Thus The New York Times in a section dealing with apocalyptic movies, of which there appears to be a growing number. To the best of my understanding, the main complaint the article brings forth is that the narrative of such movies is not credible enough. What is worse, the end is not properly understood. There is no clear message, to put it in a nutshell. “We need a doomsday we can believe in,” the article argues in no uncertain terms.

I could not care less about apocalyptic movies, but the argument still strikes me as hopelessly naïve. The very notion of a doomsday is revealing in its churlishness. Even a doomsyear is a travesty of everything we know about the end of civilizations. Although a doomscentury would be much closer to the historical facts, at least by the standards of the civilizations we know a fair deal about, even that would still remain a wild exaggeration. But the stretching of a day to a year or a century would nevertheless be a far cry from the article’s key demand.

One way or another, the end we can believe in is out of our reach no matter how strong our need. In this respect, the bible is all we actually got. God got angry with us, and that was that. Returning to the avalanche of apocalyptic movies, they will keep disappointing, for the way the world ends is forever beyond human comprehension. Otherwise, it could be stopped without much trouble. In the end, that is all that the article is hopelessly about. It is not about apocalyptic movies as such, but about the apocalyptic human condition.