The road to the Apocalypse is paved with good intentions. Such is the case in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Sun 14 Oct at 20:05 on M-Net), when the innocent quest for an Alzheimer’s cure leads to rise of an army of super-intelligent, super-angry apes.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that a noble scientific quest has gone horribly wrong on screen. Here are other onscreen scientists who may have inadvertently doomed us all.

Lucius Fox and Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises
With most of the cinematic attention focusing on his brooding and crime-fighting, Batman is often given short shrift as an inventor. But he’s actually pretty nifty with a tool set, even going to far as to rustle up a solution to the world’s energy crisis in-between nights spent tackling Gotham’s criminal cornucopia. 

But when happens when one of those criminals takes control of Bruce’s fusion reactor and threatens to use it to blow up the city? Time to swap the tool belt for the utility belt and get back to doing what Batman does best.

Animal activists/Cambridge scientists in 28 Days Later
Raiding research facilities is a questionable practice to start with. Animal activists aren’t known for the rationality and willingness to listen to reason, but, generally, if you’re warned not to release the monkey infected with the Rage virus, don’t release the monkey infected with the Rage virus.

And just what did they think they were doing when they infected the monkey with the Rage virus in the first place? Bad scientists, bad!

Whoever invented the robots in The Matrix
The culprit is never named in the movies, but whoever thought it was a good idea to develop a race of super-powerful, self-aware robot/insect hybrid things then declare war on them clearly didn’t think things through.

The MNU in District 9
Throughout Neil Blomkamp’s acclaimed sci-fi feature, we’re constantly reminded that the oppressed Prawns who managed to get themselves stranded on Earth are the worker-drones of their society.

Which begs the question: what are the soldiers like? And, more importantly, what’s going to happen to us when they show up on Earth toting some seriously big guns and asking awkward questions about why exactly we conducted all those nasty experiments on their friends and countrymen?

Walter Bishop in Fringe (Thursdays at 21:30 on M-Net)
The trouble with building a doomsday machine is that you never known when your alternate self from a parallel universe is going to show up and use it to try destroy your world because you stole his son and raised him as your own. Tricky, that.