Reshoot Independence Day – and let the Pinks lose! 
How about the Sun going nova? Whether by natural causes (i.e. it was going to go nova this whole time and we misunderstood the physics) or by evil alien device, or by malfunctioning human device, there’s nothing like a star exploding to clear your stellar system of those pesky inner planets.
Nobody’s mentioned a 1920s Style Death Ray yet?
How about something like a “De-evolution?” Stick with me here. For example everybody on the planet starts having some defect like short-sightedness, but more fatal (for my example I’ll use short-sightedness). But since we are all very clever and are able to overcome this deficiency with glasses we prosper as a species. Then one day we run out of glass for our glasses (or plastic for our plastic glasses), or all the optometrists become too blind to work anymore. At that point our civilization starts breaking down and the majority of people can’t cope and die off. Ironically (or expectedly – if you are the type to guess this stuff), people who were blind before this mess are able to cope and start re-populating the planet with purely blind people.
Too Twilight Zone?
[QUOTE=wm–]
I don’t know if “enjoyable” is the right word… it’s certainly effective. QUOTE]
Okay, you’re right. Effetive is a better word.
I’ve never liked the Gray Goo scenarios, because they’ve already happened. Earth already is dominated by gazillions of tiny, self-replicating nanomachines that eat everything, and it has been for the past four billion years. What’s the difference if they happen to be made by humans?
Sounds like something James Tiptree Jr. would write.
I thought you WERE talking about humans.
Ah, but those nanomachines (Earth life as we already know it) are too fussy about their food. They don’t turn everything into copies of themselves. Also, every one of them dies eventually, returning its atoms to the free pool for future generations to use.
The Gray Goo Catastrophe, on the other hand, imagines a nanobot that can break apart most or all molecules and use the atoms to build copies of itself. Almost everything in the world would be “food” — except other nanobots, presumably — and would quickly be turned into more nanobots, until the food supply was exhausted. A vast gray goo would then cover the planet, forever after. Fini.
A bit far-fetched, you say? Sure. Maybe even impossible, say the chemists and material physicists in the back? Well, I’m not in a position to argue.
A potential blockbuster starring Bruce Willis and/or Jodie Foster and/or Samuel Jackson? You betcha.
The aptly named book Blindness deals with the social collapse that takes place after a mysterious and unexplainable epidemic of sudden and complete blindness starts to affect the populace. Plot spoilers:
For a while, the blind are quarantined, but since no one sighted is willing to enter the quarantined zone, they quickly revert to a barbaric existence. Later, when they finally leave, we see that the entire city (possibly world) is in a state of squalor and destruction. One character keeps her sight through the whole ordeal.
A mutated encephalitis-type disease destroys peoples’ sexual inhibitations, leaving them williing to do anyone anytime anywhere. Society collapses as people spend almost every waking hour copulating. (boom-chucka-bow-wow).
“Get these motherfucking nanomachines off of my motherfucking planet!”
A death plunge into the gas giant Jupiter–for revenge, baby!
Not with a bang but a whimper.
I’m all about the zombies. I read that there was/is talk of a sequel to the remake of Dawn of the Dead and I hope it pans out.
A good movie where an asteroid/comet actually hits the planet would be more interesting than being saved at the last moment. Lucifer’s Hammer with good effects and better dialog would be more entertaining than the Earth getting saved at the last moment. Yes, part of the comet in Deep Impact hit the Earth but it wasn’t total destruction and the movie didn’t focus on the aftermath.
Well, if I’ve got it straight, somebody’s making a remake of Romero’s Day of the Dead, which was a sequel to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Not a sequel to the remake of Dawn, but rather a completely separate remake of Day. Don’t ask me why.
There was a Harlan Ellison story in which the world is invaded by Disgusting Things from another reality, which immediately start having incredible sex with everybody (literally, everybody). The sex is so good that people keep going at it until they starve to death. I don’t know if that would make a good movie; maybe an After School Special.
Long, Drawn-Out Sunday Afternoon of the Dead.
Sailboat
A few years ago, a friend bought a British novel from AMOK Books titled THE GAS in which some sort of chemical weapon was released which did exactly that.
I must be remembering this movie differently.
I wanted to like it, I got the message, but seriously, at the end, Jason Robards emerges from his shelter (he doesn’t need to wait for fallout to settle or rad levels to go down) and looks at a bunch of broken boards and collapsed houses in the bright sunshine.
No fear of radiation, no huge firestorm, no nuclear winter, no chemical contamination worries (as in the ash from the World Trade Center, for example).
It looked like the day after a hurricane, not a nuclear war. Instead of the blasted moonscape we see in Hiroshima photos, this looked like the local dump after the neighborhood replaced its aluminum siding.
Big letdown.
Sailboat
Not quite.
Near the end of the film, Jason Robards’s character returns to Kansas City, where he lives (or lived), from Lawrence, where he had been teaching a class on the fateful day. He already knows he’s dying from radiation; he was within plain sight of the blasts, on the highway, when the bombs went off. But he’s returning to Kansas City anyway because he wants to see his house one last time before he goes. He has no fear of radiation because radiation has already claimed him.
Not sure what your point is about the firestorm. This has already happened a couple days earlier by the time he comes back. (The filmmakers used stock footage of nuclear fireballs consuming buildings and trees.) We do not see events from the point of view of anyone actually in the city at the time of the explosions, or the immediate fiery aftermath.
Presumably there will be a nuclear winter later on — or then again maybe not. The film doesn’t show one because it only covers the few days before and after the holocaust.
I think you’re right that they don’t talk about chemical contamination, but they do address radiation contamination many times. For example they show army trucks coming by to hand out food relief. And they show fallout ash raining down.
Personally I thought they did a pretty good job, given the more limited special effects available in the early 1980s. There was nothing blatantly unrealistic in the film. And in the ending titles, they note that the real effects of an all-out nuclear war would be even worse than what’s depicted.
We don’t?