Post-Apocalyptic Movies and Descriptive Titles

There is a sub-genre in the science fiction realm dedicated to post-apocalyptic scenarios. Many films in this zone have easy crossover appeal with horror when zombies are involved, or pandemics (like The Stand; or 28 Days Later, which mixes both).

I grew up with Mad Max and the spectacular flop Waterworld. I don't remember hating Waterworld, but I do remember thinking it wasn't good enough to beat down the built-up head of steam of popular-consciousness hate that followed it from production to post- to screenings to its opening. What can you do? Aeon Flux is another one...

So, the post-apocalyptic movie I'm going to mention now is Snowpiercer. I remember reading a bit about it over the summer and had wanted to make a trip to the cinema to see it. It didn't work out, as we'd have to get all the way to Hollywood to find one of the five screens that was showing it.

It's on Netflix now. GREAT flick.

One thing that got me, and gets any other discerning viewer, is the premise. That goddamn premise. An attempt to combat global warming has gone horribly wrong and an ice age has been induced. Earth's surface is cold and dead, and the only humans left are riding around the planet on a train that is on a global track.

The story is based on a French graphic novel from 1982, and this film is directed by Joon-ho Bong, the Korean director of the great The Host, one of the gems Netflix makes available to your eyeballs.

In this story the last two cars are where the lower class lives, and maybe that should be "lives" with the quotes. They are perpetually on the brink of starvation, subsisting on black gelatinous protein bars (the contents of which you see later as a nice a reveal) and are kept in line through brutality and a religiosity that becomes more apparent as the movie progresses. As a form of punishment, Spud from Trainspotting has his arm put through a portal into the freezing night for the requisite seven minutes, and upon it's return to the inside of the car, is smashed to bits with a huge mallet.

Captain America plays the "hero" who starts the revolution and the march from the tail of the train to the front. There's so much death along the revolutionary march that it's hard to believe that survivors can really keep the gene pool deep enough...

Anyway, the cars along the way to the front get steadily more bizarre. One is a elementary school classroom where the children sing in unison about what happens if the train stops: "We all freeze and die!" they cheerily shout.

The ending makes you remember viscerally that the director is not American. But, really, if your idea of the survival of the human species is to perpetually ride a train, the game may already be lost.

Days before we watched Snowpiercer I told Corrie about it. At the end of the week she said, "Oh, we should watch that movie Snowtrain." She has an adorable habit of changing the names of movies to be more descriptive titles than actual names, especially if the name is cryptic. 

I believe it's because she simply doesn't care that much. Cowboys and Aliens, a generally lame movie but with a title that is a play on "cowboys and Indians", to Corrie becomes the more appropriately titled Cowboys vs Aliens. Movies just aren't things that for her are worth much brain power outside of the experience and our conversations about it directly after the fact. 

She sees subplots and generally what the director's up to; she understands foreshadowing and the elements that make the moving-picture experience pleasurable, she just doesn't really care that much. There's too much other real shit in the world going on to be concerned with movies.

In one minute Corrie can talk about the forced and characteristic whimsy in The Grand Budapest Hotel and relate it to a grand scheme of Wes Anderson's views on family that seem to stitch his movies together...

...and in the next minute tell someone, "Oh, we went to go see the new Star Wars movie," when in reality she's referring to Star Trek Into Darkness. For her, it's in space, there's a battle, or conflict, or something...so Space War? No that's not a thing...Star Wars, yeah, that's a thing... 

She's funny. We were just talking about it the other day: 

Me: It's like when you told Adrian about seeing Star Wars last year...

Her: Whatever. I know the difference. One has Jean-Luc and one has Luke and Leia. See? They're both in space, so...meh....

Me: (Laughing) What we went to see didn't have any of those people...

She does, though, pay attention to me when I talk about nerdy things, so she's pretty well versed on the intricacies if you pressed her. Same with sports. She knows more about A-Rod's contract status than any baseball-hating wife non-fan probably should.

Feeling Like a Kid Again

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. It was a combination of many factors I was deeply interested in at the time: death-defying adventure and high-velocity travel. Honestly, those remain interests.

But SPACE! Space was about the coolest thing this side of dinosaurs.

In the last twelve months twice I have ventured to the cinema-house to enjoy high doses of spectacle, the dreams of my childhood consciousness finally hitting a double movie crescendo.

Last year we left the Pike Theater wide-eyed and giddy with the prospect of free-falling around the entire planet during a shitty day at work. Last year it was Sandy and Georgie in Alfonso's Gravity. Last year it was the slow twirl of the initial fade-in to see the noob, Sandy, just trying to maintain on her first duty: tightening bolts. Yup, I remember nodding in the darkened theater, some days at work kinda suck, but most aren't 250 miles above the ground.

The mundane painted across the spectacle of an entire continent below using a brush heavy with nausea. Something about that opening set piece in Gravity felt so real and honest and...routine. But hurtling in constant freefall around Earth turns routine into life, and even then a storm of orbital space trash can come and turn that shitty day at work into a masterpiece of outlandish survival.

I haven't seen it in a year, but, does Gravity even let the audience have seven minutes before Sandy's Supermanning her way into oblivion? Four minutes? I know it get's right to it, not messing around even a little. I remember thinking, What? Already? Is this movie for real!?

There were some things that were kinda preposterous in Alfonso's space movie, but it is not a documentary---it is Sci-Fi, with the capital letters. It was a grownup's movie. Those scientific transgressions are easily forgiven because it otherwise is as accurate as it could be.

AND because it's so damn fun! I enjoyed the hell out of it. Easily the best movie I saw all year.

This year again we left the Pike Theater dazed and giddy, our brains full of dust and space and time-warping tidal-wave mountain walls. That was the spectacle. The thoughts, though, were deeper than the spectacle--they raced about meaning. They ignored the sentimentality and tried to appreciate the difficulties ahead.

This year it was Matt and Matt and Anne and Mike and even Topher in Interstellar. This year it's the tortured dad versus the dystopian future that needs farmers more than engineers. This year it's gravity re-purposed. This year it's not a shitty day at work, it's SAVE THE WORLD.

Interstellar is the 2001 for our generation. Right? Isn't that what we've been told over and over? Maybe it is...

It certainly aims to do things that Gravity simply wasn't interested in. Gravity spans in nearly real-time the three hours Doc Stone takes to go from tightening a bolt to being birthed from the lake in Arizona. Interstellar, on the other hand, relativity as a plot-device.

I don't want to give away too much, but Michael Caine plays "the Professor" who runs what's left of NASA in the dystopian future when food is scarce and crops world-wide are failing...

Trying to tease out the plot does an injustice--just see it if you're into the current transcendental Sci-Fi experience. Interstellar is trying to say something.

That something could be different for each person, but my takeaway was: do you see how hard any of these outlandish planet-saving missions are? In the fictional world of the movie they're nearly impossible...We need to fix this ourselves...

The science, again, is under assail from physicists and astronomers, but they do take pains to praise the intentions and most of the big-picture elements. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and Star Wars are obvious inspirations.

Again I went to see a grown-up science-fiction film in the theater and again I enjoyed the hell out of it. It reached for the stars, literally, and came back with its hands full of the dust and emptiness and sadness that you'd expect to find alone in the vastness of the interstellar void. The movie isn't really that bleak, and there is some clunky sentimentality, but Mathew McConaughey basically jumps into a gigantic black hole.

And they use relativity as a plot-device.

Christopher Nolan has made some of the most original movies of my adulthood. Memento? It took non-linearity to a creative extreme. Inception and Interstellar? Big-time, big-concept movie events.

Gravity: holy cow it's awesome.
Interstellar: holy cow it's awesome.

Nothing like a couple of Sci-Fi movies to capture my child-like wonders with the realities of space travel.