I’m rewatching melancholia, what other pre-apocalpyse movies are there? I’m more interested in ones that discuss the psychological fallout of everyone knowing they will all die soon, more than prepper movies.
Greenland was mostly about prepping and surviving, but it had some interesting stuff about people adjusting to the reality of the situation.
These final hours had some good stuff about this.
The TV show Night Visions had an episode about this, where life was about to be wiped out by a meteor.
IMHO the classic film is On the Beach where (nuclear) war has wiped out the population of the northern hemisphere and is beginning to affect Australia. How does society react knowing time is running out?
For a more contemporary view there’s 2021’s Don’t Look Up, where a couple of second-rate astronomers try to warn the world that a giant meteor is headed for Earth. It’s a satire and the comedy is dark. I didn’t think it was great, but it has its moments, particularly when the world finally gets the message and looks up to see the meteor, finally accepting the truth.
Deep Impact had a bit about this, but it wasn’t anywhere near the focus of the entire movie.
ETA: This music video by They Might Be Giants By The Time You Get This (2:25) is pretty much just that part of Deep Impact’s story boiled down to feelings and sentiments about what’s about to happen.
Project Hail Mary, which is still in theaters and is releasing on streaming in a few weeks, might be up your alley. The sun has been infected by an interstellar bacteria which is causing it to dim, which will cause massive global cooling and kill billions via crop failure and meteorological catastrophe, and the nations of the world launch a last-ditch effort to find a remedy by sending a junior high science teacher played by Ryan Gosling on a one-way mission to Tau Ceti (which is also infected, but not dimming) to hopefully find out why and send a message back to Earth before dying there, where he meets an alien who’s in the system for the same reason and they become friends as they try to solve the problem together.
It’s adapted from a novel by Andy Weir (author of The Martian, which was adapted into the Matt Damon flick) and on the hard side of sci-fi, and it’s overall a VERY good movie that’s both serious and funny.
It’s a Disaster: four couples meet for brunch at one of their homes, only to learn that there’s been a nationwide “dirty bomb” attack and they’re all trapped in the house. Fun if bleak.
Or, in a similar but inverted vein, 17776, where the twist is that not only is the world not going to end, but nothing is ever going to end, everyone is going to live forever, and there’s nothing left to learn and nothing left to discover.
Simon Pegg’s great The World’s End. Then again, I think all Simon Pegg’s movies end up being great. Probably because I think pub crawling is great. Or I did when I was young.
I’ll recommend the book rather than the movie, but The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens with Ford Prefect taking Arthur Dent to the pub mere moments before Earth is destroyed. That scene takes nonchalance to a new level.
When The Wind Blows is a 1982 graphic novel/1986 animated film where the central couple are in denial about the world ending.
It’s set in an idyllic English village where a dim witted retired couple experience a nuclear exchange between the USSR and the UK and them not realizing they’re slowly dying of radiation poisoning over the course of the next few days as they struggle to retain normalcy. A very bleak tale intended to demonstrate how inadequate the government was preparing the citizenry for the Cold War.
At some point during Dr. Strangelove they realize that if the US bombers successfully hit their targets, it will set off the Soviet doomsday device. So I think that counts.