9. Miracle Mile (1998)
Romance and the apocalypse go hand in hand, because what's the one thing that people want to do when they know the world is about to end? I'm not going to spell it out for you. Anyway, lots of movies have tried to tackle the combined subjects of love and world ending at the same time, be it
Shaun of the Dead, or the more recent S
eeking A Friend For The End Of The World. But both of those movies are comedies, you'll see, which means that they deal with the possibilities of "being annihilated" and "dieing horribly" with a fair degree of flippancy.
Miracle Mile, a little-known movie from the '80s that deserves a whole lot more attention, opts to do things a little differently. The first 20 minutes of the movie are dedicated to conventional rom-com tropes, with a shy Anthony Edwards falling in love with a waitress, as played by Mare Winningham. At this point, you think you know the whole story, because you've seen it a zillion times before. It's a cutesy set-up, though utterly deceiving in every sense. Suddenly there's a phone call, and Edwards is told that the world is
going to end in 50 minutes. Goodbye rom-com, hello... bleak, miserable drama about two people facing their inevitable deaths? Where's Richard Curtis when you need him?