Rewriting a Charles Randolph script already commissioned by Brad Pitt's company, Plan B (Pitt has a cameo as the film's quasi-counterculture
conscience), McKay turns Lewis's dense source into a blackly catastrophic comedy, a story of greed, venality, incompetence and barefaced corruption in which the good guys are the renegades who see
disaster coming and stake their shirts
on the apocalypse.