Your average person probably has no interest in being a prepper. But entertainment can still be found in the motivations. There are countless films out there about large scale disasters with protagonists that survive based on being prepared.
While these movies are works of fiction, and won’t exactly provide valuable information, they offer some wonderfully stimulating thoughts about why we prep, how we prep, and what we should be preparing for. Here are five films that we recommend all preppers watch, for one reason or another. They’re in no specific order and will be free of spoilers.
A Quiet Place
Starring John Krasinski, A Quiet Place tells the story of a family surviving when a strange alien race invades the planet and kills anything it can hear. With the catch of these aliens being blind, the family adapts to living a lifestyle of otherwise silence.
While the movie trailers focus on the aliens and quiet aspects, much of the film has prepper-centric concepts inside. This includes long term food storage, societal collapse, scavenging, and self-sufficient living. It also touches on the difficulty of raising a child in such an environment.
I Am Legend
Staring Will Smith, this film follows a scientist as he ends up being the only surviving human on Manhattan after a rapidly infectious zombie vampire virus. With the monsters only coming out at night, he uses the day to hunt, gather supplies, and keep himself entertained. We see some clever prepper ideas, like keeping track of which places he’s scavenged, and establishing a timer BEFORE sundown on his watch.
The strongest message of the film, from a prepper standpoint, has to be the idea of loneliness. The film consists of no one but him and his dog. You can see how he copes with the isolation, and how unraveled even he becomes when things start to go poorly. It reminds us that humans are social creatures and that complete isolation can lead to our downfall too.
American Blackout
This docudrama by National Geographic paints a “what-if” portrait of how the United States people would react if the national power grid was taken down by a cyberattack. While still made for entertainment purposes, it provides a more realistic expectation of how things would go down than a normal movie would.
The proposed realism is the value in this one. It provides plenty of possibilities to be prepared for, from the obvious lack of electrical power to the risk of anarchist looters. And with power failures happening in the real world already (from freak weather, not from cyberattacks, but still), it might be worth taking some of what it warns to heart.
Contagion
In this movie, a new disease has appeared and is rapidly spreading around the world. Lethal and highly infectious, the films shows the stress of those trying to stop it, along with the panic and fear of the rest of the world as a bad situation seemingly gets worse.
Perhaps this would be in poor taste, given the recent pandemic. Or perhaps it will provide some previously unnoticed insight, now that a similar situation hit the world. Aside from establishing sympathy for the medical professionals and scientists over the last year and a half, there’s some value in comparing what the film presents and how things actually went down in the real world.
10 Cloverfield Lane
A sequel of sorts to the wannabe Godzilla film Cloverfield, this film follows a young woman who wakes up in a disaster bunker with two other people. The bunker owner (played by John Goodman) claims to have saved the lives of her and the other guy, but is also keeping them hostage, in a sense. They aren’t allowed to leave, but aren’t being told why.
This presents an interesting perspective: can you actually help others? The bunker owner, a prepper at heart, wants to use his resources and preparation to help keep these other characters alive. But despite his well-intentioned efforts, they fear him enough to consider escaping to an inhospitable world. Should you help strangers in a disaster? How can you avoid becoming the monster, trying to keep them safe? It makes you think.
Again, these are all fictional stories and shouldn’t be taken as factual advice. But they provide some interesting perspectives to consider when planning a real world prepping scenario. And they’re entertaining enough that you could enjoy it with non-prepper friends and family.