Movies

A Cinematic Glimpse at the Post-Apocalypse

By  · Published on December 2nd, 2016

It was made as a mere montage but now it’s something different: a survival guide.

Now that Donald Trump is the President-Elect, it’s time to start preparing for the post-apocalypse in earnest. There are bunkers to dig, supplies to horde, guns to load, and friends, family members, other loved ones and neighbors to start suspecting, but where’s a fella to start? Some folks would tell you the best place to learn what you don’t know is in books, but the Golden Calf gets inaugurated in about six weeks, and with the holidays in-between, ain’t nobody got time to read. So then that leaves the movies, and boy do they have a lot to say on the subject.

From the barren wastelands of The Road and Mad Max: Fury Road to the ruined metropolises of I Am Legend and 12 Monkeys, and the weather-ravaged landscapes of The Day After Tomorrow and Book of Eli to the city-streets-turned-war-zones of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Terminator: Salvation¸ cinema has more than covered the end of the world as we know it, and has plenty to teach us about life after life. Lesson one: don’t ever go outside.

In all seriousness, we as a culture project our fears into our entertainment, it’s our way of seeing them realized but still having some control over them. Since the advent of the atomic bomb in particular cinema has been fascinated with man’s destruction and has set about imagining pretty much every single way global catastrophe could befall us. In the following montage/survival guide from Bora Barroso, scenes from the best post-apocalypse flicks – including all those listed above and then some – have been eloquently sewn together cinematically to form a mosaic of decimation and hope that looks in spots a little too familiar.

Watch it, learn from it, and prepare; the end might not be quite nigh, but it never hurts to be ready.

Novelist, Screenwriter, Video Essayist