Representation of Biblical Patterns of Salvation in Apocalyptic Cinema

Beginning of the new millennium at the dawn of the 21st century, a new attention to apocalyptic and millennialist themes has raised in the media and contemporary art and culture. Accordingly, the representation of ancient narrative of apocalypse in sacred texts in movies was not unexpected and Apocalyptic Cinema has grown thanks to repeatedly depicting of this on the cinematic screens. Meantime, a plenty of media researchers, social academics and religious scholars tried to study these representations of biblical narratives of salvation and the end of the world. Apocalyptic Cinema has been investigated in cinematic, social and phenomenological approaches. In this research that is categorized in Critical Paradigm and is defined under the Post-structuralist tradition, I applied the Barthes’ model of structural analysis of narrative to identify and analyze the codes of the 10 selected movies of apocalyptic cinema in the first decade of the third millennium. Detecting and analyzing the motifs and the narratives genres of each movie, I provided a response to the main problem: How the biblical patterns of the salvation have represented in contemporary apocalyptic movies? According to the findings, the motifs that related to Jewish pattern of the salvation are adjusted to the apocalyptic genre; In contrast, the dependent motifs of Christian salvation pattern in the bible are allocated to the post-apocalyptic genre.