Archive for the 'Post-Apocalypse' Category
August 12, 2008 - 1:43 am - Posted by Administrator
The fourth installment of the Terminator series, Terminator Salvation is presently scheduled to be released in the summer of 2009, pushed back from an original Christmas 2008 release date. If first appearances are any indication, this installment will be a whole new beginning for the Terminator series.
For the first time, John Connor [Christian Bale–Dark Knight, Reign of Fire] will be the star of the show. No Arnold. For the first time, the Terminator world will be post-apocalypse, not a present day teetering perilously close to the brink.
In the trailer John Connor’s voiceover says “This is not the future my mother warned me about.” I’m running on pure speculation here, but I believe he is making reference to a darker, more horrific vision of the Terminator universe. The trailer seems to insinuate that John (and most of humanity for that matter) is a prisoner in a Skynet prison. He must escape with a female companion–likely Bryce Dallas Howard in the role of Kate Connor first played by Claire Danes in Terminator 3. Together they must face a post-apocalyptic world which Sarah conveniently forgot to tell John about.
According to a blog entry by director McG at the Terminator Salvation website, Arnold Shwarzenegger and James Cameron have been consulted regarding their ideas for the future of the franchise, and Christian Bale is reportedly working on the story as well. According to Visual Effects Supervisor Charles Gibson, McG is attempting to incorporate elements of the horror style as well so viewers can expect this installment to be scarier. Anton Yelchin has been cast as a teenage Kyle Reese, and Sam Worthington as a character named Marcus Wright.
This edition of the Terminator series reportedly happens after Judgement Day, but prior to 2029–the date when Skynet starts producing the Arnold-model T-800. We’re promised our introduction to the bigger, nastier T-600–the cyborg Kyle Reese alluded to in the original Terminator movie when he talked about the early terminators which were easy to spot because they had rubber skin.
For Terminator fans who were never big on the cheese-and-one-liners dimension of the original Terminator films, this one seems to be a departure from that. Terminator Salvation will be a meaner, darker type of science fiction, more serious in tone and bleaker in texture. On the downside,there seems to be a rumor floating around that Terminator Salvation will get a PG-13 rating. Let’s hope not.
Posted in 2009, Artificial Intelligence, Environmental Disaster, Post-Apocalypse, Robots/Cyborgs, The Future, Time Travel, coming attractions | No Comments »
August 11, 2008 - 2:54 am - Posted by Administrator
At the turn of the millennium, we all felt like we were on the verge of something big. And we were… the dawn of a new era in science fiction. In 1999, The Matrix became the first movie to encapsulate the concept of cyber-punk virtual reality and display it in a slick motion picture geared for a broad audience. The natural downside of such a large audience is the audible murmur from too-hip-for-the-room haters, sci-fi purists, and nerds. However, The Matrix’s gigantic audience and box office totals don’t lie… it was the first movie of it’s kind.
The Matrix really became a coming-out party for the Wachowski Brothers as a directing duo, and the signature role Keanu Reeves was looking for when he starred in Johnny Mnemonic. Second time’s the charm I guess.
Torn from the pages of a comic, The Matrix is the story of Neo. He’s a corporate grunt in a nothing job with a one bedroom apartment. Or is he? Through a series of encounters with strangers, Neo (Reeves) is tempted to test the boundaries of the reality he’s been living. A choice - the blue pill or the red pill?
Neo’s choice leads him to an awakening that first-time viewers are not prepared for. I distinctly remember my roomate saying as we walked out of the theatre “Dude, when he woke up in that pod… I was not ready for that!”
The most-intriguing plot point of the Matrix storyline is that physics do not apply. When you’re immersed in a computer-generated world, anything is possible. And of course that point lends itself to a visually flashy and action-packed film. Bullets by the bucketful, martial arts up your ass. Carrie-Ann Moss co-stars as Trinity, a bad-ass chick in latex and Neo’s love interest. Laurence Fishburne is the guru–Morpheus, the man with the answers, and the cool shades.
Morpheus sends Neo on a sort of vision quest to fulfill his destiny. Much like the Star Wars series, the story touches on spiritual themes when Neo visits “The Oracle”. And his battles with Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith are some of the greatest fight scenes ever choreographed. Weaving’s speech patterns and teeth-baring grimace nearly steal the show.
Not since The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2) has a movie so singlehandedly defined it’s genre. The styles worn by the actors have saturated pop culture, the special effects have been mimicked but rarely equalled, and the concept of virtual reality or synthetic immersion has now been fully crystallized in the film-going consciousness.
***** Five Stars
Posted in 1999, Artificial Intelligence, Environmental Disaster, Five Star Rating, Post-Apocalypse, Robots/Cyborgs, The Future, Virtual Reality | No Comments »
March 22, 2008 - 8:44 pm - Posted by Administrator
Any movie where New York City is one huge ghost town is alright with me. However, I Am Legend feels like a re-write too many on a concept that’s nearly overdone at present–the concept that thinking, feeling humans have disappeared and the world is populated by mindless, blood-thirsty beasts, devoid of emotion and feeling.
Will Smith stars as Robert Neville, the last known survivor of a plague that began as a viral cure for cancer. In 2009, the plague nearly wipes out the human race. Neville is left as the lone remaining human in New York City, the rest of the inhabitants having been transformed into ‘zompires’ by the virus. OK, they’re not really called ‘zompires’ but they might as well be. I Am Legend’s screenplay was co-written by co-producer Akiva Goldsman–producer of such winners as Deep Blue Sea, Starsky and Hutch, and Poseidon. Goldsman’s screenplay was in turn based on a screenplay by John William Corrington for 1971’s Omega Man starring Charleton Heston, which was in turn based on the novel by Richard Matheson. Why the studio would decide to bring a classic science fiction novel to the big screen by borrowing from a badly-done version of the story from the seventies is beyond me. Perhaps it’s Goldsman’s penchant for lame remakes. Note to Goldsman: you’re standing on the shoulders of giants and ruining what they’ve achieved.
Couple the remake-prone producer Goldsman with a director [Francis Lawrence] whose only credits are music videos, and you’ve invited disaster. I look forward to the day when movie studios understand that classic science fiction stories need to be produced and directed by auteurs with singular uncompromised vision, not thrown together from fragments of screenplays and helmed by whomever happens to be free to direct/produce at the moment that fits the studio’s schedule. It’s about more than money.
Robert Neville spends his days in New York City hunting for food and having conversation with his only friend… his dog. He maintains a sense of normalcy by watching DVDs–one at a time–which he faithfully retrieves from a video store each day, talking to the mannequins he’s arranged in the store as if they were real humans. He has recorded a message which is repeatedly broadcast on the radio–a plea for anyone who hears it to meet him on the pier at midday. His wait for a response stretches into it’s third year, and Neville keeps busy by continuing his work as a biologist in his basement lab, working on a cure for the virus which has turned nearly six billion people into “darkseekers”–blood thirsty mutants with compulsively violent urges. They are powerfully allergic to light and stay inside in the day, coming out at night to feed on blood.
The problem with movies like I Am Legend is, there is only one reasonable outcome… the lone survivor of the apocalypse will eventually discover he’s not alone. Knowing that in advance, it can get pretty frustrating waiting for the other humans to show up when the story moves at a snail’s pace like this one does.
There are lots of great special effects, and the city of New York makes a great character, even when it’s empty, but the story just didn’t hook me. The computer-animated nature of the “darkseekers” gives a sense of artificiality to villains who would have been far scarier had they been more human. Neville’s flashbacks to his prior life are annoying as well. The whole movie I kept thinking they would have been better-served to have just told the flashback part of the story first, then progress to the post-apocalypse part of the story in linear fashion instead of flashing back and forth the whole time.
In the end, making this bad adaptation of Richard Matheson’s story only ensured one thing–that this story will eventually be adapted again. Let’s hope they get it right next time.
Posted in 2007, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, The Future, Two Star Rating | No Comments »
March 9, 2008 - 9:35 pm - Posted by Administrator
Looking at the Mad Max trilogy as a whole, a few unusual things stand out. First, it’s one of the rare series flicks where episode two [The Road Warrior, aka Mad Max 2] was seen by a vastly larger audience than the original. And second, despite going through a transformative series of changes in tone, the Mad Max trilogy has single-handedly re-defined the post-apocalyptic film.
Director George Miller reportedly worked as an Emergency Room doctor in his native Australia to raise the money to film Mad Max. Through wise use of story and setting, the lack of funds barely shows–or at least not any more than your avergae low-budget movie. Max [Mel Gibson] is an Australian cop in a near-future where society is at it’s last stand. Roving gangs of bikers and hot rodders roam the highways of the Australian outback. Max and his fellow officers are the final hand of authority, attempting to maintain order from behind the wheel of their police interceptors.
Early in the movie Max chases down a gangleader named “The Night Rider”. With a methodical patience he hounds the Night Rider on the highway, bumping him from the rear, eventually causing him to lose control and crash in a fiery explosion. When Max’s family is killed by the gang in retaliation, he dusts of his ultimate pursuit vehicle, the co-star of the movie, the Ford Falcon Coupe XB GT, a car which has been manufactured by Ford in Australia since 1960. Not be confused with the US or Argentinian vehicles of the same name.
What ensues is a violent chase movie, set against the backdrop of rural Australia. Which brings me to an aside… In The Road Warrior [aka Mad Max 2] and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome [Mad Max 3], George Miller’s story, co-written by Byron Kennedy, does explain the post-apocalyptic nature of the setting to some degree, however Mad Max appears to happen in a world that is not-quite-post-apocalyptic–the grass is still green, crops are still growing, and most social order still exists. And then at the open of The Road Warrior, the world has been destroyed by a nuclear war. Unless I’m figuring wrong (which I could be), a nuclear war happened some time between Mad Max, and The Road Warrior. They should make a movie out of that story!
The real thrill of Mad Max is the amazing chase scenes and dozens of crashes, explosions, and violent death scenes. Max pursues the members of the gang relentlessly, never giving mercy, and never feeling a thing. Mad Max wasn’t a sensation at the box office, but it should be noted Mad Max arrived at about the same time as HBO and exposed a whole generation of young fans to a movie they probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. And an interesting side note, the movie was originally shown to American audiences with Mel Gibson’s voice dubbed because producers were afraid Americans wouldn’t understand his Australian accent. The voice track has since been restored to Gibson’s original.
In essence Mad Max is a car movie. The soundtrack is little more than pistons and percussion, plus the cop sirens sound badass and futuristic somehow. Add in the right-drive Australian pursuit vehicles, and it’s a car-lovers paradise. As a childhood fan of movies like Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry, and Vanishing Point, this one sat well with me growing up.
The tone and story are considerably different in each of the sequels, and if you’re like me, you may find yourself liking one and disliking the others. Originally, the sequel was released in the United States as “The Road Warrior” and only recently was it re-titled Mad Max 2, presumably to maximize DVD sales of Mad Max to an audience which has never given it more than cult status.
**** Four Stars ****
Posted in 1979, Environmental Disaster, Four Star Rating, Post-Apocalypse, The Future | No Comments »
February 24, 2008 - 4:32 pm - Posted by Administrator
Children of Men is a rare example of a science fiction concept that’s so intriguing and unique, I decided I had to see it just because it was different. It’s 2027 and the scourge of mankind is none of the usual suspects… not cancer, not HIV, but unexplained infertility. It’s been 19 years since a human was born on planet Earth.
As with most of the science fiction films of the George W. Bush era, the post-apocalyptic storyline neccessitates the incorporation of concepts from the headlines, including homeland security, the erosion of civil liberties, and citizen internment. Many scenes were reminiscent of the imprisonment of the Jews as widely depicted in the war films of the last several decades. Children of Men is a virtual study of our society’s deepest darkest fears at a time when western ideas are reviled, technology is suspect, and religious fundamentalism is at an all time high.
Theo Faron [Clive Owen] works for the Government and his ex-wife Julian [Julianne Moore] is a member of a radical anti-government insurgency. Together they find themselves transporting a young British girl with one remarkable attribute–she’s pregnant. And hence my dislike for the movie. Like most of the grey science fiction concepts of late, nothing much happens other than “let’s go here, now we have to run away“. Repeat twelve times.
Director Alfonso Cuaron [Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban] did a great job of building the universe and filling the back story through the incorporation of background elements like billboards, media reports, and even graffiti. Britain is the last bastion of civilization (and only modestly civilized at that) and the government has implemented mandatory fertility testing. Non-compliance is a crime. Citizens are urged to report suspicious activity. Believing infertility is a punishment from God, religious groups urge repentance. All are introduced in the background.
Unfortunately, all that heavy symbolism (and the stunning sobriety of Clive Owen as hero Theo Faron) didn’t do much for my viewing experience. I must be the rare exception to the rule, because nearly every science fiction fan I’ve talked to thought Children of Men was the second coming of cinema. I didn’t care for it.
Children of Men is bleak and beautiful, well-crafted and thought-provoking. That said, I still thought it was boring and below-average. That unique and intriguing concept I mentioned at the beginning is all this movie really has at the end. An interesting situation filled with cardboard characters.
** Two Stars **
Posted in 2006, Environmental Disaster, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, The Future, Two Star Rating | No Comments »
February 23, 2008 - 9:42 pm - Posted by Administrator
Alright, I’ve fucking had it OK? I give. Please stop making Resident Evil movies. It’s massively fucked up when you can turn this into an economically-successful movie franschise.
I’ll admit, when the original came out to respectable praise, it did bring an aura of legitimacy to movies that began as a concept for a video game. And the sequel was pretty okay too. But this is too much. Seriously.
First, at the beginning of the movie when Milla Jovovich does a voiceover explanation of events thus far, she explains how the human race has come nearly to extinction and the continents are now barren deserts. The very next sequence is an aerial shot of the desert. And I wonder immediately if the story has been modified on a whim by a screenwriter or director who thinks post-apocalypse pictures have to look like a Mad Max movie (or a Tupac Shakur video if you prefer). No green stuff allowed please! OK, me being anal. I’ll grant you.
In the first minutes of the movie our primary heroine Alice [Milla Jovovich] is killed (to my great puzzlement). Then we’re informed she was merely one clone of dozens… presumably so we won’t be surprised when a character who should be dead shows up alive later in the movie. I think it’s always good for a character to be made disposable, don’t you? Who cares if she lives? They’ll just poop out another copy of Alice and we can try again. Maybe somebody could have asked Sigourney Weaver how that worked out for Ripley’s box office receipts.
But, when we get to the first major action sequence–I say ‘major’ because there’s no shortage of action, major, minor, necessary or unnecessary–it’s Alice versus a redneck family who lured her to a radio station with a phony distress broadcast. They’ve trained the now-familiar Resident Evil hellhounds to attack like doberman junkies on t-virus dope, and Alice’s first battle is a protracted one with multiple slimy red mutts. Once she escapes from the mutts–and the rednecks–the real movie can begin.
The t-virus has destroyed the world. To survive, humans must stay mobile and ready to confront any number of viral villains, including the aforementioned doggies, infected birds, and of course a plethora of zombies.
It only took forty-nine minutes before I saw a scene that was so derivative, so cheesy, so poorly done that I wanted to press ‘Stop’ soooo bad… a scene where the scientist–Dr. Isaacs [Iain Glen]–has a conversation with a holographic character in a black suit and black shades. The actor whose name I have been unable to track down appears to be overtly trying to emulate the appearance and tight-mouthed speech pattern of Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith from the Matrix movies. And the special effect used when the holograph disappears is so cheap, it reminded me of my days grazing episodes of Star Trek: Voyager on UPN–cheap special effects to make up for bad storylines–it’ll work great! Once I saw this scene, I couldn’t stop thinking about how some movie studio head saw the first cut of Extinction and said
“You know I don’t see any hipness to this cut… couldn’t you add some of those snazzy suits and Ray-Ban sunglasses like the Matrix? All the kids seem to love that stuff these days.”
And some studious little movie rat went and wrote it into the movie as an afterthought.
Ali Larter is too hot and feminine for a badass chick in a post-apocalyptic world, not to mention too clean–rub some dirt on her face will you? The cowboy character is annoying. The science storyline is a waste of time. The blood is excessive and unnecessary and has lost it’s power to shock. And something about the Resident Evil franchise taking a post-apocalyptic turn–with earthtone textures and cloudless blue skies–in a story that began as a tale about zombies in a gothic mansion… it just doesn’t seem right. I almost wonder if they went too-far to the science fiction end of the scale when maybe they should have stayed to the left end of the suspense/horror scale.
The original is worth seeing, the sequel if you’re desperate, but this third installment blows. Forget it.
Anal Probe Rating: It’s two hours of discomfort and you won’t remember it tomorrow.
Posted in 2007, Anal Probe Rating, Environmental Disaster, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse | No Comments »
February 23, 2008 - 8:06 pm - Posted by Administrator
Fifty years from now, when we look back on the movies of this first decade of the millenium, we will compare them to the science fiction of the seventies. Bleak. Downbeat. Realistic.
28 Weeks Later is a stylistically brilliant example; aesthetically beautiful from lighting to editing. As a sequel, it remains visually and cinematically true to the original, 28 Days Later (2002) in it’s desperate depiction of survival in a post-apocalyptic London which has been virtually wiped out. There is no joy, no future, no hope.
The storyline picks up right where the original left off, but with a new set of characters. Great Britain has been destroyed by the infection, but the infected who wander the streets eventually starve to death. Under the direction of a U.S. led NATO force, the reconstruction of London begins. But it seems the claims the infection had run it’s course were far too optimistic.
This movie will make you squirm in your seat. The main characters, a family trying to survive and stay together, take you on a kind of emotional roller-coaster to a very sensitive place, which in turn makes the gory scenes of unbelievable violence all the harder to take. When Don (Robert Carlyle) is infected, transforms into a zombie, and then proceeds to gouge out the eyeballs of his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) with his thumbs, I almost gave up. Fortunately, I was watching with a group of friends and couldn’t just turn it off. I was glad to see it got better, although it is violent and gory.
28 Weeks Later does have it’s shortcomings. First and foremost, no Cillian Murphy. His role in the original pulled you in and kept you for the duration. The sequel suffers from it’s own serial-killing… all of our heroes end up dead in a relentless parade of uber-violent death scenes, including the aforementioned thumbs-in-eyes bit, the obligatory throat-tearing and limb-eating scenes we’ve come to expect from Zombie movies, and the immolation of an American Soldier with a flame-thrower. And just in case you’re not grossed-out enough, we also get countless head and chest explosions from high-caliber firearms, and the topper–the killing of dozens of infected with the blades of a helicopter. And at it’s core, the zombie premise limits the movie to the standard zombie-film mold–it’s a chase flick.
Like the original, 28 Weeks Later is loaded with societal parallels and ponderings, including homeland security, illegal immigration, and civil liberties. Like the movies of the seventies, this story mirrors reality in a difficult time–the implication being the thinking citizen has disappeared and has been replaced by blood-thirsty autmomatons. Where are the powers of good? Where are the voices of the righteous? But perhaps I’m over-thinking it.
*** Three Stars ***
Posted in 2007, Environmental Disaster, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, Three Star Rating | No Comments »
January 9, 2008 - 10:20 pm - Posted by Administrator
OK, so I’m gonna admit right up front, I had about five beers and a couple of margaritas in me, and it was about one thirty in the morning before I finally sat down to watch Final one night. I think I DVR’ed it from the Independent Film Channel if I remember right. It’s possible that I don’t because of the beers and margaritas, but if you’ve been reading much of this blog, you probably already know I’m full of shit, so no point pretending I’m informed now.
Occasionally I take notes while I’m watching movies so I can refer to them later when I blog it. Here’s what I wrote for Final:
I don’t know if I can buy Denis Leary in this type of role.
What the hell is going on in this movie?
What the fuck?? Is that Jim Gaffigan?
Is something going to happen soon?
This is a science fiction movie without special effects!
After that my writing trails off on the page and ends in a stain that can only be the drool from where I fell asleep at about three am.
Here’s the deal. Final is one of those concepts that was borne out of a love for science fiction, minus the money to do it properly. Final is as low-budget as they come. Denis Leary is Bill, a man who wakes up in something that’s not quite a prison, but a little more than a hospital. We do not know exactly what Bill’s malady is, but we are treated to flashbacks from his life where he appears to be going through a very tough time. He’s the outcast of his family, he’s broken up with his fiancee, his father has died, and eventually he flashes back to his own apparent attempted suicide.
His therapist Ann (Hope Davis) is in charge of deciding whether he’s “recovering” or not. She begins work figuring out why he has delusions of being cryogenically frozen for four hundred years, and why he believes he will soon be executed. Just as you’re about to go, “OK, what the fuck??” and hit the stop button on the DVR, the story unfurls itself all at once and you find out that Bill hasn’t been frozen for four hundred years, but he is going to die soon.
The pacing in Final is terrible. Nothing seems to happen for the first half of the movie, then they reveal, like, ten plot points all at once, then there’s a long slow slide to the end. It’s like Denis Leary said “I’ve been frozen for four hundred years” and the doctors said “No you haven’t. Seriously.” Then as the movie viewer, you go “OK, whew. Cuz that would have been weird.” Then the Doctors say, “Instead you’ve been in a coma, your mom died, your girlfriend abandoned you to a science experiment and got remarried, we froze you, there was a terrible epidemic that ravaged the world, now we woke you up, but we have to kill you so we can save the world with your tissue cells because you were frozen before the pandemic burned into the human genome.” And all of that is revealed in less than five minutes. Nothing else happens. And the entire movie (except the brief flashbacks) happens in the hospital. Jim Gaffigan plays a hospital orderlie who hardly ever speaks.
But then maybe I was just drunk.
** Two Stars
Posted in Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, Suspended Animation, The Future, Time Travel, Two Star Rating | No Comments »
January 7, 2008 - 12:36 am - Posted by Administrator
After the world witnessed the horrors of the second World War, the science fiction genre became a psychological sounding board, reflecting nuclear nightmares and a fear of technology. Moviemakers populated their films with mushroom clouds and UFOs, harbingers of our inevitable technological doom. These are the movies I grew up with.
Unknown to me were the movies of the previous generation, the post-World War I movies which portrayed the horrors of the day. Poison gas attacks. Things to Come is one of those movies.
Filmed in 1935, and released in 1936, as Europe was on the brink of another World War, Things to Come is the story of one hundred years in Everytown, a city which is popularly believed to be a thinly-veiled London.
Things to Come is based on The Shape of Things to Come novel by H.G. Wells, and the movie was written by Wells himself. Director William Cameron Menzies [Around the World in 80 Days, Gone with the Wind] was said to have entertained Wells suggestions during the production process as well.
The story covers a timeline that stretches from 1936 to 2036, and that timeline is the main shortcoming of the script. The movie becomes an unceasing parade of new characters and they can become laborious to keep track of. In the beginning, Everytown is an idyllic community of peaceful citizens. They spend Christmas in fear of a war which eventually decimates the city. The war goes on for thirty years and is followed by a plague called the “Wandering Sickness” which runs rampant for years more. They slowly become isolated from the world, communication is cut off, and the survivors shun technology. Things to Come is, to my knowledge, the first post-apocalyptic science fiction film. Although many would argue Metropolis deserves that honor, this is the earliest one I ever saw which looked… dirty. Like Mad Max. A crucial component for any post-apocalypse picture.
Eventually the local techno-phobe warlord who rules Everytown is surprised by the appearance of a stranger in possession of high-technology–most notably, futuristic airplanes. The stranger is able to convince the citizens of Everytown that social order is making a comeback in other parts of the world, and technology plays a big part of it. He brings a message of hope for a future tech-savvy civilization–”Wings Over the World”.
After Everytown’s World War I-era air force is easily defeated by the highly-advanced Wings Over the World Air Force, the citizens embrace technology whole-heartedly and begin rebuilding Everytown Utopian-style, underground and highly futuristic. The movie comes to a conclusion in 2036 as humans prepare to send our first astronauts to the moon via a giant “Space Gun”, as yet another group of techno-phobe citizens threatens to revolt.
Many have called Things to Come cheesy, the story preachy, and the dialogue corny. All of those things are true at times. Honestly the choice of costumes for the futuristic characters is a little too Flash Gordon for my taste. I don’t get into the whole Toga-and-Shoulder-Pads look. And the dialogue is generally too wooden and, well, 1930s-ish. However, the real legacy of Things to Come is the look. If you were mesmerized by the visuals in the otherwise-terrible “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” then you will enjoy Things to Come. The first time I watched it, every ten minutes I had a light-bulb moment… “Oh, so that’s where they got the idea for that…”
Director Menzies would go on to contribute to the motion picture industry primarily as a producer, and especially in the field of Art Direction and Design. His flair for the artistic shows. The sets, models, and locations used in this movie are nearly unparalleled, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was a movie filmed in 1935. In Things to Come, you’ll see portrayals of Auto-Gyros (an early type of helicopter), super-highways, flying wings, elevated monorails, moving sidewalks, flat screen video monitors (transparent no less), and more. Watch for the 2036 scene where the guy turns on his video monitor to show his granddaughter what Everytown used to look like, and you can see through the screen from the back. Prophetic. Keep in mind, this is during a time when nobody had a television.
Anyway, this is not your movie if you need today’s special effects and dialogue. The sound is especially bad in this movie. But if you can appreciate it for its occasional moments, definitely check it out. It’s a science fiction classic. If I could split it up, I’d give it three stars for story, but four stars for the look.
Posted in 1930's, Four Star Rating, Post-Apocalypse, The Future | No Comments »
December 13, 2007 - 8:42 pm - Posted by Administrator
The Postman had two strikes against it when it hit theatres in 1997. First, Kevin Costner was the star and director at a time when his choice of roles [Waterworld], and his reportedly flimsy acting skills were the subject of tabloid chatter. Second, it opened in theatres on the same day as Titanic. I acutally went and checked it out by myself that night (my wife was out of town) and I was all alone in the theatre. They had Titanic running on eight of the other screens in the same cinema complex.
The actual script for the Postman is pretty good. Be warned, this one is also an epic and clocks in at 177 minutes.
It is 2013 and war and plagues have wiped out civilization as we once knew it on Earth. The United States of America no longer exists. Survivors have retreated from the cities to fortified rural communities and forts.
Costner plays The Postman, a drifter who stumbles onto a wrecked postal truck one night while searching for shelter in a freezing rainstorm. He dons the cold weather clothing from the corpse in the drivers’ seat and entertains himself by reading the mail. When he later tries to gain access to a gated rural community, he is forced to con his way in by making up a story about delivering the mail for the “Restored United States”. And that is where the story truly begins, the story of liberty’s triumph over the forces of tyranny–the villain General Bethlehem played excellently by Will Patton. The movie also features an early onscreen performance by a relatively unknown Giovanni Ribisi.
One small drawback of this movie would be the decidely non-science fiction setting. The vehicles of choice in The Postman are horses, and most of the action takes place outdoors. But for those who love post-apocalyptic sci-fi like Mad Max, I Am Legend, and The Omega Man this movie is an absolute must-view.
**** Four Stars
Posted in 1997, Environmental Disaster, Four Star Rating, Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, The Future | No Comments »
