Definitely coming down with something. It might just be something that’s a reaction to being so far south of my usual stomping grounds, but it’s something. Am regularly coughing up a little muck in the mornings, and I hate that.
Lete’s see, thoughts… alright. Discussing, recently, TV series that ended properly (weren’t cancelled, felt like they came to a natural resting place) and movies that ended with the end of the world. Movies set after the end of the world–that is, movies which are presented not only as happening in a resource-poor high-danger wasteland but happening after everything was destroyed to produce this wasteland–are a lot more common. For ones which actually end with the end of the world, the only ones coming to mind right now is 12 Monkeys, Dawn and Day of the Dead, and Return of the Living Dead (seriously, watch it).
I’m not sure why the reluctance to produce such things. Most of the movies that depict a setting which could result in the end of the world aren’t ones which are likely to have a sequel anyway, so it’s not as if they’re being avoided out of fear of murdering franchise potential.
(Oh, Terminator 3! I forgot that one. And would sort of like to go on forgetting it, actually, but it counts.)
End of the world movies are a downer, yes, but that doesn’t make them bad. Movies (in terms of pacing and complexity) tend to resemble short stories, and there are a lot of short stories that end with the end of the world. So why, relatively speaking, are there so many fewer movies that go that route? Harder to make? Less likely to be popular? And is that last veering towards the snobbery of insisting hoi polloi can’t possibly appreciate a good apocalyptic tale?