A scene from 'Mad Max: Fury Road'
A scene from 'Mad Max: Fury Road'
Image: Supplied

Two weeks into 2023 and already many may be despairing that their quiet pleas for a better year have fallen on deaf ears. With the war in the Ukraine continuing, the Republican crackpots taking hold in the US, the Tories making dangerously fascist public comments about immigrants in the UK and our own seemingly never-ending load shedding, infrastructure and political uncertainty woes — 2023 already looks worse than many of us feared, and that’s just one month in.

However, when times are tough and days are dark, the movies are here to remind you that no matter how bad you think things are in reality, they could always be imagined as much, much worse.

Here are three films that deal in apocalyptic fantasy to help you navigate whatever troubles the real world may throw your way…provided of course that the Wi-Fi and the power remain on long enough for you to watch them….

The arthouse essential:

The Last Wave – YouTube

Richard Chamberlain stars in Australian director Peter Weir’s despairing meditation on humanity’s relationship to nature that’s high on chilly atmosphere and  metaphysical terror and low on hope.

Chamberlain plays an attorney who’s hired to defend an Aborigine man accused of murder. As he begins to investigate more of the circumstances around the case he finds himself in a strange, sometimes scary world of ancient mysticism and prophecy that soon seems to be playing itself out in the real world. As inexplicable weather patterns begin to form in the air above Sydney, Chamberlain’s lawyer’s nightmarish hallucinations of the end of the world begin to break down the barrier between fantasy and reality and drive him increasingly mad.

... it’s imagery remains as hauntingly foreboding as ever

By the time he’s completely broken and become an ostracized doomsayer, it’s all too late and the still confounding and mysterious final frame of the film is one of those that burned itself into the consciousness of a generation of faithless youth living in the shadow of seemingly unavoidable impending nuclear holocaust and beyond.

Some of its attitudes towards traditional beliefs and rituals may border uncomfortably on the patronizing in today’s more keenly representational-issue attuned world but it’s overall warning about the dangers of disregarding ancient beliefs still ring loudly in our ever more chaotic present pre-apocalyptic ears and it’s imagery remains as hauntingly foreboding as ever.

TRAILER:

The stone-cold classic:

Mad Max: Fury Road — Rent or buy from Apple TV +

Another gritty, mad, high-flying imaginative take on the end of the world offered by a very different Australian director is George Miller’s fourth offering in the franchise he first brought to life with the low-budget exploitation dystopian action of Mad Max in 1979.

This time round it’s Tom Hardy who steps into the role of Miller’s road warrior made famous by Mel Gibson but it’s not Max who’s the star or hero of this refreshingly old-school post-apocalyptic engine grinding return to form.

It’s a big budget, big screen adventure that stays true to the B-movie roots of Miller’s original creation in spirit and verve

Rather it’s Charlize Theron’s Furiosa and the oppressed women of the nefarious tyrant Immortant Joe who rev much needed life into a new but equally entertaining and slyly thought-provoking, barren vision of the end of the world filmed on location in the desert of Namibia. 

With a simple premise involving the driving of a huge truck across the desert and an army of distinctively deranged villains and vehicles in hot pursuit - it’s a big budget, big screen adventure that stays true to the B-movie roots of Miller’s original creation in spirit and verve.

It’s strong, surprisingly layered central female characters also paved new ground for the possibilities for action cinema to both deliver on spectacle and drive home relevant messages about broader, real-world society, long before the rest of Hollywood got on board the feminist revisionist genre truck. One can only hope that when the apocalypse comes, Furiosa is steering whatever ship those fools who manage to survive, find themselves on.

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The diamond in the rough:

12 Monkeys — Rent or buy from Apple TV +

Terry Gilliam’s 1995 extension of a story made famous by Chris Marker’s ’60s French experimental still-film classic La Jetée has enjoyed a recent positive reevaluation thanks to its deadly global virus extinction level event plot, which saw it land a place on everyone’s “what to watch during the Covid-19 pandemic”, lists.

It’s a freewheeling mad mess of a film that’s beautiful, singular and insane in all the best kind of ways

It was, however, always ahead of its time and Gilliam’s injection of his own very weird but infectious energy into the enterprise makes it a one-of-a-kind experience that’s sometimes frustrating but ultimately invigorating in its go-for-broke approach to combining ideas and genres into a uniquely unforgettable melting pot, seldom seen in mainstream movies .

Mixing the time-travel premise of Marker’s original film with a post-Aids era virus terror and the paranoid fears that briefly enveloped much of the world at the end of the millennium – some of which seem silly in hindsight, but others which have recently reared their heads once again — it’s a freewheeling mad mess of a film that’s beautiful, singular and insane in all the best kind of ways.

Its apparently overly-bleak, doom and gloom ridden despair for the fate of humanity only look more and more like an underestimation in the wake of our current situation, making it more prescient than even the darkly absurd imagination of Gilliam could ever conceive.

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