One of the few about the end of the world in the religious sense would be The Rapture (1981).
Agreed. I liked the movie. And I remember this bit from Roger Ebert’s review.
Note: On a talk show in Toronto, I was asked to define the difference between American and Canadian films, and said I could not. Another guest was Wayne Clarkson, the former director of the Toronto Film Festival. He said he could, and cited this film. “Sandra Oh goes into a grocery story to find a bottle of wine for dinner,” he said.
“The store has been looted, but she finds two bottles still on the shelf. She takes them down, evaluates them, chooses one, and puts the other one politely back on the shelf. That’s how you know it’s a Canadian film.”
I think there were a couple of other, quiet films that I’m struggling to remember.
I am not the OP, but this thread seems to be, like apocalyptic society, breaking down. But instead of anarchy and score settling, it has become a list of apocalyptic films. No one In T2 and T3 (other than the main characters) knows the world will end, and the film isn’t about people dealing with that. The Rapture only deals with one person “knowing” the world will end.
I’d argue it’s a huge part of T2, it’s a defining part of Sarah Conner’s character (who I’d say is the main character)
Note that the OP explicitly says, “I’m more interested in ones that discuss the psychological fallout of everyone knowing they will all die soon, more than prepper movies.” That’s not true of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Though I’d argue T2 is definitely about Sarah Conner knowing everyone will die soon, and the psychological effect that has on her, rather than just being a “prepper” movie.
IMO you’re still missing the point.
IMO the OP wants to know about movies where the entire society, every last human, knows they’re imminently doomed. So the story is “How does society react?”
Not “How does the tiny cadre of less than a dozen insiders who know we’re all doomed react while the rest of the world blunders on as normal, oblivious to their impending doom.”
A George Pal classic:
Small cadre of astronomers spot a star on a course to hit earth; make plans to get a few survivors onto the planet around the star. Like Don’t Look Up, most of the world doesn’t believe them until things start getting real, after which things get as grim as you might expect.
Which is why Miracle Mile doesn’t really fit, but Children of Men might actually be the defining film of the genre*. The world has had 18 years to get used to it, with probably no more than 40 years until the absolute end (barring a war or other cataclysm), and things…are not going well.
The scene that still gets me is the abandoned school. The shock of seeing it empty catches you first, (no more kids. Duh!), but the fact that it is being left to rot, and no one is repurposing it gets me. Because of course, why would anyone?
*On the Beach does the same, but it takes a small city rather than the entire world (which is already dead).
The movie is based on a novel by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer that was pretty good. Robert Bloch, writing in the early 1960s, proclaimed it one of the few “true” science fiction movies, and one of the best of them.
Of course, he also hated the way they dumbed down the book for the movie. The planets named “Bronson Alpha” and “Bronson Beta” get pointlessly renamed “Bellus” and “Zyra”, as if they were planets in a Flash Gordon story. Arthur C. Clarke bemoaned the bad design of the launch ramp and the pitifully bad Chesley Bonestell art at the end (Bonestell! I wouldn’t have thought he could ever do anything bad. Until I saw this.)
But the story of almost-doomed people and the psychology still holds. They’re only not doomed if they succeed in building their Space Ark.
This is the first example I thought of, and fits the bill of what the OP is looking for pretty well, I think. An ELE-level asteroid is headed toward the Earth, and all attempts to avert it have been exhausted.
Rather than being 100% total anarchy in the streets with everybody just doing what they feel like, many people are just sort of doing what they always do in a dispirited, resigned, half-assed way. I remember one scene (it’s been awhile since I saw the movie, so I’m probably not remembering it perfectly) where, on a road trip to somewhere, the Steve Carell and Keira Knightley characters stop at a chain restaurant, like a Fridays or Chilis. It’s in kind of a shambles, and they’re out of a lot of stuff, but people are still working there, and they get served. That kind of strikes me as how such a situation would go down with many people-- not knowing quite what else to do, they’d just kind of shamble on with their normal lives on auto-pilot, until the very end.