects budgets could be kept low, since all a director needed to indicate worldwide annihilation was stock footage of a mushroom cloud. Even Roger Corman, no fool he, got in on the act, in "Day the World Ended" (1955).

In "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) Stanley Kubrick blew up the world without ever showing the aftermath - or does "Eyes Wide Shut" count? Chris Marker's "La Jetee" (1962) is surely the most beautiful and poetic end-of-the-world movie, not least of all because it's also the most visually restrained. Richard Lester's "The Bed Sitting Room" (1969) plays post-Armageddon life for laughs. Its London makes that of Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" seem almost like a resort. (Boyle's movie is a zombie picture, a related, but wholly different genre.)

Australia is saved, at least for a while, in Stanley Kramer's "On the Beach" (1959), while it's about as far from salvation as one can imagine in the "Mad Max" movies (1979, 1981, 1985). There must have been a rub-off effect. How else explain the star of those movies, Mel Gibson, directing a film called "Apocalypto"? It's set amid Mayan civilization. Imagine the double bill it would make with "2012."

The ultimate end-of-the-world scriptwriter is the Deity. He's laid everything out in the Book of Revelation - and with no copyright issues to worry about! How could Hollywood resist? Both Demi Moore, in "The Seventh Sign" (1988), and Nicolas Cage, in "Knowing" (2009), rather spectacularly bump up against the end of days. The "Left Behind" trilogy (2000, 2002, 2005), based on the best-selling series of Christian sci-fi novels, looks on the bright side of the end of the world - since, from a believing perspective, the end of this world means the beginning of a better world. That's what Mimi Rogers would like to think, anyway, in "The Rapture."

When a phenomenon is big enough - God, say, or the end of the world - its origins really don't require explanation. How simians came to take over from humans in "Planet of the Apes" (1968, 2001) doesn't much matter. All that matters is that they've done so and that Charlton Heston gets to run around bare-chested and in a loincloth. Some sort of plague is the problem in "I Am Legend" (2007), which is a remake of "The Omega Man" (1971 - hello again, Charlton Heston), which is a remake of "The Last Man on Earth" (1964).

Global warming seems to be behind things in "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004), though the rather paradoxical result is global freezing. As for "The Road," which opens later this month, presumably only Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel on which it's based, knows the cause of the apocalyptic landscape Viggo Mortensen and son have to negotiate. Easily the most in-your-face (in-your-planet?) title belongs to "The Earth Dies Screaming" (1964). With a name like that, who needs to know the cause of the destruction?

Of course, there's a case to be made that every single movie is an end-of-the-world movie. Seriously. What is a movie but a self-contained world unto itself? It's a world we enter when the lights go down and a world that disappears (at least until the next showing) when the lights come up.

What's more, there's a ubiquitous message alerting us to this fact. What two words, hands down, have appeared more often on movie screens than any other? That's right: THE END.