PostApocalyptica

Last Night (the good one, not the crappy Keira Knightly one)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:00 GMT

A few days ago, while searching for something interesting to watch on Netflix I stumbled across a movie I had managed to have never heard of. This, despite the fact that it has several actors I know and like and is definitely the kind of story that I like. Last Night is the debut film by the Canadian writer/director/actor Don McKellar, and is set during the last six hours before the literal end of the world. An unspecified disaster, which has apparently been known about for at least several months, is going to kill every last human being on the planet at the stroke of midnight (Eastern time). The story follows a small group of characters whose stories interweave over the course of their final half-dozen hours of existence.

The cast includes Sandra Oh, Sarah Polley (she was the little girl in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but you would probably recognize her better as the lead in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead), Callum Keith Rennie (if you were a Battlestar Galactica fan you would recognize him as the cylon “Number Two” or Leoben Conoy), a slightly-more-than-a-cameo appearance by David Cronenberg, and another slightly-more-than-a-cameo appearance by Geneviève Bujold. Set in Toronto, this is an extremely Canadian take on the end of the world.

Just what do I mean? Well, most of my readers are from here in the United States, and I suspect that anyone reading this from outside the US is well familiar with the good old U S of A method of apocalyptic storytelling: Hire either Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer, get the best special effects houses in the world to digitally blow #$^@ up, and slap a bunch of big name actors in front of the green screen to scream and run as the world falls apart. Big, dumb, loud, and the only thing approaching character development is the suspense of whether the estranged and irresponsible dad will overcome his childish tendencies and save his family (yes, he will, invariably). That is not this movie.

Instead, Last Night uses virtually no special effects. The end of the world is coming, and at least in Toronto the people seem to be facing their demise with a generally subdued politeness and sense of duty. David Cronenberg’s character is the manager of the local gas utility, and he has been personally phoning every single customer to thank them for their business and to reassure them that the gas will remain on until the very end. Sandra Oh’s character starts the movie out shopping for the supplies for the last night with her husband, and she experiences the closest thing to apocalyptic fury in the entire film: while she is in the store, a gang of partiers vandalizes her car.

Don McKellar’s character simply wants to spend his last few hours alone, for reasons that become clearer as the story progresses. And yet, he is drawn into helping Sandra Oh get home to her husband – a storyline that intersects with Callum Keith Rennie, who has dedicated his final days to living out every single sexual fantasy he has ever imagined. Meanwhile out on the streets of Toronto people are gathering to party like it’s New Year’s Eve as the ever-charming Jackie Burrougs runs through the streets announcing how much time is remaining.

The setup might seem odd, but it ends up being surprisingly effective. The complete lack of explanation for the end-of-word event (What exactly is it? Why is it happening precisely at midnigh? Why does the sun continue to shine brightly even as midnight approaches) actually works in the story’s favor. Rather than getting bogged down in trying to give a plausible explanation, it simply is. All of the people who were going to react badly have already done so in the previous few months, and what little violence remains is more of the overzealous boisterous sort rather than actively dangerous (with a very few startling exceptions). Instead of explosions and spectacle, we are given humans asking themselves what is the meaning of their lives, and what remains that is worthwhile. The final thirty seconds of the movie are simply breathtaking, set against a soundtrack choice that is both surprising and yet perfectly telegraphed. In a certain way it reminded me of the ending to On the Beach, and yet with its own unique biting charm.

If you are looking for a slap-bang American action movie with lots of disaster porn, then go watch Roland Emmerich’s cheesy crapfest 2012. But if you are looking for a really good Canadian character piece that is at turns funny, touching, and heartrending, then please go give Last Night a look. It’s on Netflix streaming, and it is well worth an hour and a half of your time.

NEXT WEEK: The Old Man and the Wasteland

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Category: Apocalypse

Category: Fiction

Category: Unspecified

The War Game - Nuclear War Comes to Britain

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:00 GMT

In 1965, the powerful documentary filmmaker Peter Watkins made the amazing “Culloden” – a documentary about the 1746 Jacobite uprising, done in the style of the Vietnam War reporting being done at the time. The docudrama was widely praised and went on to win a BAFTA award for its innovative style. Following on that success, his next project was intended to be aired as a documentary special airing on the 20th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. The War Game was presented as a documentary detailing the events leading up to and then following a nuclear attack on Britain by the Soviet Union. Before it could be aired, however, it was pulled from release by the BBC because it was deemed “…too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.”

With a run time of not quite 50 minutes, this riveting faux-documentary is very brief in duration and yet all the more powerful because of it. It is a snapshot of society during the mid-60’s as the threat of nuclear war was nearing its peak. With only two decades having passed since the London Blitz, virtually every adult involved with this production had direct personal memories of life during and after warfare (something which American civilians such as myself have never experienced, and have a difficult time comprehending), and that experience comes through in a myriad of heartbreaking ways throughout the show.

Watkins almost exclusively uses amateurs in his productions rather than experienced actors, which lends an amazing sense of reality and despair to the proceedings. He starts by laying out the logistics involved with a full-scale evacuation during the run-up to war, with tens of thousands of women and children being relocated from urban centers into the surrounding countryside and with homeowners being compelled by the government to take in and care for these masses of people. When the first bombs fall the victims are given barely three minutes warning before the first nuclear flash. We are shown a young boy standing in his yard screaming and covering his face, while a dispassionate narrator describes the intensity of the flash and its ability to literally melt eyeballs in their sockets for anyone unfortunate enough to be looking in that direction.

A few seconds after the flash comes the heat of the blast itself and the concurrent shockwave. Furniture and clothing spontaneously combust, and then the documentary moves into what I found to be the most riveting section – a blow-by-blow description of a true firestorm that grows in intensity as the buildings and structures feeding it collapse. Hundred mile an hour winds are sucked into the firestorm, drawing in more victims and spurring the heat even higher. For those not killed by the fire itself, we see them slowly collapse as the oxygen level is depleted and the methane and carbon dioxide levels increase.

Although fictional, The War Game is presented as a true documentary and remains every bit as powerful today as it was 47 years ago when it was originally filmed. Although the BBC did not air it (at least not until 1985), it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1966. In 2000 the British Film Institute created a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programs, and The War Game was placed as #27 on that list. If you have Netfilx, it is currently available for streaming there and I heartily suggest you take an hour to watch it. It is is a moving, grueling 50 minutes of programming that I think will leave you stunned. Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer can make all the big action spectacles they want, spend millions upon millions of dollars creating CGI porn of Los Angeles falling into the ocean, and they will never be able to touch the power of this little film shot with almost no budget on simple black and white celluloid. It really is that powerful, and I truly hope you will seek it out and give it a look.

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Category: Apocalypse

Category: Nuclear

Category: Fiction

Category: Television

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Published in 2010, The Passage is the first book of a planned trilogy by Justin Cronin. The novel spent nearly two months on the New York Times bestseller list, and more importantly my wife really liked it and suggested that I should read it. In broad strokes the story is about a secret government experiment that is attempting to create super-soldiers but instead unleashes a virus that ultimately destroys civilization (at least in North America, we are never given any glimpse of the wider world so it is unknown whether or not the infection was contained). The twelve initial test subjects, all death row inmates who were offered the removal of their death sentence in exchange for participating in the experiment, become in effect vampires. One tenth of their victims also become lesser vampires, powerful enough to hunt mankind nearly to extinction and yet under the thrall of whichever of The Twelve is the original source of their infection. The first third of the book details the experiment itself and how its subjects were recruited, leading to the inevitable apocalyptic breach of security, and then the remainder of the book is set nearly a century later at an outpost called The Colony where what may be the last surviving humans live in a protected enclave that is surrounded by giant lights that keep the monsters at bay during the long, dark nights. A little girl named Amy becomes the last subject of the experiment, and she becomes something entirely different. We are told she is destined to save the world, and her story is the through-line that holds everything together.

First off let me say, I really did enjoy this book. That may not be evident in the paragraphs that follow, because I have some very specific annoyances with the writing style, but on the whole I thought it was a good book that is well worth picking up. At over 750 pages it is obviously an epic read, but it has quite a bit of interesting things going on inside those covers. Stylistically it attempts to straddle the chasm between being a literary work and a piece of popular fiction. The story really is more about the characters, relationships, and inner journeys but it is punctuated with many gripping action sequences. Parts of it are extremely cinematic, in particular the scenes like the initial breaching of the laboratory security or the running pitched battle on the locomotive, while much of the novel is really about the journey that the characters make (both physical and emotional). Although it is the first book of a trilogy, it does end on a satisfying note that completes the initial quest while still setting up the epic struggle to come.

With the current glut of vampire stories out there (thank you so much, Stephanie Meyer and Charlaine Harris), I was a little skeptical about yet another blood sucking epic whatever. As it turns out, Justin Cronin does some very interesting things with the vampire mythology by mixing up historical vampire lore with modern virology. Yes, the virals fear the light. Yes, they are apparently immortal and have uncanny strength and stamina. Yes, they have rows of sharp teeth, and if they choose to they can turn you into one of them. But these are not sparkly Twilight vampires or hot & sexy True Blood vampires, they are brutal, animalistic hunters that travel in packs and destroy everything in their paths. Aside from The Twelve, they have no apparent intellect at all, they are simply drones fighting for their own pack at the behest of their one single leader.

On the flipside, the humans of The Colony also have a very interesting and well-thought-out social dynamic. After 93 years of waiting for the Army to return, they have formed their own distinct culture in which the children under 8 (referred to as Littles by the adults) live in a protected sanctuary at the center of the compound, kept completely unaware of the true nature of the world. Power for the lights is maintained by a wind farm and power station nearby, and the walls are protected by the trained soldiers of The Watch. Although they have maintained a state of relative safety, the simple truth is that the technology that keeps the lights on at night is slowly failing as the parts become increasingly un-fixable; most of the residents of The Colony don’t know it, but their days are numbered unless something changes soon.

So yeah, there are a lot of great world-building in this novel and it leaves plenty of room for growth in the next two books (The Twelve is due in the summer of 2012, with The City of Mirrors due in 2014). I gather that the author has the entire story mapped out, and I will be particularly interested to see what things in this first book become more important in retrospect once the trilogy is complete. In fact, I am sincerely hoping that the first book will become better in retrospect, because right now I would only give it three stars out of five.

The first issue I have is that Justin Cronin seems to suffer from the same disease as Stephen King, never using a sentence where a paragraph will suffice. I honestly think that at least a quarter of the book could have been edited out without adversely effecting the plot or characters. As an example, he spends page after page at the start of the book giving the sad story of Amy’s mother, detailing her tragic fall from being a promising young woman to being a desperate single mother and prostitute, ultimately driving her to abandon Amy at a convent because as a mother she can no longer care for her child. It’s sad, it’s heartbreaking, and once she walks out that door she no longer has any impact on the story. What took multiple pages to tell could have been just as effectively done in a few paragraphs as she abandons Amy with the nuns. Similarly, the first segment of the book spends a significant amount of time on the back story of Carter, the last of the death row inmates to be taken into the experiment. Chapter after chapter is spent on Carter, his past, how he was sentenced to death for an incident that was really a suicide and not a murder. All of that time spent, and then the primary antagonist for the story turns out to be Babcock – the first of the death row inmates and one for whom we get literally no back story at all. Now, perhaps all of those details on Carter will become important in the next book, but if that is the case then it could have been dealt with in flashbacks at the appropriate narrative time.

Which leads me to issue number two: flashbacks. Or, more accurately, flashbacks inside of flashbacks inside of flashbacks. At times the story feels more like Inception with Vampires, and it gets very frustrated. Hey, I’m a big Doctor Who fan and I am down with timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly non-linear storylines. I like when an author plays with perceptions and sequence and does things to keep the readers on their toes. But at a certain point a story can go past being non-linear and move on to being just plain confusing. This is especially true when all of the nested flashbacks involve characters and settings that are completely new to the reader. But even worse that confusing, at times the flashbacks become flat out infuriating when they become excuses to avoid writing about actual events in real time.

My third frustration is exactly that, Cronin’s tendency to write right up to the edge of a significant event and then abruptly skip right past that pivotal thing and only tell about it in passing in a later flashback. At one point he spends a full 25 pages foreshadowing “The Night of Blades and Stars”, and you just know that when that @#$^ goes down it is going to be epic. The lights are going to go out, the virals are going to invade The Colony, and there will be riveting action just pouring out of the pages. Except, instead of that happening he writes right up to the moment before the lights go out, and then he skips ahead to the next morning and mentions that hey, yeah, the lights went out for three minutes last night. We get flashbacks from a few characters regarding what they did during the outage, but there is no sense of peril in this (clearly if they are alive in the morning then they are exceedingly unlikely to be killed or seriously injured during the subsequent flashback). He does this in another place, where a group of characters is spending their first night away from The Colony. Cronin spends multiple pages describing their very tense night, in which the building is surrounded by virals but they never attack. This is immediately followed by a chapter that is presented as the journal of one of the members of that group, and in one of her journal entries she spends three sentences describing a later night in which they really were attacked. The virals breached their defenses, several virals were killed, and one of the group was seriously injured. Now *that* is a scene I wanted to read about in vivid detail, and instead I get just a handful of sentences in passing. I seriously wanted to scream at that point.

But again, overall I did quite enjoy the book. Whatever its weaknesses, it manages to do creative new things with the vampire genre and creates an interesting and plausible post-apocalyptic world. It tells a solid story that comes to a strong conclusion while also hinting at the epic struggle to come, and it takes several of its characters on solid emotional arcs. If it has some frustrations, I will happily take those as the cost of a story well told.

But seriously, dude, for the next book: a little more editing please?

NEXT WEEK: The War Game

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Category: Apocalypse

Category: Virus

Category: Fiction

Category: Literature

SOPA and PIPA - Why JamesAxler.com went dark yesterday

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:04:00 GMT

Unless you are living under a rock without an internet connection (and if you are, how in the heck are you reading this), you almost certainly know that yesterday, January 18, 2012, was a large-scale internet protest against the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation in the United States congress. Many major websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, went dark for the day and instead served up messages asking American citizens to contact their representatives to oppose the proposed laws. JamesAxler.com joined in that protest, and I feel like today I owe you an explanation as to why.

First off, let me say categorically that piracy is bad. If you are downloading pirated music, movies, and other media then you are a bad person and you should feel bad. I am familiar with the lame arguments that people give to justify their actions, but they are simply that - justifications. More germane to this website, if you are downloading pirated copies of books published by Gold Eagle then you are doing nothing but harming the publisher and the authors. The publishing industry is in a particularly fragile state right now, going through massive systemic changes, it is is frankly a miracle that Deathlands and Outlanders have continued to be published month after month. So yeah, piracy is bad and should be stopped to the fullest extent possible under the law.

But that "under the law" part is very important, and on that count SOPA and PIPA are both bad laws. To me it is not just that they are overreaching - in a problem that requires a laser knife to address, these laws instead use the equivalent of the Death Star planet-killer cannon - but they are also laws that seek to impose technical solutions without sufficient input from the actual network engineers who would be required to implement it. The remedies proposed in the legislation would fundamentally break the internet at a very core level.

Here's a best-case example: Fifteen years ago I founded JamesAxler.com, actually as an outgrowth of a final project in a college class I was taking. I registered the JamesAxler.com domain name fully expecting that I would shortly thereafter receive a cease and desist letter from Gold Eagle, and had that happened in 1997 I would have simply rolled over and handed the domain name right over to them. That did not happen. This site exists entirely under the Fair Use doctrine, and I work very hard to ensure that the site does not infringe upon any copyrights. I have never had a direct, official conversation with Gold Eagle, but unofficially I know that they know that I exist. They have made the decision that this website is not harming their brand, and that in fact it is a de facto sales tool that advertises the James Axler books at no cost to them. I do make a tiny income from the site from commissions on Amazon book sales and for some advertising, but that income is less than what I spend each month to keep the site running. But let's say that one day GE's parent company, Harlequin, wakes up and decides that this website is infringing upon their intellectual property. Under today's law, their lawyers could send me a Cease and Desist letter and then I could choose whether or not to mount a legal battle to defend the website. Ultimately it could go before a judge, and if I lost then I would be forced to hand over the domain and this site would cease to exist. That process would take months, or more likely years, and would have any number of checks and balances. Under SOPA and PIPA, however, they could simply accuse me of piracy and have the JamesAxler.com domain name de-listed from all DNS servers. The site would simply disappear as if it had never existed, with no due process and no warning. That's a best-case situation where you have a rights owner acting in good faith under the genuine belief that their rights are being infringed upon.

But what about a worst case? Imagine an author of some completely unrelated and imaginary post-apocalyptic book series. Somehow or other, this author hears about JamesAxler.com and this author thinks that the members here are secretly trading pirated copies of his books by sending private messages to each other. (For the record: this is not happening. It is purely a hypothetical example.). That author goes to his publisher, and the publisher initiates a SOPA takedown. JamesAxler.com evaporates from the internet with no warning, for no valid reason and with no actual proof of wrongdoing.

If you think that worst case example is hyperbole, I invite you to look at the history of DMCA takedown notices. It is a similar piece of legislation, designed to protect copyrighted material, and the vast majority of DMCA takedown notices are abusive power grabs.

SOPA and PIPA are not about stopping piracy, not really. SOPA and :PIPA are about a shifting in the balance of power in creative works.

It used to be that if you were a musician and you wanted to be successful on more than a purely local level, then you needed to find a talent scout to pick you up and get you signed onto a record label in order to get national distribution. And even if you were insanely talented and did manage to get signed, the most likely outcome was for lots and lots of people to make money off of you while you went broke. For authors the situation was basically the same; you needed to get your novel picked up by a major publisher in order to reach an audience, and odds were that again you would lose money out of the deal.

Today with the power of the internet and social media, the middlemen of record labels and publishers are becoming increasingly irrelevant. This is an absolutely amazing time to be a creative person if you have the talent and the drive to make it happen. Musicians like Jonathan Coultan, authors like Corey Doctrow, writer/actors like Felicia Day, they have all created very successful careers by harnessing the power of the internet and social media and completely bypassing the normal gatekeepers. There are a number of authors who are making boatloads of money by selling their books directly on Kindle and other e-reader platforms. Musicians are making money selling directly through iTunes and other online music retailers. In my own industry of software development, the opportunity has exploded in the mobile world with the Apple and Android app stores.

The gatekeepers of creative media are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and rather than reinvent themselves and offering a business model that makes sense in this new world (and let's face it: authors still need editors, recording artists still need sound engineers, etc,), these gatekeepers have decided bribe congress with billions of dollars in order to protect their failing business model. They are like Godrej and Boyce, owners of the last typewriter factory in the world that finally closed down in April of 2011.

So yeah, I hate piracy. But even more, I hate bad legislation powered by outdated business models. And that's why JamesAxler.com went dark for the day on January 18, 2012.
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Category: General

More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:00:00 GMT

This Christmas my very excellent wife gave me (among other things) a copy of More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead, which is billed as "the definitive Return of the Living Dead documentary. Last night I finally had some time to sit down and watch it. It's pretty much two hours of talking heads, and given this wasn't a cursed production like Apocalypse Now the documentary really won't be interesting to anyone who is not already a ROTLD fan. But if you are a fan, there's some interesting material here.

For me, Return of the Living Dead was a seminal event in my teenage years. It came out in the summer of 1995 just before I started my senior year in high school. I was a big fan of horror films in general and zombie films in particular (my favorite at the time was Lucio Fulci's 'Zombie', mostly because I had not yet seen Romero's Dawn of the Dead). I vividly remember the drive down to Seattle to see ROTLD in the theater, blaring the Ramones' cover of "Needles and Pins" on the stereo and itching to see what Dan O'Bannon had in store for me. I was not disappointed, and to this day one of my favorite moments in cinematic history is the zombie picking up the radio in the ambulance and telling the dispatcher to "..send more paramedics!"

Watching the documentary, the first thing that surprised me was how nice John Russo seemed to be towards George Romero. I had always been of the impression that they had a huge falling out after Night of the Living Dead (not an unreasonable assumption given the lawsuit over sequel rights), but in his interview segments Russo repeatedly had nice things to say about Romero and wished him nothing but the best. Of course, the documentary did not give Romero's side of the story so there may be some more meat there.

The next interesting thing in the documentary was how truly awful the original effects designer was. He was ultimately fired from the film and replaced essentially by a kid, and at first I thought maybe he was just getting a bad rap from some of the other crew members. Then they showed an actual photo of his original effect for the Headless Yellow Man, along with his own lame justifications, and you realize that he was a guy that just got in over his head and could not produce the work needed.

One other interesting bit was how much everybody in the cast and crew hated on Jewel Shepard, who played one of the punks. She got the gig because she was a stripper at a club that Dan O'Bannon frequented, and he offered her the role. She apparently infuriated the other cast members with her generally lazy attitude, and I have to say that 26 years later in the interview bits she does not come off much better. I'm sure she's a nice person and fun to hang around with socially, but I would surely hate to have to work with her...

Here's one bit of trivia I learned from the documentary: in the infamous Gravestone Dance scene in which Linnea Quigley gets completely naked, she is actually wearing a latex prosthetic over her ladybits that effectively turns her into a living barbie doll. Apparently when they first shot the scene and she took it all off, one of the producers screamed that no, no, no we can't get away with showing her pubic hair like that. So after that take she went and shaved herself, and the producer freaked out that that was even worse. So the effects guy basically poured some alginate down her panties to create a mold, and then fashioned a flesh-colored latex bikini to go over her privates. The seventeen year old theatergoer in me completely disapproves, and the forty-three year old reviewer in my finally understands why that particular scene always seemed off. (But the seventeen year old me was too busy looking at those amazing breasts to ever even notice - seriously, how hot was Linnea Quigley in 1985?)

For me, though, the most captivating moment in the documentary was towards the end with a short clip of Dan O'Bannon giving a final farewell. He passed away a little over two years ago, after more than thirty years of secretly battling Crohn's Disease, and in that short clip we got to see a weakened and emaciated and yet still dominating creator giving a very sincere thank you to all of his fans over the years. I was genuinely touched by that clip alone.

Aside from the main documentary, the dvd also includes several special features including short documentaries on ROTLD parts 2 & 3, and an awesome short clip called "Return of the Living Dead in 3 minutes" which summarized the entire movie simply by having the actors from the interview segments reciting their best lines from the movie.

On the whole this is, as I said, a documentary strictly for serious ROTD fans. And even for them, it's not really a must-have. Honestly, this documentary would be perfect as a bonus disk on a fully restored and remastered Blu-Ray edition of Return of the Living Dead. But since that isn't going to happen anytime soon, this is at least worth a look-see.

NEXT WEEK: The Passage by Justin Cronin
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Category: Fiction

Category: Film

Plague Year - High altitude is the only escape from high technology

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:00:00 GMT

After four consecutive weeks of writing about movies, I thought it was time to get back to some white-knuckle post-apocalyptic literature. Published in 2007, Plague Year by Jeff Carlson is the first book in a trilogy about a nanotech machine plague that nearly wipes out humanity and forces the few remaining survivors up onto the mountain tops in order to stay above the invisible sea of death. As one group of survivors struggles to stay alive in the High Sierras in California, a team of researches on the International Space Station races to find some kind of cure or vaccine. Meanwhile a civil war is brewing within the US government, now relocated to Leadville, Colorado in the heights of the Rocky Mountains.

As post-apocalyptic thrillers go, this book is a little more outside my normal comfort zone. It is very much a techno-thriller, with much detail given to the mechanics of the Machine Plague. The nano-virus is both simple and deadly: a self-replicating plague that eats the flesh of virtually any animal, but which self destructs when the atmospheric pressure drops below 0.7. Insect life is almost entirely unaffected by the plague, and human survivors can only stay alive if the stay above 10,000 feet in altitude. Although humans can survive for a few hours if they dip below that altitude, and will recover fully if they get back up to a high enough elevation in time, for many of the survivors there are simply not enough supplies to live through the winter months while stranded on mountain peaks. Perhaps with full diving gear they might be able to venture to lower ground for foraging, but ski lodges are not particularly know for their extensive collection of SCUBA gear…

Much of the plot thread involving the astronauts on the ISS reminded me of similar characters from Lucifer’s Hammer. Not that I think Carlson was borrowing directly from that book by any means, it just struck me as funny to come across the same kind of setup in such a different book. In any case, the astronaut story has that same element of highly skilled individuals marooned in space, who need to find some way to safely get back to Earth and then become embroiled in the political machinations of a government that has become completely militarized and on the verge of civil war.

All of the high technology in the astronaut plotline is starkly contrasted with another plot thread following the few remaining survivors in the High Sierras who have resorted to cannibalism in order to stay alive. Having barely survived the first post-plague winter, they know full well that the odds of their surviving another winter are vanishingly small. Among these survivors, however, is one man whose knowledge might be the key to destroying the nanite plague and saving what remains of humanity.

I did think that parts of the book moved very slowly; perhaps it could have done with a bit of editing to tighten up the parts that dragged on, and drive the pacing of the California storyline to be more in sync with the astronaut/Colorado storyline. That being said, the final act with the expedition into Sacramento and the race to find the laboratory that originated the nano-virus is absolutely gripping. Human drama, military combat, dark secrets, and heroic sacrifices abound. Although it is the first book of a trilogy, it does come to a satisfying conclusion in its own right. Certainly the dynamics of the next book are firmly established (Plague War), but the book does not end on any kind of massive cliffhanger.

Stylistically the book is equal parts George Romero-style gruesome with Lincoln Child-style techno-thriller and Tom Clancy-style political drama. It makes for an interesting and unusual cocktail, and at less than 300 pages it is a quick read. It is perhaps not an amazing literary exercise, but it is if nothing else an engaging end-of-the-word thriller perfectly suited for a nice summer read while lounging by the pool. I see from the plot summaries that the third book of the trilogy gets into zombie territory, so I am definitely looking forward to that.

NEXT WEEK: More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead

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Category: Apocalypse

Category: Virus

Category: Fiction

Category: Literature

La Horde (that's french for "The Horde"!)

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Generally speaking, my primary experience with French cinema has been the “magical reality” movies of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (and his very excellent Delicatessen is very much on my list of movies to review for this blog). Between that, and movies like Mr. Bean’s Vacation (which may be a British film but it is set almost entirely in France) and The Triplets of Belleville (easily one of my favorite animated films of the last decade), when I think of French films I almost exclusively think of happy, funny, whimsical and lighthearted comedy. Now, it’s not that I expected to actually see that kind of style in a zombie movie -- I knew when I started watching The Horde a few days ago that I was watching a straight-up horror film – but that almost hard-wired preconception definitely wreaked havoc with my perception of this extremely brutal zombie apocalypse thrill ride.

The setup for The Horde is pretty basic: A cop is murdered by a drug lord, after the funeral four of the cop’s friends go on a completely unsanctioned mission of vengeance, but before they can carry out their mission they are interrupted by a zombie uprising. Simple and straightforward. The interesting thing about the movie is that absolutely none of the characters are likeable. The four cops are not looking for anything but brutal justice, and they will kill anyone who gets in their way. The drug dealers are all scum-of-the-earth evil a-holes who enjoy murder, torture and acts of degradation. Toss in a batshit insane retired war veteran and a bunch of mindless flesh-eating ghouls, and you really don’t have anyone to root for. And yet, despite the general unlikeability of absolutely everyone on screen the relationship dynamics are completely engaging. Nobody is protecting or working with anybody else out of compassion or concern, every interaction is completely a calculus of whether or not cooperating will improve each individuals chance of surviving.

Aside from the human characters, the real central character of the story is the building itself. The drug gang has set up business in a dilapidated old tenement building on the outskirts of Paris that has been condemned and and theoretically been evicted of all tenants. This means that the only people left inside the crumbling pesthole are drug dealers and squatters, the dregs of humanity living outside of the law in the rotting remains of a structure that had become an architectural zombie long before the dead began to rise.

The first act of the movie plays out like a standard crime movie, to the point where I began to wonder whether I had misread the plot summary and was not watching a zombie flick at all. When the undead appear on the scene it is abrupt and without warning. The surviving cops and drug dealers are all at the top of the building, and they make their way up to the roof to find out what is going on. This leads to the most visually arresting shot of the entire film:

They stand on the roof looking at the Paris skyline as explosion after explosion rocks the City of Lights. Flames erupt all around, and it abundantly clear that the apocalypse is upon them. The crumbling tenement upon which they stand is no safe refuge, and they know that if they are to have any chance of survival they will need to battle their way back down through the structure and escape to somewhere else. The rest of the story is effectively one long running pitched battled moving down floor by floor to reach the exit.

Let me be perfectly clear: this movie is absolutely brutal. The violence is blunt, bloody, and aggressive. If you do not have a strong stomach, this is certainly not the film for you. In addition to the graphic violence, with only one female character the misogyny is stomach turning in places. There is one particular scene where the crazy vet and one of the drug dealers are torturing and demeaning a female zombie, taunting and laughing at her as she squirms on the floor. In fact, they become so engrossed in their fun that they have to be interrupted and reminded that there is an actual crisis situation going on. As I said, these are not likeable people, not a single one of them.

There are numerous big set-pieces in the movie. Aside from the destruction of Paris, the other most visually arresting moment is when one of the characters makes his final stand on the roof of a car in the parking garage. Surrounded by literally hundreds of zombies, he fights them off first with guns and then with a machete and then finally with nothing but his feet and fists. He survives for an improbably long time just out of the grasp of the undead horde, but with nowhere in which to escape. The shot of all of those raised arms reaching in to tear him to pieces is simply stunning.

Overall I completely enjoyed the movie. It had its flaws (much of the cinematography was a bit too dark to really see what was going on), but on balance it is a brutally dark and violent roller coaster that moves quickly and efficiently to its big action finale. If you are offended by profanity or by extreme violence, stay very far away. But if you are a fan of the zombie genre this is definitely one to check out.

NEXT WEEK: Plague Year by Jeff Carlson

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Category: Apocalypse

Category: Zombie

Category: Fiction

Category: Film

Ah, the glorious 80's: Steel Dawn

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Back when I started this blog, I wrote to my friend Michael Montoure (whose work you can read over at Bloodletters.com) to ask for his help with a logo. The design brief I gave him was "every bad knockoff of The Road Warrior that was ever filmed in the desert on a non-existent budget", and I think we can all agree that he delivered beautifully on that précis. I was reminded of that this week as I watched a movie that fits that description perfectly: Patrick Swayse’s magnum opus Steel Dawn.

Yes, he is the desert warrior…

Category: Apocalypse

Category: Nuclear

Category: Fiction

Category: Film

Before Chris Pine was Captain Kirk, he was in Carriers

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Back in 2007, before he was cast in the lead for the Star Trek reboot, Chris Pine was in a little independent post-apocalyptic virus film called Carriers. It sat in a can for two years until one presumes the distributers of the movie realized that they could maybe make a little extra cash off of Captain Kirk and got Carriers into a limited theatrical release. I stumbled across it on Netflix a while back, and although I entered into it with low expectations I was actually pretty impressed.

The story follows four young adults in the aftermath of a global pandemic. Brian (Chris Pine), his girlfriend Bobby, his brother Danny, and his brother’s friend Kate are trying to reach Turtle Beach where they think they can wait in safety for the virus to die out. They have survived so far primarily because Brian has a very rigid set of rules they must follow in order to stay uninfected. These aren’t lighthearted Zombieland-type rules, but rather very strict and cold-hearted guidelines on what must be done in order to survive. One of those rules is that you don’t help the infected, because they are a lost cause. Unfortunately, early on they wind up breaking that rule (against Brian’s wishes) in order to help a man and his infected daughter try to reach a place where the father has heard that scientists have developed a cure for the virus. This sets off the chain of events that drives the entire story.

Although there is some action in this movie, it is primarily a character-driven dialog piece. It repeatedly demonstrates how solid writing and acting can overcome a miniscule budget, and makes the most of every penny. Chris Pine’s charisma is infectiously watchable, because even when he is being a complete cold-hearted a-hole you know that he is right and he remains… well, not quite likeable but certainly justifiable. That is a tough line to walk, and he does it well. The rest of the leads are equally effective, with Piper Perabo particularly standing out as Brian’s girlfriend. The conflict between her instincts to help people vs. Brian’s drive to keep the group safe and healthy creates quite a bit of riveting conflict, and there is a particularly moving scene with her about two-thirds of the way through the movie.

With an 85 minute running time, Carriers is a very quick watch and is economical with its storytelling. It jumps right in without any undue exposition, and drives very efficiently towards the inevitable final clash between the two brothers. Although there is nothing particularly new or shocking in the actual events portrayed, I found it to be a story very well-told that deftly avoids seeming clichéd or cheap like many low-budget apocalyptic films (last week’s Meteor Apocalyps, I’m looking right at you…). I thought that it stood well on its own as a tight little drama that can appeal to a wider audience, and I hope that Chris Pine’s presence draws more people to check it out. If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth a look.

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Category: Apocalypse

Category: Virus

Category: Fiction

Category: Film

Meteor Apocalypse

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:00:00 GMT

So, a little while back when I was reading Lucifer’s Hammer I considered doing a month-long series of blog posts on various post-apocalyptic stories surrounding a world-killing meteorite. I didn’t really want to write a post on Armageddon, though, both because it is obvious and because it would mean I would have to actually watch it again and I am just not that dedicated. (Sorry Michael Bay, no matter how pretty Liv Tyler is to look at I just can’t sit through another one of your overblown steaming piles of cinematic crap). I wanted to dig a letter deeper, and on a whim I tried searching Netflix for Meteor – a true classic of 70’s excess with Sean Connery and Natalie Wood. Sadly, Netflix did not have it available. Also sadly, I instead stumbled across Meteor Apocalypse. I saw that Babylon 5’s Claudia Christian had prominent billing in it, so I figured what the heck – it looks awful but maybe a little dose of Ivanova would raise the entertainment factor a bit.

Sadly, it did not.

My first hint that I was in for 88 minutes of misery was the very first title card, which credited the production to Faith Films. Oh my God (no pun intended, seriously), was I going to be in for some kind of Left Behind style evangelical preaching masquerading as entertainment? Well, kinda. There are definitely a few heavy-handed Christian Commentary moments scattered throughout the movie, but honestly those turned out to be some of the better and more sincere moments in the film. No, the real train wreck behind this movie is the fact that writer/director (and actor in at least one scene) Michael Rutare clearly does not believe in science, and as a result has never bothered to spare even a few brain cells to take in any information about even basic physics. Oh, where to begin?

Well, I guess right at the beginning. In the opening scene we are asked to believe that:

A meteor the size of Texas is hurtling on a collision course with the Earth, but it has been kept a secret from the entire world except for key heads of state and support staff.

Note: Our planet is filled with both professional observatories and amateur astronomers. If anything that large was headed our way, people would notice. Like, lots of people. And the news media would be wetting themselves over the kind of wall-to-wall doomsday coverage they could get out of it.

All of the nuclear nations in the world can launch a phalanx of missiles into space and accurately target an approaching meteor in an attempt to destroy it.

Note: Nuclear Missiles are not capable of just flying into space, and certainly not capable of being targeted at extra-terrestrial objects. And even if they somehow could be, the could not be all launched simultaneously from locations all around the globe and wind up clustered together on a single flight path. Launch windows just don’t work that way.

All of the people who didn’t notice the giant freaking meteor heading straight for Earth also will not notice hundreds of nuclear warheads being launched and then the combined detonation of all of those warheads.

That’s just in the first two minutes, and the impossibilities just continue to mount for the next 86 minutes. The one big meteor is turned into lots and lots of tiny meteors, all still headed for the Earth. (Hey, that’s actually an accurate result!) The first large-ish one lands in Lake Meade in Nevada in the middle of the night, and somehow that large mass impacting the lake does not result in a Tunguska-sized event. No, what it does is contaminates the water in some magical way, such that anyone drinking as little as 4 ounces of tap water from anywhere between Las Vegas and Los Angeles will get sick and die.

Speaking of getting sick and dying, the first guy that dies from it – he collapses on the ground in front of his co-worker in the middle of the night, and immediately two paramedics arrive even though they haven’t been called. They are the crappiest paramedics in the entire world, and not only do they not save him but actually once he is dead they decide to just run off and leave the still-warm corpse behind, along with a big bag of injections. Fortunately they are rapidly punished for their incompetence when they are hunted down by heat-seeking meteors. At least, I assume the meteors are heat-seeking, because they only seem to impact vehicles, buildings, and other interesting targets.

Oh, and the meteors all fly in from different angles, despite them all coming from a common origin. Seriously, throughout the movie there are scenes of meteor showers with the smoke trails of the meteors criss-crossing each other as they race in from all directions. I think the meteors were actually sentient, and came with some kind of on-board steering systems.

You know how all of those little meteors all came from the same place? Well, somehow they only shower down in little one or two minute bursts and only in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. And not continually, no. A few come down on the first night. Then at least twelve hours later, they storm down again in the same geographic location, despite the rotation of the earth. And then at some point we find out that there is yet another huge meteor that is going to destroy Los Angeles in three days. Do you know what the odds of two planet-killing meteors hitting the Earth within three days of each other? I’d say about the same odds that the esteemed Mr. Rutare has ever been in the same room with anything even resembling a science textbook.

Aside from all the magical pinpoint-targeting boulders that keep falling from the sky, there are also people. There is the father who is the main protagonist, and who also seems to have desert-induced narcolepsy. Seriously, at least five times in the movie he runs off from something in a panic, only to wake up later from a deep sleep on the desert ground. There is sickly sidekick, a woman who theoretically spends three days on the road with this guy and during that time sleeps on the ground, gets in gunfights, gets chased down by rejects from The Road Warrior, and in all that time her hair remains clean and perfectly combed and her brown tank-top remains pristinely un-smudged and un-torn. Seriously, for a dying chick going through the end of the world she looks like a supermodel the entire time.

Argh, I could seriously go on and on. For a few minutes I thought about writing this entire post by doing real-time live blogging about the movie, but then I realized that it would require me to actually watch it again. That would be cruel and unusual punishment. There’s the scene where the protagonist puts together the cure for the meteor-water-plague in under a minute without measuring anything – and the cure totally works. There’s the scene where the protagonists are being attacked by some water thieves, and then two guys from the FBI show up out of nowhere to try to break up the fight. It just goes on and on, with the kind of writing and acting I would expect from a grade school drama class. No, scratch that, at least a grade school drama class would decide to through in random cool stuff like robot ninjas or time-traveling dinosaur cowboys. This thing is just a wretched mess from start to finish.

So, um, don’t watch it. Spare yourself the pain. I suffered for you, so that you could be freed of this torture. Run, be free, and come back again next week.

NEXT WEEK: Before he was Captain Kirk, Chris Pine was in ‘Carriers’

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Category: Apocalypse

Category: Meteor

Category: Fiction

Category: Film