People are scared that the end is coming. I don’t think they actually believe that Judgment Day is nigh, or that an extinction-level asteroid is on its way, or that Syria (or North Korea, or Taiwan) is going to lead to World War 3, or that a virus will mutate into a pandemic as deadly as the Spanish flu or whatever it was that nearly ended human civilization in Contagion, 28 Days Later, or The Walking Dead. But all of these things are making people anxious – very, very anxious – and somehow this is translating into a desire to buy tickets to movies about what these people are anxious about. They actually make me more anxious than I was already, but it seems that for some people these movies calm them down, sort of like how speed calms down kids with ADHD.

Maybe it’s because they teach us how to respond to the end. Last week, I wrote that, in contrast to the narrow scope of the comedy This is the End, “when Hollywood tackles the end of the world we get giant sci-fi epics focusing on teams of either super-heroes or super-heroic soldiers making the planet’s last ditch effort to stave off oblivion.” Like religious myths of ancient times about deity-caused dooms, these movies tend to have powerful moral centers; we learn how people should behave when most people are about to die. The need for selfless heroism is the lesson of World War Z, the frightening, if somewhat flawed zombie apocalypse movie starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster. Continue…