Not Comets, Robots or Russia: America Has Become the Threat in Hollywood’s Apocalyptic Fiction

A helicopter glides through smoke rising from the exploded Lincoln Memorial. Atom bombs flash and mushroom clouds bloom over the Los Angeles skyline. These images—from, respectively, the climax of Alex Garland’s latest film, Civil War, and the opening scene of Amazon’s blockbuster Fallout series—follow what is a curious cinematic tradition: In Hollywood’s tales of apocalypse, America’s landmarks must blow up.

In Independence Day, the Empire State Building and the White House are among the buildings blitzed by extraterrestrial invaders. In Armageddon, an errant meteor hits the Chrysler Building (Armageddon’s twin film Deep Impact, released the same year, has a comet level New York entirely). In Miracle Mile and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it is, again, L.A. that goes nuclear—Hollywood can seemingly imagine nothing worse than the Dream Factory going up in a cloud of radioactive smoke—having been struck by the Soviets and killer robots, respectively.

However, there’s something different about how Civil War and Fallout arrive at their particular cataclysmic money shots. In Civil War, a despotic American president is in violent conflict with breakaway armies of U.S. citizens, culminating in an explosive final clash in Washington, D.C. In Fallout, meanwhile, it’s American corporate executives who fire those nukes on their own unsuspecting countryfolk. It is not murderous aliens, space rocks, Russia or out-of-control A.I. demolishing America here—in these and in a number of recent works of Hollywood apocalypse fiction, responsibility for the fall lies within America itself.

Where exceptional American heroes could once be trusted to band together and save the day, in Hollywood’s new apocalypse fictions, cooperation has become impossible. In Civil War, the warring factions are so splintered that combatants can’t always tell who it is that they’re fighting. Through the course of Fallout’s first season, meanwhile, we learn that society on the West Coast started to rebuild after the bombs dropped, but that it soon fell again, nuked back to zero by “vault-dwellers” with their own, opposing vision of America.

Division and distrust rule in the paranoid 2023 pairing of sci-fi thriller Leave the World Behind and doomy American picaresque The Sweet East, too. Leave the World Behind presents its characters with a smorgasbord of near-futuristic threats, from zombie self-driving cars to microwave weapons, but the attackers responsible for them are never identified—all we know is that America has become “dysfunctional enough” that the attacks will encourage the country to ultimately obliterate itself.

In more chaotic fashion, The Sweet East takes us on a journey through a hopelessly polarized America bubbling with the possibility of violence, before climaxing with a large-scale terrorist attack that could have been carried out by any one of the groups we met along the way. As with Civil War, neither of these films make explicit the exact catalyst for the breakdown; the point rather seems to be that the fabric of American society is now so frayed that collapse has just become inevitable.

American disunity is also given as the deciding factor in humanity’s downfall in Adam McKay’s 2021 disaster comedy Don’t Look Up, only here the end is decidedly more final. An Armageddon (or Deep Impact) for these times, Don’t Look Up imagines a U.S. that has the technology to thwart an incoming comet, but which is so divided on how to respond that the rock ends up hitting Earth anyway. The film posits, as Hollywood often has, that America would be the nation best-equipped to avert a world-ending threat…then watches as it simply fails to act.

It’s not just polarization that brings about Don’t Look Up’s extinction event. It’s Mark Rylance’s Silicon Valley caricature Peter Isherwell who fatally convinces the film’s morally bankrupt U.S. administration, led by Meryl Streep’s Trumpian Janie Orlean, to mine the comet for valuable resources rather than to destroy it when they have the chance. Echoing the 2021 animated comedy The Mitchells vs. the Machines, in which a Zuckerberg-like tech baron creates an A.I. that tries to wipe out humanity, and Fallout, in which eager execs deliberately bring about nuclear holocaust in a bid to boost company profits, it’s the free market capitalist project taken to a satirical extreme: Unchecked, corporate America sacrifices life on Earth for just a little more money.

Though it approaches the subject with less anarchic glee, last year’s Oppenheimer reaches much the same conclusion as Fallout where nuclear weapons are concerned: It is not the weapons per se that are the danger, but who wields them. Oppenheimer, like Fallout, entered development before the recent resumption of nuclear saber-rattling between Russia and the West, but following a period in which the U.S. president reportedly became obsessed with the idea of using nukes. And so in Christopher Nolan’s film, which ends with Cillian Murphy’s “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer imagining the world being consumed by nuclear fire, foreign enemies remain pointedly unseen—while it’s hawkish U.S. politicians, like Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss, who push for nuclear escalation.

Demand for apocalypse fiction never goes away. Allowing us to process in the extreme the headline anxieties of the moment, apocalypse stories simply change to fit the times. In the 1960s and 1980s, Cold War tensions fueled two separate (but similarly despairing) waves of movies about nuclear annihilation. In the 1990s and 2000s, advancing technology, increased awareness of global pandemics and Y2K-inspired millenarianism led to Hollywood seeing the end of the world in robotic takeovers, disease outbreaks and divine reckonings.

Hollywood’s current trend of seeing danger within America recalls that found in the New Hollywood era of the late ‘60s and 1970s. Turbulence in the U.S. at that time was reflected in some bleak dystopian sci-fi, including Silent Running and Soylent Green, as well as paranoid thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. These films, too, found threat at the heart of America, though few of them—save for exceptions like Planet of the Apes, which gave us that awesome shot of a ruined Statue of Liberty—went so far as to imagine America’s troubles bringing about the end of the world. The U.S. has seemed so unstable of late, however, that Hollywood has apparently seen fit to upgrade the nation’s instability to an existential threat.

Brogan Morris is a London-based freelance writer and editor, whose writing on film can also be found at the BFI, The Guardian, BBC Culture and more. You can follow him on X formerly known as Twitter at @BroganJMorris.