The apoca-list: Top Apocalypse Movies

"MAD MAX: Fury Road" reminds us that there is nothing filmmakers love more than imagining mankind's destruction, and nothing we love more than watching it.

At various times, we've found the end of our world horrifying or funny, or both. Here, in no particular order, are the some of the best apocalypse movies, with an eye to how they've evolved.

"La Jetee": French, intellectual, black & white, only 28 minutes long but endlessly influential.

The way it combined the apocalypse, time travel and the idea of a man who foresees and shapes his own destiny has been updated by Terry Gilliam as "12 Monkeys," James Cameron in "The Terminator" and even "Looper," in which Bruce Willis replaces the existential poetry of "Jetee" with something more concrete: "I don't want to talk about time travel. If we start that, we'll be here all day."

"Planet of the Apes": Corny, sure. But there is no more defining postapocalyptic image than Charlton Heston on the beach, looking at the Statue of Liberty's torch sticking out of the sand, realizing that the alien planet he's on is a ruined Earth.

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers": Movies often envision the end of mankind as a consequence of invasion, and this was among the creepiest. Other classic examples include "War of the Worlds" and even "Red Dawn."

As a rule, movies assert that mankind will rally and prevail by recovering what is best in us. Exception: Tim Burton's "Mars Attacks," in which the opposite occurs - the invasion is repelled by Slim Whitman yodeling.

"Children of Men": Before he won an Oscar for "Gravity," Alfonso Cuaron directed this, one of the best examples of the Malthusian apocalypse movie - we've destroyed ourselves with overcrowding and disease and pollution.

Here, our frayed DNA has left us unable to reproduce, save for one fertile woman, whom Clive Owen must escort to safety. The idea of polluted and evacuated Earth gave us Pixar's "Wall-E" and Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar," starring Matthew McConaughey, who earlier starred in the weirdly compelling . . .

"Reign of Fire": Back when he was considered a hopeless ham, McConaughey played a berserker-ish military man in this sci-fi fantasy, set in a UK destroyed by marauding dragons. The cast includes Christian Bale and pre-"300" Gerard Butler. Everyone has an irrational love for a goofy movie - this one (pulling a dreadful 40 percent on rottentomatoes.com) is mine.

And not because they sent me a "Reign of Fire" fire extinguisher, which I still have.

"28 Days Later": This is perhaps the best of the virus/contamination movies, which also include "The Andromeda Strain" and the George Romero "Living Dead" canon. They're all great, but "28 Days Later" director Danny Boyle added mobility and ferocity, which changed the game and spoke to the idea that in today's wired world rage spreads faster than reason or compassion. The rageful hordes link this movie with . . .

"Mad Max"/ "The Road Warrior": George Miller's low-budget "Mad Max" was the first movie of the a-punk-alypse, capturing the leather/anger/hair-dye/low-fi feeling of the era. He returned with the even better "Road Warrior," which varied its bleak vision with humor and still-astonishing visuals.

"Shaun of the Dead": At some point, we stopped being horrified by our impending demise and started laughing at it. In "Shaun of the Dead," it's impossible to distinguish between a zombie and the average London commuter.

Zombie-ism is also a metaphor for a man (Simon Pegg) stuck in adolescence, a rich vein of comedy, which is why it gets the nod over "Zombieland," a meta-satire of zombie movie conventions.

Of course, you can't mention funny apocalypse movies without crediting Stanley Kubrick, who made us laugh at mankind's mutually assured destruction all the way back in the Sixties with "Dr. Strangelove."

"This Is the End": Selfish and amoral Hollywood narcissists (James Franco and Seth Rogen, playing themselves) realize that the Rapture is upon them, and try to become moral men in their final moments. A surprisingly ruthless piece of self-criticism from Hollywood, which too often allows narcissism and materialism to pass without comment, suggesting that the apocalypse is already here, which may soon be confirmed by the arrival of first horseman of the apocalypse . . .

"The Entourage Movie": Welcome to the Bropocalypse.