With the looming threats of nuclear war and global climate change hanging over us, it’s easy to look at the state of the world right now with despair. According to scientists, humanity is as close to extinction as it’s ever been. The famous “Doomsday Clock,” created by scientists and experts as a symbolic warning for how close we are to our own self-made destruction, currently sits two minutes before midnight, the hypothetical doomsday scenario. The last time the clock was moved this close to midnight was in 1953, during the nuclear arms build-up of the Cold War. While the future of humanity looks bleak, not all hope is lost. Just as the clock can be moved forward, it can also be moved back. However, if humanity chooses to continue down this dangerous path, catastrophe will be all but certain.
To celebrate the sometimes seemingly inevitable fall of civilization (and remind ourselves of what our future could hold if we don’t take action), I’ve arranged three quintessential works of apocalyptic cinema: Akira (Otomo, 1988), Snowpiercer (Joon-Ho, 2013), and WALL-E (Stanton, 2008). While each of these films depicts a horrible future in which humanity’s hubris has led to its downfall, they also offer a glimmer of hope in the end: the possibility that human life will continue to persist despite whatever unfortunate circumstances we find ourselves in. [Warning: spoilers ahead for these films.]
First, we start with a bang, literally. In the opening of Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime science fiction epic, a blinding white explosion obliterates Tokyo in 1988. By 2019, Neo-Tokyo, a sprawling dystopian megacity full of corruption, violence, and filth, stands in its place. Visually striking and gorgeously animated, Akira is a harrowing depiction of mass destruction that reflects Japan’s own tragic history with nuclear weapons. The story, adapted from Otomo’s manga of the same name, follows Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata), the leader of a biker gang, and his childhood friend Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki), who develops increasingly powerful psychic abilities after an encounter with a mysterious green-skinned boy. The boy turns out to be an escaped esper from a secret government laboratory that houses more like him. Tetsuo is then captured by governmental forces and brought into the secret Akira project, named after a young psychic with similar powers who caused the destruction of Tokyo at the beginning of the film. History soon repeats itself. As Tetsuo grows stronger and more unstable, he becomes crazed and more power-hungry. Eventually, the government and the military can no longer control or stop him, and he rampages through Neo-Tokyo. By the end of the film, Tetsuo has lost total control of his powers and mutates into a giant monstrosity, absorbing everything he touches. In order to stop him, the remaining espers awaken Akira, who then unleashes another massive psychic blast that destroys Neo-Tokyo, mirroring the destruction at the beginning of the film. Kaneda, who is saved by the espers, regroups with his surviving friends and they ride off into the ruins of the city, while the sun rises on the horizon. The ending gives hope that humanity will continue on and rebuild anew.
In Bong Joon Ho’s similarly dystopian action thriller and class satire, Snowpiercer, Earth has frozen over after a failed attempt to reverse climate change causes another ice age and kills all life. The only survivors live aboard a giant train called the Snowpiercer that perpetually circumnavigates the world. The privileged upper-class passengers live at the front sections of the train, enjoying luxuries such as sushi, while the lower-class ones live in extreme poverty and desperation at the tail sections, only served strange blocks of protein to eat (we later find out they are made out of cockroaches). Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) leads the tail section residents in a revolt against the guards and their cruel overseer, Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), as they fight their way to the front of the train to confront Wilford (Ed Harris), the inventor of the train and oppressive ruler of this closed ecosystem. Along the way, they pick up former security expert Namgoong Minsu (Kang Ho Song) to disable the locks between the cars, and his seemingly clairvoyant daughter, Yona (Ko Asung), who is particularly awestruck upon seeing the outside world. After a long journey, filled with several bloody fights and the deaths of many of his allies, Curtis finally reaches the engine of the train where he confronts Wilford, only to learn that his “revolution” was a lie. In a shocking twist of events, Wilford reveals that he engineered the plot from the start with the help of Gilliam (John Hurt), Curtis’s old friend and mentor, in an effort to reduce the population and maintain order and balance in his ecosystem. Even more shocking, Wilford then asks Curtis to replace him as dictator of this society. In the end, however, Curtis decides to help Yona and Namgoong blow up the engine and sacrifices himself to protect Yona and a young boy named Timmy, from the blast. The train is derailed and crashes, and the two emerge from the wreckage as the sole survivors. In the final moments of the film, the pair spot a polar bear in the distance, a hopeful sign that life still persists in the outside world.
For our final stop, we slow things down to take a look at the decidedly less violent, but all the more heartfelt, story of WALL-E (Ben Burtt), a charming sentient trash compactor robot left alone on an uninhabitable, garbage-ridden Earth that has been abandoned by humans in the distant future. During his daily routine, he finds and collects small trinkets such as Zippo lighters and rubber ducks, discarded remnants of a past civilization. The earth of Pixar’s WALL-E is a wasteland, a massive dumpster filled with heaping piles of trash and junk, devoid of almost all animal and plant life. It serves as a warning of the environmental disaster that awaits if we neglect our responsibilities to take care of our planet. When WALL-E and romantic interest EVE (Elissa Knight), a sleek probing drone sent to Earth to scan for vegetation, return to the starship Axiom with newly found plant life, we discover that humanity has devolved into pathetic complacency and obesity, being fed, raised, and taken care of entirely by robots. It reflects our own increasing dependency and obsessiveness with technology and video screens. Upon the positive response of the probe, the Axiom is supposed to initiate a return protocol to Earth; however, the mutinous AI autopilot system, AUTO, attempts to prevent this, under a directive issued by Buy N Large, the evil international corporation responsible for humanity’s evacuation from Earth. With the help of Captain McCrea (Jeff Garlin), WALL-E and EVE defeat AUTO, and the Axiom returns to Earth, humanity’s first reunion with the natural world in centuries. In the final shot, Captain McCrea re-teaches humans how to grow and nurture plants, and we are shown that just outside the city, vegetation has already begun growing back, forecasting Mother Nature’s reclamation of the planet and the eventual return of civilization.
Despite the different tones, styles, and genres of these films, they all represent some of the finest works of apocalyptic fiction to ever have come out of the genre. Their bleak, but ultimately hopeful outlook reminds us not to completely lose hope in the dark and uncertain times we live in today.
Author Biography
Tylen Watts is an undergraduate film student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He aspires to work in film and television production one day, and enjoys 35mm photography and creative writing in his free time.
References
Bong, Joon-ho, et al. “Snowpiercer.” IMDb, Aug. 2013, www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1. Accessed 27 Oct. 2019.
Glawson, Stephen. “Post-Apocalyptic Cinema: What the Future Tells Us about Today.” Film Matters, vol. 5, no. 2, 2014.
Griffin, Andrew. “Doomsday Clock: Humanity Is Still as Close to Catastrophe as It Has Ever Been, Scientists Say.” The Independent, 24 Jan. 2019, www.independent.co.uk/news/science/doomsday-clock-minutes-to-midnight-nuclear-war-climate-change-global-warming-a8744651.html. Accessed 27 Oct. 2019.
Joon-Ho, Bong. Snowpiercer. The Weinstein Company, 2013.
Katsuhiro Ôtomo, et al. “Akira.” IMDb, 16 July 1988, www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1. Accessed 27 Oct. 2019.
Otomo, Katsuhiro. Akira. Toho, 1988.
Stanton, Andrew. WALL-E. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2008.
Stanton, Andrew, et al. “WALL·E.” IMDb, 26 June 2008, www.imdb.com/title/tt0910970/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1. Accessed 29 Oct. 2019.
“WALL-E Blu-Ray 3-Disc Special Edition Disney.” DVDBeaver.com, 2019, www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews42/wall-e_blu-ray.htm. Accessed 29 Oct. 2019.
