Mad Max to Children of Men to The Road. The sci-fi sub-genre whose central premise is the aftermath of the catastrophe rather than the catastrophe itself.
Post-apocalyptic sci-fi is the sub-genre whose central premise is the aftermath of catastrophic collapse rather than the catastrophe itself. The form's structural framework — civilisation has ended, the protagonists are surviving in the ruins, the question is what individual or community life can be built — has produced some of the most-distinctive science-fiction cinema of the past five decades.
George Miller's Mad Max franchise — Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Fury Road (2015), Furiosa (2024) — is the foundational post-apocalyptic film series in international cinema. The Australian-desert setting, the vehicle-based action choreography, the specific dystopian aesthetic Miller and his designers established have shaped almost every subsequent post-apocalyptic production. Fury Road is, by general critical consensus, the franchise's commercial-and-critical peak; Furiosa is the most-recent prequel that has extended the framework.
Post-apocalyptic films succeed when they use the catastrophic premise as structural enabling condition for serious character work rather than as backdrop for action spectacle. The films above mostly do this. Children of Men's specific question is what happens to civilisation when the future itself fails (the infertility); the answer the film offers is that small specific acts of human kindness become structurally important precisely because they cannot produce conventional continuation. The Road's father-and-son survival is, in some sense, an extended meditation on what parental love means when there is no future for the children to inherit. WALL-E's robot-romance is, structurally, about what care looks like after the conditions that made care socially supported have ended.
The form's failures are typically those that treat the post-apocalyptic premise as scenery — the dystopian aesthetic without serious engagement with what the aftermath actually means. The films above mostly avoid this.