Squashing The Big Apple
Movies that Destroy New York

What is it about New York that makes Hollywood want to trash the place? Sure, it’s America’s biggest city, with plenty of familiar landmarks to level. But Chicago is pretty big, too, and it doesn’t get smashed more than once every decade or two. Paris has plenty of landmarks, and you can count on one hand the movies in which they’ve been systematically destroyed.

By: The Staff of Premiere.Com

Maybe it’s a West Coast thing. If most movies were made in New York, maybe they’d destroy Los Angeles a couple of times a year. Or maybe it’s that New York is the home to the Broadway theater, which to Hollywood is hopelessly unprofitable and inexplicably prestigious -- in other words, maybe it’s nothing more than a touch of civic jealousy.

Whatever the case may be, there’s no denying that New York gets its share of destruction and then some. Twenty of our favorites follow, but they by no means exhaust the list.

When Worlds Collide (1951)
In a whole different world of special effects, legendary sci-fi producer George Pal busts out the miniatures and the garden hose for “When Worlds Collide.” The tale of a rogue planet on a collision course with Earth -- see, the title isn’t a metaphor -- doesn’t end pleasantly for New York. It gets flooded with enough sea water to drown everything save the cockroaches.

Planet of the Apes (1968)
After all the hunting, capturing, escaping and laying on of stinking paws, astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) wanders down a desolate stretch of beach to discover ... the Statue of Liberty! All this time he’s been among ape-men who have built a civilization on the ruins of what was once New York. Well, OK, it could have been New Jersey. But still, we blew it up!

Superman II (1980)
Yes, they call it Metropolis, not New York. Director Richard Donner doesn’t make much of an effort to conceal that he’s thinking about New York, though, given that he has the Empire State Building sticking up right in the middle of midtown. That’s like painting wings on an elephant and calling it an eagle. When Superman (Christopher Reeve) throws down with General Zod (Terence Stamp) and his flunkies, there’s no mistaking that it’s Times Square taking the brunt of the super-fisticuffs.

Escape from New York (1981)
In John Carpenter’s dystopian thriller, New York’s crime rate goes up so uncontrollably that the federal government decides to simply wall it off and declare the city a giant prison. While this scenario doesn’t look too kindly on New York, the film’s production doesn’t look too kindly on another city: East St. Louis, Mo. Unable to find New York locations suitably burned-out, rundown and pathetic enough to make a convincing city/prison, Carpenter had to film nearly all of his exteriors in that sad-sack Missouri city.

Q (1982)
It’s an old New York joke that you recognize the tourists in New York because they’re the only ones looking up. New Yorkers don’t need to gawk at their skyscrapers, making “Q’s” conceit that a giant, winged serpent could nest atop the Empire State Building without anyone noticing until it started eating people utterly believable. Hindered by 1982 special effects, the movie opts for “mystery” over large-scale carnage, but the thought of world-famous urban monuments being home to man-eating monstrosities is disturbing enough.

2019: After the Fall of New York (1983)
An Italian cheapie knockoff of “Escape from New York,” “2019” envisions a nuclear-decimated New York inhabited by radioactive freaks and monsters. Luckily for the filmmakers the post-apocalyptic setting allows much of the action to take place in nondescript parking lots and empty patches of desert, rather than having to hire the manpower to, say, shut down large portions of Fifth Avenue. All that saved money is on the screen, folks.

Ghostbusters (1984)/ Ghostbusters 2 (1989)
Look, having the world’s only paranormal janitors based in Tribeca is bound to bring some undesirables into the neighborhood. First large sections of the Upper West Side get stomped on and ultimately covered in charred marshmallow, then a river of slime beneath the city streets conjures up a vengeful spirit from the past. The Ghostbusters’ means of disposal may not be tidy -- they wreck as much of Manhattan as the ghoulies do -- but at least they do something.

Independence Day (1996)
Despite some geographical inaccuracy -- the Empire State Building does not straddle a street, for example -- director Roland Emmerich certainly makes his point. When the hovering alien spacecraft get the “go” sign, Gregory Johnson’s iconic design gets lit up like a Roman candle and Manhattan learns the hard way that not all tourists want to pose for pictures in Times Square and catch a matinee on Broadway.

Men In Black (1997)
The MIBs spend much time covering their tracks and erasing memories, but why? If you told a bunch of average New York commuters that giant, subway-car-sized space slugs lived in the tunnels, probably no one would bat an eye. They’ve seen far more disturbing things inside a subway car. “Men in Black” is relatively gentle on the big city, though, and unusual in that it saves most of its destructiveness for the outlying borough of Queens -- most notably a battle at the old World’s Fairgrounds -- where, let’s be honest, no one is really going to notice.

Armageddon (1998)
Michael Bay goes the hackneyed “New York landmark destruction” route, but at least give him some credit for picking two slightly lesser-used landmarks: In illustrating a meteor shower’s path of destruction, Bay shows the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Station getting torn apart by hunks of space rock ... as well as several taxi cabs near a “53rd Street Station” which is in that trendy New York neighborhood known as Obvious Studio Backlot.

Deep Impact (1998)
Before Roland Emmerich got the notion to turn Manhattan’s cavernous streets into a log flume in 2004, but long after George Pal did the same thing in 1951, director Mimi Leder ... aw, forget it. Meteor hits earth. New York floods. Let’s move on.

Godzilla (1998)
Emmerich once again lets New York have it. This time the German director unleashes a giant lizard on the city so nice they named it twice, and a great many recognizable landmarks suffer as a result. We’re not sure if that ending, in which Godzilla is finally stopped by the crisscrossing cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, was meant to be a subtle joke for Manhattanites who equate moving to Brooklyn with death, but we like to think so.

The Siege (1998)
Taking a much more grounded tack than most of the other films listed here, “The Siege” preyed on our worst real-life fears -- rampant attacks in major cities. Its portrait of a devastated Manhattan under martial law kind of makes giant lizards and supervillains seem cozy and safe, doesn’t it?

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Like Emmerich’s “The Day After Tomorrow,” this film blames the Earth’s fragile ecosystem for New York’s eventual flooding and destruction. Unlike Emmerich, however, director Steven Spielberg shows us only the aftermath, not the disaster. And, as in “Planet of the Apes,” the Statue of Liberty is used as a chilling reminder of what once was: Her torch, barely peaking out above the surging sea, is eerie in much the same way that her beach-logged torso was in the 1968 film.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Yet again Emmerich has it in for Gotham. What is it with this guy? This time severe changes in the Earth’s climate cause New York to get flooded like a cheap Chevy and then frozen solid. Why this should also cause giant werewolves to appear is open to debate -- we choose the “bad CGI” argument -- but this is one case in which New Yorkers actually would have preferred to have the snow turn to a gray, slushy muck the way it usually does 10 seconds after a blizzard.

King Kong (2005)
Forget Mel Brooks, a thousand chorus dancers or a Stephen Sondheim score. Remember the simple days when all you needed to open on Broadway was a big ape in chains? Once Kong gets out, however, things go very bad for 1930s Times Square. Cars are thrown, buildings are crushed and Central Park’s frozen ponds are subjected to inhuman levels of sentimentality. The Empire State Building, despite being the location for the final showdown, gets by with a few dings and scratches. The streets below, however ...

War of the Worlds (2005)
Perhaps realizing that he missed an opportunity with “A.I.,” Spielberg makes up for it by piling on the New York decimation in his remake of the H.G. Wells classic. From the vantage point of Bayonne, N.J., we see bridges twisting like licorice and entire swaths of the city getting ripped apart. The whole Eastern seaboard feels the brunt of the alien attack, though, so for once New York isn’t unfairly singled out for termination.

I Am Legend (2007)
There is nothing more chilling than the sight of New York City completely devoid of people. It’s somehow more unnatural and more disturbing than an alien invasion, a giant meteor or an epic tsunami. People surrender their desire for peace and quiet the minute they sign the rental agreement on a New York apartment, so the idea that Fifth Avenue could have more vegetation than people is tough to swallow. New Yorkers being turned into ravening zombies is a little spooky too.