Hollywood on a Bum Trip: the Latest Trend of Disaster Films

Global warfare, economic recession and disaster on the nightly news may mean despair and ruin for those involved, but Hollywood revels in such bad news. Why? Because when the going gets tough, the tough get going - to the movies. Box office results have shown that disaster films do well in tough times. The type of disaster merely changes to reflect current popular concerns.

For instance, the most recent successful post-apocalyptic film "The Road" (2009, Hillcoat) portrays a man and his son scrabbling to survive an unnamed worldwide disaster. Part of the background used for the film was not created with high-budget special effects, but footage taken during Hurricane Katrina. And the story itself? When so many people are struggling today to get by, the theme of struggling to keep your family alive in the face of brutal, alienating conditions is one that hits very close to home.

The appeal of the survival film is obvious. Whereas today's every day life can seem powerless - governed by employers, laws, and societal mores - the world of the survivor has been slashed down to basics. It both sends our own cares and worries into the background with huge, impressive explosions, and leads us to live vicariously through the protagonists, who reach down into themselves to discover the power to triumph. In "2012" (2009, Emmerich) the protagonist Jackson Curtis (played by John Cusack) doesn't just beat all odds to sneak aboard a giant ark in China, but also reconciles with his family after his ex-wife's husband conveniently dies. The end scene involving the arks floating amid a calm sea and beautiful sunrise is meant to invoke the biblical ark and lead the viewer to believe that a new world is ahead. "The Book of Eli" (2010, Hughes) is another film using biblical themes to invoke hope. This is an interesting undercurrent that may be worthy of further exploration elsewhere - whether or not Hollywood is tentatively embracing religion as something other than a target, and what that means for the general trend of Americans and religion today.

Other new films fall into the realm of environmental and moral lecturing. "9" (2009, Burton) and "Wall-E" (2008, Stanton) both have non-human protagonists who live in a landscape devastated by humans. "Daybreakers" (2010, Spierig), "I am Legend" (2007, Lawrence) and "28 Weeks Later" (2007, Fresnadillo) involve pandemics that turn the human race into cannibals and blood sucking beasts. Such films are a not-so-subtle critique of humanity and how near or far we are from beasts.

The trend shows no signs of lessening. Lionsgate recently acquired rights to "The Hunger Games," a young adult novel and Twentieth Century Fox is working on "The World Without Us," a look at how quickly the Earth would bounce back without pesky humans to ruin it. Reviews and trailers at websites like Quietearth.us are keeping a fan's eye out for the newest offerings.