For decades, filmmakers from around the world have returned to Australia's outback not merely for its vast and punishing landscape, but for what that landscape permits human beings to become. From Peter Weir's unexplained vanishings to Greg McLean's brutal predators, cinema has long understood that the red interior of a continent is most terrifying when it strips away the conventions that keep people civil. Netflix's Apex — watched for 2.54 billion minutes and counting — is only the latest chapter in a story that has been told since at least 1971: in the outback, the most dangerous animal is a