The great Sam Peckinpah once said, "It's not just blowing up a bridge, it's the way you blow up a bridge."
That's how I feel about apocalyptic or dystopian movies. It's not just blowing up the world, it's the way you blow up the world.
Pundits are questioning Pixar's decision to base WALL-E on a trash-strewn Earth, a robot hero and humans who've evolved into pudding pops. The last laugh should be on the naysayers as audiences discover the inventiveness, wit, emotion - and, yes, hope - that director Andrew Stanton and his team have invested in every inch of their sometimes bleak and barbed design.
Of course, filming a cautionary tale without making it strident, or making audiences despondent, presents a steep challenge to filmmakers. For my money, even the gifted Alfonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) flubbed that challenge with Children of Men.
But many moviemakers have covered the screen with art or entertainment glory when depicting humankind at its worst. Here's a handful of films that present beauty, humor or thrills - as well as fear - as humanity flirts with the end of days.
"Metropolis" (1927): When Fritz Lang's portrait of a dream city-turned-nightmare premiered in Berlin, no one had seen anything like it. H.G. Wells called it "quite the silliest movie." Yet George Lucas and Ridley Scott borrowed from it for Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and Blade Runner, respectively. James Whale's laboratories in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein gave off the same whiff of retro-futuristic medievalism as the lair of Lang's mad scientist Rotwang; Rotwang himself was reborn as the title character of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove; and Rotwang's femme-fatale robot, Hel, became Kubrick's HAL in 20 01. At the center of this towering spectacle, which includes a flashback to the Tower of Babel, is class warfare between workers who live underground and the elite living the high life in their skyscrapers. But the movie's imaginative extremism is what still drives audiences wild. When the robot wiggles near-naked in front of wealthy men and winks at them with her mechanical eyes, these guys are lost. (Actually, what's nightmarish to us is how sexy the robot is when she's just a featureless automaton.)
