Apocalypse and Other Love Stories

Again.

Hollywood has been luring us into air-conditioned terror from time immemorial, or at least since 1951, when in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” Patricia Neal had to say the immortal words “Klaatu barada nikto” to keep an alien robot from destroying the world and ourselves for our warlike ways.

Since a flying saucer blasted the White House to smithereens in “Independence Day,” in 1996, the varieties of summer disaster have gotten ever more vivid and cosmic.

So my interest was piqued when I kept encountering a pair of movie trailers depicting A-list movie stars on a future ravaged and abandoned Earth.

In “Oblivion,” aliens have blown up the Moon and humans have decamped to Titan, a moon of Saturn. Under the supervision of a scary NASA controller named Sally, Jack Harper, played by Tom Cruise, attends machines left behind to produce power and beam it to a giant death-star-like outpost in the sky known as the Tet.

Investigating the crash landing of a mysterious spaceship containing humans on the desolated Earth, he is captured by a scary underground band of rebels, led by Morgan Freeman puffing on a big long cigar.

In “After Earth,” Will Smith and his son Jaden crash-land on an Earth that was deemed inhospitable for humans 1,000 years ago. In the meantime everything on the planet has evolved to kill humans. The son, Kitai, has to journey across it by himself to fetch an alarm beacon.

As a big fan of apocalypse, I couldn’t wait to see these movies to get the latest societal take on the means or origins of our doom. If movies are a reflection of the national psyche — at least as interpreted by Hollywood — we’re all expecting a hideous future.

But you already knew that if you’ve been listening to the most recent round of college commencement speeches.

Of course these movies aren’t about the end of the world at all. The apocalypse is just a stage on which humans pursue their personal destinies with the help of special effects and some suspension of scientific judgment.

At its heart, “After Earth,” which opened last week to tepid reviews and a disappointing box office, is just a father-son story about a young hot shot who has to learn to trust his father and to control his emotions if he is to avoid being killed by an alien creature that can track and kill humans by the scent of their fear.

“Danger is real,” goes the poster slogan. “Fear is a choice.”

“Oblivion” is set in 2077, 60 years after aliens invaded Earth and had to be fought off with nuclear weapons, leaving the planet uninhabitable. Mr. Cruise, whose memory has been erased (as a security precaution, he is told), has to learn to trust Mr. Freeman — which of course you should always do — and to figure out why the woman who just crashed on Earth is the same woman who has been haunting his dreams of the Empire State Building.

It’s hardly giving anything away to say that under Mr. Freeman’s tutelage our hero will discover that everything he thought he knew about himself and recent history is wrong. The story, derived from an unpublished graphic novel that owes a lot to “Star Wars,” snaps together at the end with an agreeable sci-fi logic.

“After Earth” was dreamed up by Will and Jaden Smith as a way to work together, as they did in 2006, in “The Pursuit of Happyness.” Along the way they created a 300-page back story that describes how humans ruined the planet and were eventually forced off by toxic air, severe unpredictable weather, tsunamis and earthquakes, complete with a political, spiritual and technological guide to life on the new planet Nova Prime.

You might wonder, as I did, what humans had to do with tsunamis and earthquakes. When I asked the director, M. Night Shyamalan, about this in a recent interview, he said it had to do with his sense that there was “a soul” behind everything.

“Gaia is rejecting us,” he explained.

Curiously, the Earth 1,000 years later looks as much like an Eden as a hell, with giant trees, vertiginous waterfalls and prodigious wildlife killing and eating one another cheerfully in the usual Darwinian manner. It’s only human fear that ever made the place dangerous, Mr. Shyamalan said.

So Earth abides.

But the world does not. The world, to paraphrase the poet Muriel Rukeyser, is made of stories, not of atoms — nor of disease vectors nor predator-prey relations. And so it is always ending and being reborn. Every death is the end of a world, every divorce the collapse of a cosmology.

My favorite end-of-the-world movie has no science in it at all. It is Robert Altman’s 1971 classic, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.”

Set in the Northwest at the turn of the 20th century, it tells the story of a gambler and hustler, played by a young Warren Beatty, who parlays luck and bluff into a business empire as the proprietor of a whorehouse and then is hunted down like a dog when he resists selling out to a big corporation.

You might say that this is the end of the West as we thought we knew and loved it.

McCabe, who is no John Wayne, bleeds to death in a snowbank while the townspeople put out a church fire; meanwhile his lover and partner, Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), surrenders to an opium haze, twirling a glass egg in her hand.

At the end the camera closes in on her eye and we see the reflection of the egg, an orb haloed with light, redolent of the images sent back from space by the Apollo astronauts or the end of the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It looks just like the world turning.

Klaatu barada nikto.