Armageddon is promised in film after film , teased in marketing campaigns , drool after by destructo - porn aficionados — but never comes . Call it destructus interruptus . The End of the World has only been delivered in one movie .
Disaster film offer it up like a bride ’s dower : If you come see this motion picture , we ’ll show you the oddment of the World . But they never really do , do they ? We get the Irreversible Change of the World all the clip : The Day After Tomorrow gave us an ice-skating rink long time , The Road Warrior saw a petrol - liberal blacktopping - mutation jamboree , 2012 all but collapse the satellite in two , while Waterworld cover it in H2O. Zombie films are all about the jinni that ca n’t be put back in the bottle .
And that ’s not even take into business relationship those films which bring us to the brink of Irreversible Change , but then back off . Pretty much every exotic invasion flick falls into that category : warfare of the Worlds , Independence Day , Men in Black , The Day the Earth Stood Still , et cetera , et cetera . Come to think of it , so do impedance celluloid : The Matrix trilogy , the Planet of the Apes saga , and the Terminator film are all about human beings try on to reclaim a damaged world — one of their own making — back from an occupying force .
But in all of those scenario , the earth is still here . liveliness goes on . There ’s still a office for our hero to crusade and , more often than not , a menace that can actually be stopped . I ’ll give Roland Emmerich quotation for , at the very least , commit to his brand of catastrophe : there ’s no stopping the cold or the calendar from fucking everything up . And J.J. Abrams ’ Star Trek gets some brownie point for , at least , destroying Vulcan . He waste up a planet , just not the planet .
For my money , only one film has carried out its threat to put down the entire satellite and leave no trace : The Hitchhiker ’s Guide To the Galaxy . If you ’ll remember , Earth is in the mode of some intergalactic highway , just as the humble domicile of Arthur Dent ( Martin Freeman ) is in the way of some flyover . And when Arthur follows Ford Prefect ( Mos Def ) offworld , both his house and his reality get destroyed in the blink of an middle .
I suppose , at the terminal of the day , we do n’t need to see the Big Blue Marble blow into particle ( or else Hitchhiker ’s might ’ve do substantially at the box office ) . Which is fine . But I do wish that Hollywood would stop teasing me with something they ’ll never redeem .
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