“On a recent Saturday night,” wrote Jordana Horn in The Wall Street Journal last spring, “I went to the movies. Walking past the theater showing I Am Legend (plague kills most of humanity), I opted to watch Cloverfield (inexplicably angry alien destroys Manhattan) instead. After sitting through back-to-back previews for Hellboy II: The Golden Army (ancient truce between Hell and Earth is revoked, resulting in mass destruction) and Doomsday (lethal virus ravages England, a disease-ridden cinematic cousin to 28 Days Later and Children of Men), I found myself disturbed.”1
Well, who wouldn’t be after all that apocalyptic doom? All of these movies, and many more that we could list together, draw upon apocalyptic themes that first appeared in the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible. “The evil that permeates this world must be redressed — and only God can do it,” thundered some of those early prophets. “And God will do it,” they exclaimed, “in the last days, the dread and terrible days of the Lord.”
In Hollywood, these “last days” have been transformed into a time when all hell, supernatural or at least superhuman, breaks loose and only the efforts of a courageous, but obviously outnumbered few can stop irrevocable destruction. Even then, in most of these movies the earth is almost annihilated and only a small number is left to rebuild. So Tom Cruise and his movie daughter survey the nightmarish landscape now destroyed by the Martians at the end of the most recent remake of War of the Worlds. Will Smith drives through the deserted streets of New York City in I Am Legend. Rarely in such movies is there a mention of God; rarer still the believable happy ending. And nowhere in movieland is found a sense of what early Christians meant when they talked about the last days of human history.
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