In IFC’s recent listing of the 10 best planetary apocalypse movies – all with accompanying videos – the Earth takes a severe licking thanks to everything from invading aliens to hurtling comets. But only two of the top 10 touch loosely on electromagnetic themes (disturbances in the Earth’s EM field and an impending solar flare), which is good news for EMC engineers interested in moonlighting as screenwriters.
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Here are IFC’s picks for the best disaster movies:
- “Armageddon” (1998): A giant hunk of space rock threatens to collide with the planet, leaving it up to Bruce Willis and his crack team of oil drillers to hop on the next shuttle and blast the Texas-sized thing into a bunch of much less-threatening smaller chunks.
- “The Core” (2003): A bunch of disturbances in the Earth’s electromagnetic field are making birds drop dead and random lightning storms wreck havoc; a geology professor concludes it’s because the planet’s core has stopped turning, which launches a top-secret mission to drill into the center of the Earth and blow it to kingdom come, which will (in theory) jump-start its rotation.
- “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004): In this environmental disaster flick, an ultra-speedy climate apocalypse includes scenes of Mother Nature laying waste to some of the world’s great cities.
- “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (2008): It isn’t the threat of nuclear warfare but rather our own carelessness with the environment that prompts an alien race to threaten us with extermination.
- “Deep Impact” (1998): This movie chronicles the attempts to destroy a seven-mile-wide comet that’s set to collide with the Earth and cause mass extinction; unfortunately, the nuclear bomb planted on the thing by the spacecraft “Messiah” only succeeds in splitting it in two, which means there’s now a pair of 3.5-mile-wide comets en route to kill us all.
- “Independence Day” (1996): The Earth is being invaded by a massive alien force that blows the White House, the Empire State Building and other landmarks to kingdom come. . . and only Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and a laptop computer can stop them.
- “Knowing” (2009): An MIT professor’s son receives a series of numbers that were buried in his school’s time capsule 50 years earlier; the digits end up being a set of sequences that refer to the times and locations of several fatal disasters over the past half-century, with the last few numbers pointing to an event that has yet to happen: a solar flare that will wipe out everything and everyone on Earth.
- “Mars Attacks!” (1996): A silly yet rather violent alien invasion spoof in which Martians lay waste to great American cities like Las Vegas whilst their Earthling victims are simultaneously bombarded with the looped recording of “Don’t Run, We Are Your Friends.”
- “2012″ (2009): In this 158-minute “What If?” examination of the theory that, based on the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, the end of the world is nigh — like, this year, the Earth is more or less just falling apart simply because the Mayans said so, plunging California into the ocean and smashing an aircraft carrier into the White House via megatsunami.
- “War of the Worlds” (2005): The Earth is invaded by hostile aliens who traverse the terrain via massive transports we’ve come to refer to as “tripods,” machines equipped with heat lasers that completely vaporize their targets and bass-heavy horns that serve as both battle cry and death knell.
