Alternate Takes 11.28.09: Post Apocalyptic Films

Posted by Shawn S. Lealos on 11.28.2009

With The Road hitting theaters this week in a limited release, Alternate Takes looks at other post apocalyptic films from Escape from New York to The Matrix.



Welcome to Week 79 of Alternate Takes. I am your host Shawn S. Lealos and you have now entered my world.

Let's start with the comments:

Corey has never heard of Near Dark and if there are others who have not seen this movie, do yourself a favor and seek it out. It came out on Blu Ray a couple of weeks back for those with that technology. Sly Reference agrees with this choice as well.

Acid brought up The Forsaken, a movie I bought used awhile back during a B1G1 sale but haven't watched yet. I need to get on that...

Though not a dark film, I would ask you retract the MTV comparison. MTV may have been a clever and positive label when this movie came out, but now it nothing more than calling a movie shit. This was a classic film in the vein of Goonies, but it wasn't a lame reality show or TLR episode... - Posted By: Rage (Guest) - I can understand that but to clarify, I am 39 years old and when I say a movie is MTV styled, I mean something like Top Gun or, as in this case, The Lost Boys. The term when I use it means more of the quick paced editing, bright neon lights, music video style (although, even in the eighties, this was not necessarily a "positive lable"). Kids today may not understand because, as you said, MTV isn't about music videos anymore.

Guest#8203 wants some Let the Right One In love. Mats from before doesn't agree and calls the movie quite overhyped. Not a bad movie really, but by far not really good.. I will find out for myself soon enough as I plan to watch it after I finish the novel on which it is based. The book is fantastic so far.

Guest#3740 wonders why I didn't include Bram Stokers Dracula. I love that movie and you are right about Gary Oldman's character being a great Dracula. My reason for excluding it was because it is about Dracula and I wanted to look at different vampire stories.

Norm Peterson also likes all five of my choices and is one of the few, the proud, who also like Nic Cage in Vampire's Kiss.

Finally, JLAJRC wonders where Vampire$ is at and I will agree that James Woods was excellent in that movie as is - strangely enough - Daniel Baldwin. James Woods agrees.

On with the column...

A small part of the country will get the opportunity to watch the latest adaptation of a Cormack McCarthy novel, The Road. The last film adapted from the author's works was the Oscar Award winning No Country for Old Men but I am not sure if we should compare that fantastic movie with this one. The Road is a spectacular novel about a post apocalyptic world and the journey of a man and his son to find any sign of civilization to fit into. Along the way they meet up with nomads, cannibals and all-around bad folks. The novel is great more for the brilliant prose by McCarthy than the actual storyline so I am not sure what we will end up getting in this film. However, the release of this movie got me to thinking and this week's Alternate Takes will look at the best of the post apocalyptic film genre.

5. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) Directed by John Carpenter Written by John Carpenter and Nick Castle Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Atkins For awhile, John Carpenter could do no wrong. He broke out with his third film Halloween and never looked back. Using what has to be described as independent filmmaking he set the horror world on fire. Over the next few years he made a sequel to his legendary horror franchise, a quality, creepy horror movie in The Fog (with a great score), one of the greatest horror movies of all time in The Thing and the campy, yet satisfying Stephen King adaptation Christine. But also during that time, he took a small break from the horror genre and made a balls-to-the-wall action flick called Escape from New York. The movie takes place in the distant future year of 1997 where the third World War has caused the United State's crime rate to climb by 400%. To contain this increase in crime, Manhattan Island has been turned into a maximum security prison surrounded by a containment wall where all inmates are serving life sentences. Because the entire Island is a prison, the inmates run the asylum and control the entire city. When the President of the United States' plane is hijacked and crashed onto the Island, the President is taken hostage by inmates who order all soldiers to leave Manhattan or the President will die. Enter Snake Plissken, one of the most iconic anti-heroes in cinema history. The lead character in the videogame Metal Gear Solid is based on Plissken and his appearance is legendary in genre circles. He is a former U.S. Army Lieutenant with two Purple Hearts who turned to a life of crime when he believed the United States betrayed their soldiers. After his arrest for breaking into the U.S. Federal Reserve, he was sentenced to life in Manhattan but was offered a full pardon if he could go in and save the President. The twist is that he is injected with a serum that will kill him in 24 hours if he is not given the antidote. The movie gets really good when he is dropped into Manhattan. While in the city, the movie becomes a perfect post apocalyptic adventure film. Snake gets help from a cabbie who ends up in over his head (Ernest Borgnine), finds a criminal mastermind nicknamed Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), and must face a gang led by the "Duke of New York" (Isaac Hayes) to save the President (Donald Pleasance). It has everything you could ever want in a film in this genre and does it all perfectly.

4. MAD MAX (1979) Directed by George Miller Written by George Miller, Byron Kennedy and James McCausland Cast: Mel Gibson, Steve Bisley, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne In the future, fuel is scarce and no one seems to care about law enforcement anymore. That is not a good sign for baby-faced police officer Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) who is one of the best "pursuit men" in the Main Force Patrol police unit. On the side, Max is also a loving family man, with a beautiful wife and a baby boy. Things go bad for Max when he and his partner Goose arrest Johnny the Boy, a young protégé in the Nightrider's Armalite motorcycle gang. In an act of vengeance, they attack Goose and end up throwing a match into his vehicle, which is leaking gas, and blows him up. Goose lives but is scarred horribly. When Max sees how badly his partner is disfigured he quits the police force, believing nothing they do matters in this dystopian society. He is talked into taking a vacation and thinking about it. Then the movie switches gears. Max's wife and baby are brutally murdered by the same motorcycle gang and Max Rockatansky becomes Mad Max and the rest is history. The franchise of Mad Max is about the fall and eventual redemption of Max's character. While The Road Warrior is more of a western, with Max rediscovering his humanity, Mad Max is a simple, brutal post apocalyptic tale about a man trying to live in a broken society who reverts into a beast with no remorse hell bent on vengeance. It is the most brutal movie on this list, and the one most devoid of hope.

3. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner Written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling Cast: Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore, James Daly, Linda Harrison Planet of the Apes is not a typical Post Apocalyptic movie. If you have not seen it, this is a SPOILER but the movie is forty years old so whatever. It begins with four astronauts in a hibernated sleep until their spacecraft crash lands on a foreign planet. Their journey has taken 2,006 years yet they only aged 18 months due to time dilation. When they crash land they find that one of them has died thanks to an air leak. The year is 3978 and tests prove that the planet they landed on is incapable of sustaining life. Oh, and it's run by apes. The gorillas are the police, military and hunters. The Orangutans are administrators, politicians and lawyers. The chimps are intellectuals and scientists. There are other humans there but they cannot talk, are uncivilized, and are either killed or kept as slave labor or experimented on. When Charlton Heston, whose voice was injured early in the movie, speaks he is considered an abomination and sentenced to death. The movie has one of the best twist ends in the history of cinema when he finally escapes and runs across the destroyed Statue of Liberty and realizes that he is actually back on Earth and the entire planet has been destroyed by the human race, leaving the Apes to rule and keep it safe from future generations of violence and technology. There were three sequels explaining how the world was destroyed, showing the complete circle in the storyline of the movies and proving that maybe, just maybe, the apes in this movie were right all along.

2. THE MATRIX TRILOGY (1991-2003) Directed by The Wachowski brothers Written by The Wachowski brothers Cast: Keanu Reeves. Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, Joe Pantoliano, Gloria Foster, Helmut Bakaitis, Monica Bellucci, Roy Jones Jr., Randall Duk Kim, Harold Perrineau Jr., Jada Pinkett Smith The first Matrix movie is the masterpiece. The next two have divided fans like nothing since the Star Wars prequels. I like all three movies, think they tell a wonderful story, and therefore leave all three in this spot as one of the best post apocalyptic worlds ever created. The first film shows a world just like the one we live in and a group of people who believe there is a conspiracy and nothing is like it seems. Those people are right. The world has passed humanity by, the humans having lost a war with the machines. While everyone believes they live in 1999, it is actually 2199 and humans are kept in pods, used as an energy source, while being fed memories of the life they believe they are living. The next two movies show our hero Neo (Keanu Reeves) as he escapes his catatonic state and helps Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) lead a rebellion against the machines to free humanity. What makes this series great is the actual question of what is better, to live a lie and be happy or to live the truth in a world that has been destroyed. A character in the first movie played by Joey Pantolione asks that exact question, and while eating a steak in his mind, reveals he prefers to live a lie. The entire series has strong Biblical undertones as well with Neo, a Christ-like figure, rising from the dead to help lead the rebellion to the Promised Land. There is a lot of filler, mainly talk scenes where a lot of philosophical mumbo jumbo is spilled out for us to take in but the action scenes in these movies more than make up for it. Bullet Time has become a farce lately, but here it is majestic, a ballet of guns and swords. The character of Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving) is an awesome bad guy as well. People like to bitch about the sequels but this is one of the most creative, awe inspiring franchises ever filmed.

1. CHILDREN OF MEN (2006) Directed by Alfonso Cuarón Written by Alfonso Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby Cast: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Huston, Michael Caine I have been looking a lot at my favorite movies lately and this Alfonso Cuarón film ranks easily in my Top 10 favorite movies of all time. It might even break my Top 5 over time. While it may not appear to be in the traditional sense of the genre, it is most definitely a post-apocalyptic movie. The world is coming to an end and it is everyone out for themselves as the world crumbles around them. The year is 2027 and no human child has been born in eighteen years. The world has grown infertile and no one has an answer as to why. Most of the governments in the world have collapsed and the United Kingdom is one of the only remaining societies. They have closed their borders and have instituted a police state. The country is in shambles between the terrorist acts and the military forces instituting their will by any means necessary. Theo, a former activist and current bureaucrat is kidnapped by a group that his wife is a member of and asked to use his connections to transport a young woman named Kee safely from the country. Kee is the first known pregnant woman and is now hunted by special interest groups, while avoiding scientists and the government for differing reasons. They travel throughout the country trying to find a somewhat mythical boat of scientists called the Tomorrow, where they can hopefully keep Kee and her baby safe while searching for a cure for the world's infertility. The movie is a fantastic piece of filmmaking. Cuarón is one of the most innovative, brilliant directors working today. Alongside Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu, the three men form a group of Spanish filmmakers whose only equivalent is the trio of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola in the seventies. While Del Toro has achieved the most success of the group, Cuarón is just as talented and I look forward to whatever he decides to make next. As it is, his greatest work Children of Man is, in my eyes, an unmitigated masterpiece.

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