It has been showered with meteors and blitzed by the Bomb, eaten by fauna and throttled by flora. It has faced acts of God and alien invaders and sentient manmade parasites that escaped from a lab. Director Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie 2012 (2009) upended the globe with a massive solar flare. Richard Kelly’s arthouse oddity Southland Tales (2006) opted for the inadvertent catalyst of two strangers shaking hands. Forget Janet Leigh in the shower or Drew Barrymore on the phone: it’s the planet itself that is cinema’s greatest scream queen, wheeled out regularly to be tortured and murdered in interesting ways. There’s only one thing Hollywood likes better than a happy ending, it seems, and that’s an unhappy ending for absolutely everybody concerned.
The world dies yet again in The End, a lavish, drunken curtain-call of a musical in which Tilda Swinton plays mother to humanity’s last holdouts. The scene is a salt mine half a mile underground that has been lovingly made over as a well-appointed family home. There are Monet paintings on the wall and a deferential dancing butler who dispenses fine wine every night. But the planet has burned, which means that everyone upstairs is now dead. Of course, climate change is to blame, the people in the bunker concede. But they’re still quibbling over the science and blithely absolve themselves of all guilt. They refill their glasses and beam at one another across the dining room table as the doomsday clock ticks well past midnight. In most movie musicals, the songs are perky and optimistic; gateways to the future. Here they’re desperate pick-me-ups and nostalgic bawlers, hopelessly nodding at the rear-view mirror.
