(Also, that Central Park Kong ice-skating sequence was laaame.) Therefore, the 1933 Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack original is still the gold standard for giant-gorilla-destroys-half-the-city movies, not the least because it was a film set in its era: To a New York audience at the time, those were their streets, their buildings, their secretaries Kong was tearing, smashing, and eating. Sure, Peter Jackson’s gazillion-dollar remake had better F/X and even more scenes of extended midtown mayhem, but there was also a strangely unreal quaintness to its portrait of the city - perhaps because P-Jack & Co., wary of ruffling any post-9/11 nerves, chose to make their movie a period piece. are married amid the photos of deceased crew members, even Van Alen’s ghost was seen to shed a tear. The resultant shot of the Art Deco skyscraper taking a nosedive into 42nd Street had audiences cheering and the ghost of architect William Van Alen mournfully shaking his head. While New York isn’t completely destroyed in Armageddon, thanks to the efforts of Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck’s sweaty, hunky deep-core drillers, the movie does open with Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building taking direct hits from flaming meteorites. Extra bonus chill factor: One of the film’s screenwriters was Lawrence Wright, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. Could it happen here? Well, some of it already did. It’s not just the pure nerve-jangling tension of watching various terror cells in the city go active and start causing untold destruction (including to a Broadway theater), it’s also the film’s eerie vision of the government suspending civil rights and the military taking over New York that keeps us up at night. But it’s hard to deny its power today, given, well … you know. We admit it, at the time this fairly milquetoast terrorism thriller/political drama was released, we didn’t make much of it. Still, there’s magic in it: Coney Island underwater looks a lot better than Coney Island aboveground. But the existing film’s matter-of-fact treatment of the devastated Manhattan skyline retains just enough of Kubrick’s Olympian distance that it says more about mortality and impermanence than all the CGI explosions in the world. We’re also convinced that had Kubrick lived to make it, he might have done a bit more with the film’s postapocalyptic vision of a flooded, devastated New York - he was, after all, from the Bronx, unlike that suburbanite Spielberg. We’re cheating a bit, because New York has been long destroyed (thanks, melting ice caps!) by the time this Steven Spielberg film of an original Stanley Kubrick project gets started. Oh, and that there’s no problem in the world playing “Higher and Higher” can’t fix. But we’re going with the sequel for this list, and for one reason only: because one of the chief villains this time around is a paranormal ooze collecting in New York’s gutters, fed by the city’s collective negative energy, which just confirms our belief that New Yorkers are sometimes their own worst enemies. Yes, both Ghostbusters movies torch the city real good, and we love the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man just as much as the next guy. ![]() What was it about the late nineties that made filmmakers want to reduce the city to rubble? Sure, Giuliani was cleaning up the city, but could he protect New York from fictional catastrophes? Hell no! Anyway, in this scene, Godzilla rises out of the East River, steps over the FDR, and pounds the Fulton Fish Market into the ground. Roland Emmerich’s Matthew Broderick–starring stinker was the second, and the weakest, of 1998’s trio of Manhattan destruction (see further down on our list for the other two). Virus-fueled depopulation is just the latest way Hollywood has found to destroy New York City here’s a look back on some of the worst - and most photogenic - abuse that our fine metropolis has withstood … at least until Cloverfield comes out next month, anyway. As commuters constantly cheek by jowl with our fellow New Yorkers, we kind of love this vision of New York it’s straight out of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, except with millions of killer vampires. Will Smith’s last-man-on-Earth adventure I Am Legend opens this week and portrays the Fresh Prince living alone in an empty New York City, circa 2012, complete with a grassy meadow in Times Square and some extravagant wildlife. Courtesy of Warner Brothers (Legend), 20th Century Fox
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