When we were talking in class yesterday about movies with apocalyptic scenarios, I started thinking about how most modern apocalyptic movies seem to subtly align themselves with a cyclical rather than progressive view of history, and how subversive such an idea is to the entire apocalypse mythos. As we learned, apocalypse mythologies indulge in eschatology, assuming history has an absolute end that humanity is naturally progressing toward. With the exception of movies like Miracle Mile, Hollywood movies on the other hand tend to find an absolute end to be just a bit too bleak to sell, and thus end up telling cyclical stories. Revelation only sells to a certain point before Hollywood writers decide to instead rewrite Genesis, and thus the main characters of apocalypse movies almost always survive as Adam and Eve stand-ins to build a new world.
Often, in the rare exceptions when the main characters do not survive, the plot will simply purloin another biblical narrative: the messiah story. In "I Am Legend," Will Smith blows himself up, but that allows other characters to escape to an Edenic setting. In "Armageddon," Bruce Willis dies, and because of his death Earth is saved.
Though these cyclical stories are generally told due to commercial interests, their view of human history is worth considering nonetheless. In movies like Terminator and I Am Legend, man is victim of his own progress - we are the ones that built the robots that destroy us, we are the ones that create the virus that turns almost everyone into killer zombies - but in such stories, man is not erased, progress is erased. Here is where things get interesting: though these stories are often cautionary tales about how progress is destroying us, the happy ending of such stories often still involves progress starting again. In one of Romero's ". . . of the Dead" movies, for instance, characters attempt to escape (to, again, an Edenic) island using a tank made of improvised technology (old modes of technology being destroyed).
These Hollywood apocalypse stories thus seem to view the apocalypse not as an end but as a clean slate.
A really astute observation, Ben. Does this suggest to you that "progress" has somehow become detached in our minds from the human beings who are responsible for and benefit from it? Marx would say that there's no such thing as progress except in the area of human labor--he wanted labor to "progress" not in terms of efficiency (i.e., technology) but toward human fulfillment (the end of alienated labor).
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