Millennium Movies

The cinema has always loved big gestures and spectacular effects, and what could be more spectacular than The End of the World?--definitely with a bang, and only occasionally with a whimper. Kim Newman's new study follows the history of movie apocalypse and covers just about every movie and sort of End that you can imagine--atomic warfare, glowing mutants, alien invasions and collisions with asteroids. More often than not, Ends are avoided by old tricks that might just work, or by the hand of God, which in American movies amounts to pretty much the same thing. More often than not, movie treatments of doom are intended to be deadly serious--Hollywood is rarely as inadvertently comic as when it tackles big issues and the clichés of apocalypse often totter into camp. Fortunately, there are some brilliant joke Ends--Doctor Strangelove and Mars Attacks get their just desserts here. Newman takes us through some terrible old tat and some masterpieces, and has the same good humoured response to all of them-- this is movie "fandom" rather than serious film criticism, but there is a seriousness and intellectual depth to his jokey love for his subject. --Roz Kaveney