MADRID — American actor Charlton Heston is remembered as the star of Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 Planet of the Apes (1968), a post-apocalyptic film with a pacifist moral and a pessimistic view about human nature. The ending was so powerful that many people tend to forget that five years later Heston also starred in one of Hollywood’s first eco-disaster films: Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green.
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The story is set in 2022, when, amid overpopulation, pollution and a lack of drinking water, the government has started to process human corpses into food: the titular “soylent green.” But while a nuclear apocalypse is not something we can completely rule out in 2024, this second scenario for the end of civilization feels more realistic today than it once used to.
“Imagining what the end of the world might be like somehow reduces and helps channel social anxiety towards the future. It is something that the horror genre is also good for, it reflects and channels anxieties,” says Layla Martínez, author of the 2020 essay “Utopía no es una isla” (“Utopia Is Not An Island”) about different scenarios that are precisely the opposite of climate apocalypses.
Products of their times
Hollywood and creators of TV shows love ecological collapses — the more spectacular the better. While until the 1980s, the end of the world was always the result of wars, the 1990s saw the arrival of climate apocalypses, with Kevin Reynolds’ Waterworld in 1995, starring a Kevin Costner at the height of his popularity.
The list is endless, but Roland Emmerich’s 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow is the best at combining catastrophism and a certain scientific plausibility.
There are so many different versions today that the 2019 French series L’Effondrement (The Collapse) even skipped the explanations about how the end of civilization happened; and the 2022 Spanish series Apagón (Blackout) quickly went from ignoring the premise of a solar storm to delving into the pandemic or the panic over peak oil.
Movies at that time were the direct result of the triumphant era of neoliberalism.
Yet these are fictional stories from the second and third decades of the 21st century, a time when the idea of what the end of everything will look like has been changing: it is no longer everything, nor is it the end.
In the 1990s and 2000s, things were different. Living with the worst of global warming was an inevitable fate, and even in techno-optimistic productions or whose focus was not around the subject, it appeared as a done deal.
In the series seaQuest DSV (1993-1996) which takes place in 2018, the Amazon had been completely devastated and oxygen was injected into the atmosphere through artificial installations. In Steven Spielberg’s 2001 Artificial Intelligence, New York is underwater and major companies have their headquarters in skyscrapers to preserve part of their structure on the surface.
“Movies at that time were the direct result of the triumphant era of neoliberalism. These worlds where there is no hope are fiercely anti-utopian. It’s not just that the future is apocalyptic, but there is no hope for change,” Martinez explains.
Today’s “collapse” and the after
That narrative started to change between 2012 and 2014, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with films such as Snowpiercer (2013) by Bong Joon-ho or Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) by George Miller. “Revolutionaries triumph; they are heroes. You don’t see what they build afterward or what the society will be like, but you can imagine that there is an after,” Martinez says.
On his Pop Culture Detective web series, writer and cultural critic Jonathan McIntosh has analyzed the emergence of “solar-punk,” an optimistic kind of science fiction that imagines a future based on renewable energies or, at least, a world after fossil fuels that has learned to live with the climate crisis.
The most obvious recent example is the 2022 Disney animated film Strange World by Don Hall and Qui Nguyen, in which settlers of a — probably extraterrestrial — world learn not to depend on a mysterious source of energy, which is easily identifiable as a fictional version of fossil fuels.
Even more explicit is Brad Bird’s 2015 film Tomorrowland, which directly confronts the optimistic vision of the future from the 1950s and 1960s with that of our present. It concludes with the protagonists explaining to the camera that changing our traditional pessimism is the first step to avoid a bad ending. The message might be too idealistic –thinking that there won’t be any major floods would lead to them not happening – and techno-optimistic. But we get the intention.
The end of an era
For Martínez, the fact that there is now “a more optimistic science fiction is the natural result of a certain fatigue caused by decades and decades of very similar post-apocalyptic stories. That, combined with the criticism many authors have made about the conservative cultural impact of dystopias. Every cultural production said that the future was going to be shit.”
The most interesting ones, she says, “those that go a step further, like [the 2023 TV series] The Last Of Us, where we see how society is organized after the collapse. And it turns out that those who live the best are those that could be called communists; those who have a more egalitarian, sustainable and comfortable society.”
Biblical apocalypses are about the end of an era, not of the world.
The author reflects on how “the idea of the apocalypse, in reality, is something that draws on the linear idea of time of the Judeo-Christian culture.” But the most current readings of the Apocalypses in the Bible, like the ones from John of Patmos’ Book of Revelation, or the Book of Daniel, “point out something else.
These apocalypses are about the end of an era, not of the world. As subjugated people, they imagine the end of the Empire.” Martinez suggests that we seize “this idea of the Apocalypse as the end of capitalism so something else may emerge.”
In recent fiction, all ends of the world come, she says, “from the general feeling that capitalism is a worn-out system. This idea is shared by many ideological movements. Fiction continues to show the end of capitalism as something equal to the end of the world, something deeply ideological; it is the Capitalist Realism of Mark Fisher, who says that there is nothing outside of it or after. New apocalypses have the opportunity to imagine this after, an after that is not perfect, but better.”
