End of the World Stories Are Getting Boring

credit: MCU

It feels as though every other big action movie, especially in the fantasy or science fiction genres, threatens the earth in one way or another. In fact, it’s become very easy to say that the earth is possibly one of the most maligned and weakest planets in many different stories since it’s constantly being subjected to one threat or another. If it’s not aliens, it’s something supernatural, and if it’s not that, it’s the threat of nuclear war that eventually shows up in one movie or another. Realizing how many threats the earth has to endure so often in the movies makes it feel as though humans are a bit paranoid that something could happen at any given moment or are simply willing to theorize how the world will end at some point. In any case, it does feel as though this type of plot has been used in so many different ways over the last several decades that trying to get into it any longer has become rather difficult. In all honesty, it’s fair to state that paying attention to stories that are smaller in scale is much easier since it implies that no matter what happens, the world will keep moving forward. 

credit: Men in Black

Getting people to care that much about how the world will end has become a little difficult.

It sounds a little grim, doesn’t it? Thinking that people don’t care about the world in the movies is kind of hard to believe, but the fact is that working up the nerve to care about how the world ends in the movies is, well, kind of tough since it’s happened so often over the years. From asteroids to aliens to supernatural beings who want to dominate humanity, there’s always something coming, and it’s usually bad. Given all the planets that exist in most movies, it’s kind of easy to imagine that there are a lot of them that might be seen as bigger targets, but somehow, the earth is always doomed from the beginning since it’s considered backward, uncivilized compared to many other worlds, and so on. Ending this world almost feels like a mercy kill in some movies.  

Keeping the earth under constant threat gets to be kind of an old and tired story. 

Agent K in Men in Black said it best that there’s always some threat to the earth that’s waiting to blow the planet to kingdom come, and the MIB were tasked with making sure that it didn’t happen. In the MCU, the Avengers and other heroes are set to stand against otherworldly threats, and in various other movies, there are always initiatives and projects that are somehow in place because…reasons. People appear to expect the earth to end at some point in the movies it would appear, and because of this, there’s always some sort of countermeasure that’s been in place for longer than anyone realizes. Hell, at least one movie created a fictional vehicle made with a fictional material that would allow the people aboard the craft to reach the core of the earth in order to ‘restart’ it. When thinking of how the world is meant to end, it becomes easy to get bored with the many different imaginative ways that people come up with in order to show the decimation of the world. 

credit: Armageddon

Sometimes it’s best to assume the earth was already ruined and just move on. 

The world isn’t a perfect place, even in the movies, but thinking of how it can all come crashing down takes a lot of effort, especially since the imagination it requires to come up with a new way to say that the world is going to end requires a monumental effort at this point. Some would state that, of course, it doesn’t, that a good end-of-the-world movie is always welcome and that pondering the end of all things is good for entertainment. In the meantime, it’s fair to say that a lot of good stories go by the wayside since the all-encompassing need to focus on the world tends to overshadow a healthy number of stories that are a little more personal. 

Personal stories are easier to relate to more often than not. 

Let’s be honest, a lot of people focus on stories that are less expansive and don’t tend to force people to accept a widespread story because they’re easier to relate to, especially given that as great as some folks can be and as wide as their influence spreads, they’re still just one person or one group. Showing how a single person or group can affect others on a global scale is always interesting, but ending the world is an act that takes a great deal of effort and becomes less interesting with each new telling.