There’s really no end to the number of movies featuring one extinction event or another, or even movies looking at what humanity will do when it’s desperate to survive, but here we’re going to look at the five films where humanity loses, and there are a few heavy entries…
5. Don’t Look Up (2021)
The first entry of five films where humanity loses, and this is the most recent. Not too well received upon release by the majority, Don’t Look Up is sadly a chilling depiction of how the mainstream and media ignore and specifically sidestep major crises. Not a particularly subtle vehicle for a discussion of global warming, the main characters’ discovery of an Earth-destroying asteroid is first treated as a joke, then a potential money-making opportunity, and finally a very real threat. By then it’s too late and we see the consequences, with Earth being destroyed and life wiped out, quite dramatically.
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4. Life (2017)
In terms of the loss of humanity, this movie is definitely the prologue to that particular story. A group of astronauts come into contact with confirmed alien life, and in their haste to figure it out, they end up angering it and suffering the pain and anger of a much higher being. Why is humanity losing? In the end, it’s revealed that the alien life form made its way to Earth, and as it grows from its murderous rampage against humans, it’s unlikely anything could have caused it. Stop. It survived in the vacuum of space, high temperatures and more, so I like to think Earth succumbed pretty quickly.
3. Melancholy (2013)
Lars Von Trier is quite a controversial director, it’s fair to say. Seemingly introducing violence and nudity in a way to shock his audience into paying attention, Melancholy is one of his few films that is a bit softer, but with serious content. The end of the world is hinted at at the start of the film, and in one particularly gruesome and beautiful scene, we see the result of a planetary body hitting our own, and the inevitability of which no one can escape.
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2. Dr Strangelove (1964)
The longest-running of the five films where humanity loses, Stanley Kubrick’s film was released shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the film is a lesson in how men’s egos could lead us to edge of extinction at the push of a button, and that at some people’s whim, we might find ourselves closer to the world of Fallout than we’d like. Oh, and we could also become sex slaves tasked with repopulating the now irradiated wasteland we call home.
1. The Road (2009)
The final entry in this list of five films where humanity loses, if you ever need to see the utter desperation and terror of the human race in the face of incredibly dire situations, then watch The Road. A film more about the aftermath of a doomsday event than the event itself, we see the worst of humanity, as cannibals pursue the main characters of father and son, and up where people will go into a bid to save their loved ones, even if it means dying themselves. Humanity is lost throughout this film, rather than at any particular moment, and sadly reflects too well the nature of humans dealing with the need to be selfish.
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