Here Comes the End of the World!

It seems like I remember the world ending once before. Yep, pretty sure I do, and I’m pretty sure I was in college. That was when, within a span of a few months, Armageddon and Deep Impact both hit the big screen. Now how in good conscience Hollywood released two multi-million dollar blockbusters—each one about a giant asteroid heading toward the earth, each one with a tragic space mission, and each space mission with the ludicrously stupid idea of blowing up the asteroid at the same time—is beyond me.

But I saw them both, so who am I to judge?

Well, move aside Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman, because the world is ending all over again. Here comes 2012, a movie with a plotline that seems to be simply: “Everything everywhere crumbles into oblivion. Get some popcorn.”

You’ve got an aircraft carrier riding a giant wave into the White House. You’ve got the Hollywood sign crumbling in an earthquake. You’ve got St. Peter’s Basilica rolling over hordes of people. And you’ve got John Cusack driving a limousine out of the back of a plane onto an ice shelf.

That is no misprint.

On the other hand, you’ve got another apocalyptic film with a slightly deeper and more reflective bent to it. The Road, the film adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, is opening this week. It seems to be about a father and son trying to make their way to warmer temperatures while everything bad imaginable happens around and to them.

But here’s the interesting thing about these two films that sets them apart from how the world ended a few years ago with Willis and Morgan. In the previous films, there was a threat to end the world that had to be diverted—namely, the giant asteroid that only a deep-sea oil drilling team could handle. But in these films, at least from what I’ve read so far, it doesn’t seem like there is as much of a threat as there is the assumption that the world will end.

And what comes next? Fathers and sons on lonely roads? John Cusack holding up a boom box to no one in particular? What comes next? That’s what people are asking, and maybe that’s what people are wondering, too.

Interestingly enough, the film makers for The Road have even targeted evangelical groups with the movie, producing sermon outlines and Bible study curriculum of a sort to go along with it.

Really?

Really.

There seems to be a general fascination about the end of the world, maybe now more than ever before. It’s certainly an interesting time to go to the movies. Maybe an even more interesting time to go to church.