For a society so worried about the state of the planet, we seem to get a perverse thrill out of seeing it destroyed for fun. That, at least, is the theory those in the entertainment business seem to be working off at the moment.

A crop of movies has been sweeping the human race away in a tide of tsunamis, evil robots and flesh-eating zombies. President Danny Glover declares in Roland Emmerich's latest disaster movie, 2012, "The world as we know it will soon come to an end." It will if film-makers have anything to do with it.

Civilisation made its last stand earlier this year in Zombieland and Terminator Salvation, with only Woody Harrelson and Christian 'I'm going to trash your lights' Bale standing in the way of total annihilation. Now there's a sobering thought.

Next up is 2012, in which the Earth's core overheats to catastrophic effect. The special effects men get such a workout in this movie that it has been dubbed 'apocalyptic porn' in some quarters.

LA slides into the sea like a cake off a table, the Himalayas are drowned in a giant tidal wave, St Peter's Basilica in Rome and the Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro crumble like chalk figurines.

Most impressively of all, John Cusack manages to keep a straight face while driving a limo along the edge of the Earth's crust and screaming: "California is going down!"

Director Emmerich certainly has a destructive streak. He had aliens blow up the White House in Independence Day (1996), flattened downtown New York in Godzilla (1998) and laid waste to LA, again, in The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Seriously, what has the world ever done to him?

He's not the only one who is interested in sending the planet down the pan. A less-than-cheerful start to the new year will come with post-apocalyptic tales The Road and The Book of Eli.

Viggo Mortensen stars in the former as a protective father trying to shield his son from the hopelessness of a dying world in the wake of some unnamed catastrophe.

In the latter, Denzel Washington treks the bleak landscape of a post-war wasteland. And you thought surviving the recession was a worry.

The doomsday obsession is percolating across other cultural mediums -- Tim Burton's worrisome animated feature 9 had rag-doll figures chased through a devastated world by an evil mechanical monster. An upcoming show called Day One is being touted as the next hottest thing on TV. Taking its cue from the hit series Lost, it centres around a group of neighbours who survive some class of global disaster.

Books, too, are getting heavy on the future of the world, with scientific bestsellers The World Without Us, Our Final Century and The Coming Plague debating the possibility that the end is nigh.

"There is definitely a lot in the collective consciousness right now about the end of the world," Cusack's 2012 co-star Chiwetel Ejiofor says. "The fragility of the planet, the nature of global warming, the free access to nuclear weapons, financial and scientific responsibility -- these are all part of our consciousness. So a movie like 2012, though entertaining and extraordinary in scope, allows us to discuss these things."

In fairness, 2012 is more interested in showcasing the many ways in which a CGI specialist can blow up the world than in debating the science bits.

Instead of feeding into the sort of eco-concerns that drove the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still last year, 2012 links into a supposed ancient Mayan prediction that the world will end on that date. (Incidentally, it is also the proposed deadline for the completion of the Metro rail link in Dublin. Coincidence? I don't think so.)

Nonetheless, the world is an unpredictable place at the moment and apocalyptic tales can be a reaction to that instability. When the film version of the HG Wells novel War of the Worlds appeared in 1953, it joined a growing cast of alien/sci fi movies like the original Day the Earth Stood Still and When Worlds Collide (1951). Nuclear war fears were in their infancy and society was changing rapidly in the post-world war world.

The doomsday scenarios of later films, as in the 1970s' Planet of The Apes series or The Omega Man, were aligned with the huge upheaval in society -- in the US, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in particular are reflected in this way.

But sometimes it's best not to read too much into the end of the world: this is Hollywood after all. In the explosion of action movies and the growing sophistication of computer-generated special effects of the 1990s, the disaster movie was king. There isn't a bigger canvas to showcase a big studio budget than the globe itself.

The epic scale of catastrophe envisaged in Independence Day or Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998) or Terminator 2 (1991) is a lot about action-movie thrills and less about the actual end of days.

In each, humanity can overcome the potential threat from aliens/meteors/psycho computers. It's Die Hard with slightly higher stakes.

Saying that, the more recent apocalyptic movies are serious affairs. In the sinister Children of Men, the end of the world is seeping in by default (women just stop having babies altogether), and in films like The Road or Book of Eli, the apocalypse is already a fait accompli and a widespread loss of human life is taken for granted.

Could it be that we are finally at a crisis point where the pervading attitude is that there is no turning back on our destructive actions?

The message of environmental catastrophe is no longer the sole preserve of science fiction, with documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth finally getting some home truths out to a mainstream audience.

Global terrorism and the financial meltdown -- both appeared in the last decade to be completely out of the control of governments.

Lawrence E Joseph has written a non-fiction book called Apocalypse 2012: An Optimist Investigates the End of Civilisation, and believes that at the very least we should be asking: 'What might happen?' and 'What are the near-term catastrophes that we can prevent?' For the record, he believes that a giant solar blast will knock out the world's electricity in 2012.

So is this the point in history where apocalyptic entertainment finally dovetails with reality? Or should we just buy some popcorn and enjoy the ride?

It might be worth noting Roland Emmerich's answer when he was asked why he's so obsessed with the destruction of the world.

"It makes for a good story," he smiled.

Irish Independent