And on The Topic of the End of the World…

T.S. Eliot put it best in his poem “The Hollow Men”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I feel the need to amend myself for the previous post about the post-apocalyptic world of The Book of Eli. There’s a lot more to that story than I first indicated, such as the plucky young female side-kick Solara and the dirty western frontier feeling of Carnegie’s town and the fact that Eli is the book, embodies it, carries it within himself, cradled close to his heart. And the fact that people eat each other is just icing on the cake. Uhm. Well, maybe not icing. Well, strange icing then.

There are all kinds of post-apocalyptic landscapes. There’s excess and decay in Blade Runner (1984), a world where there is too much of everything but it’s all broken down and at odds with the high level of technological advancement. There’s the same general sense of too much stuff and an increasing level of urban ruins in Split Second (1992) where the futuristic London looks more like Venice, complete with rain and rising water levels. Hardware (1990) is post nuclear in the same way as The Book of Eli (2009), but here there’s an interesting mix of blasted wastelands and excess and changed climate. Technology features heavily in that movie as well, and it’s the same kind of retrofitted architecture in a dying structure where the difference between ghetto and high-end living are slim to none, merely depending on weather the technology works or not.

The future of the whole Terminator-series is blasted landscapes, ruins and dangers and technology gone rogue. It’s mostly a hostile environment, more fitted for machines than humans.
Mad Max (1979) had that same blasted desert feel to it even if it was still basically a revenge tale. And the following movies in that series had their merits and flaws. It’s still a forerunner in its genre, no matter what you might think of the leading actor today.

“If the future isn’t bright at least it’s colorful” Blixa Bargeld sings in one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s songs. That certainly applies to the movies mentioned above.

In Equilibrium (2002) the world still works, but things are not the way they should be. Just like with 1984 (1956 and again in 1984) things are bad, but the pressure is concentrated to the psychological realm in a totalitarian structure where you actually can’t argue that things aren’t what they should be, that the future isn’t a bright, clean and shiny place. These aren’t post-apocalyptic worlds in the same sense, they are dystopias, but there’s more to it than that. Reasons why aren’t always given, but the viewer can infer. And does, at least if they’re constructed like this viewer. You can argue where the line between post-apocalypse and dystopia should be drawn, but sometimes they are one and the same and sometimes they teeter-totter back and forth across that line.

There are plenty of post-apocalyptic scenarios that involve some kind of plague or bio-warfare, touching on our paranoia about diseases. Pandemic outbreaks of vampirism as in Daybreakers (2009) or I Am Legend (2007) or, tangentially, The Omega Man (1971) or any of the droves of zombie-movies, starting with the George Romero movies go at the topic slightly differently. The Last man on Earth (1964) combines vampirism, viruses and what-not. And David Cronenberg’s inimitable Rabid (1977) that creeps in under your skin for more reasons than one.

The premise is basically that everything else is the same, but the people needed to keep society going are the broken part of the machine, with the exception of small pockets of survivors. 28 Days Later… (2002) give us the modern view of the virus spreading in a world where communication and travel have developed to the point where pandemics are moving at epic speeds. Then there’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) of course, which is all of these things, decay and viruses and time travel and a hallucinatory drift in the fabric of reality with a cherry on top.

Planet of the Apes (1984) is of course another time-honoured classic that deserves a mention. Nothing’s really wrong here if you don’t take the fact that the human race managed to bomb themselves into the stone age proving themselves to be nothing more than an interesting footnote in history, reduced to myth at best. It’s that old fear of degeneration, a reversed Darwinian evolutionary curve making us irrelevant, which is something that not even Matrix (1999) took all the way. At least there humans serve some kind of utilitarian purpose, even if it’s not that great from our perspective.

Then there’s a lot of … uhm, let’s call them less successful movies on the same basic topic, like Interzone (1987), the storyline of which is given in haiku-style as “Humans fight mutants in a post-holocaust world.” Hmm… I haven’t seen that one. A Boy and His Dog (1975) I have seen, but I can’t exactly claim to have any interesting memories of it, apart from thinking that the sound quality was really bad and the voice-over of the Dog just felt incredibly wrong.

We bring it on ourselves.
That is surprisingly often the moral lesson in these narratives. It doesn’t matter if we are pawns in the game or victims of chance or just caught in the maelstrom of circumstance that are outside our control.

Our fears are pretty much the usual ones. Things ending badly, for whatever reason, are often brought about by greed and stupidity and all the things connected to excess and any of a variation of combinations of the seven deadly sins. Sometimes the humans in these narratives are like cockroaches, surviving despite of it all. Sometimes they are righteous men in a bleak free-for-all where people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Mule

The Book of Eli (2010) Post Apocalypse Gray

Article first published as Movie Review: The Book of Eli – Post Apocalypse Gray on Blogcritics.

The Book of Eli starts when a man comes walking through a bleak and colorless post-apocalyptic landscape. He has a backpack and a machete and purpose. This is a quest of sorts, where Eli (Denzel Washington) is carrying a book, protecting it and “going West”. It’s not clear at first what the book is, who the wanderer is or where he’s going. The tale is hugely mythological and evoques images from Dante’s Inferno or whatever tale of wanderers you might be most familiar with.
On his travels he encounters good men and bad. Mostly bad.
He finds his way to a budding town ruled by Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who has spent a long time and a lot of resources looking for a book. It just so happens that Eli is carrying the book Carnegie is looking for. Carnegie tries to manipulate and seduce Eli to stay and share the book, but Eli respectfully declines. This is where the hunt-and-seek part of the story begins. Eli happens to befriend Solara (Mila Kunis), the daughter of Claudia (Jennifer Beals) who is Carnegie’s concubine, for lack of a better word. When Eli leaves the town Solara follows him.
Now, this is all very archetypical, so there is really no point in discussing the presence of certain conventions and clichés since that’s the whole point here. It’s a myth arch and the approach to the story fits.
There’s a great consistency in the visual aspects of the movie. Whatever happened is thirty years in the past and the survivors who remember what the world looked like before are few and far between. Eli and Carnegie are both of that generation and they suffer the unavoidable “paradise lost” emotions that that engenders. They remember, and in part that is what this whole movie is about. The book itself is a symbol of knowledge and pre-apocalypse times.
All vegetation has died, there is nothing green in this world. Whatever canned goods there were have been depleted over time and people are resorting to eating the other white meat, each other. That means this bleak future is a free-for-all and no one is safe.
Eli can handle himself, though. He’s a survivor and a fighter and a true believer who really does think he is on a mission, and that there is someone watching over him.
I like the look and feel of this dystopic future and I am frankly surprised at the stellar quality of the cast. Gary Oldman is suitably villainous, but still manages to inject enough depth into his character to make him interesting. Even bit-parts like The Engineer (Tom Waits), George (Michael Gambon) and Lombardi (Malcolm McDowell) are cast in a way that gives this unexpected weight and substance.
All that being said, I’m afraid this movie is probably not going to stay with you for very long. It ends on an oddly hopeful note, but nothing is really resolved and there are plenty of pitfalls on the way there, where it resorts to simple action-movie clichés. There’s a surprisingly hollow knell at the core of the whole premise that niggles at the viewer and I can’t really put my finger on what it is.
To be fair it’s competing with old favorites in the same genre, like Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Hardware (1990) or, more recently The Road (2009).
It is most definitely worth watching, though, and the opening sequence sets the atmosphere of the whole movie. Just keep that in mind and you’ll see what I mean.

The Book of Eli (2010) directed by Albert & Allen Hughes stars Denzel Washington (Eli), Gary Oldman (Carnegie), Mila Kunis (Solara), Ray Stevenson (Redridge), Jennifer Beals (Claudia), Frances de la Tour (Martha), Michael Gambon (George), Tom Waits (Engineer), Malcolm McDowell (Lombardi), Evan Jones (Martz) and Joe Pingue (Hoyt).

Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation (2009) directed by McG stars Christian Bale as John Connor, Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright, Moon Bloodgood as Blair Williams, Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese and Helena Bonham Carter as Dr. Serena Kogan.

Let me just start by saying that the first Terminator movie was a pretty big piece of the puzzle for me as a younger animal. It was one of the first times I started thinking about the structure of movies and not just their ability to entertain me. I honestly don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, but it was lots. So I have no intention of pretending that I am in any way impartial in my opinions – not that I ever am, but still.

It was always about two things for me – the apocalyptic future, and I like a good dystopia – and the relationship between man and machine. So – for me the first movie might still have been better if they had cast Lance Henriksen as the terminator, like they considered at the time. He would have played it like a praying mantis, which would have been wicked awesome, but we have Arnold, and that’s another take on it.

T2 had lots of things going for it. Linda Hamilton’s portrayal of a woman with a badly fractured psyche and a young Edward Furlong caught in what may very well just be his mother’s psychosis. I had a hard time forgiving the last two or three minutes – the thumbs up thing just made me cringe.

We will not speak of T3. The less said about that embarrassment, the better. Sorry.

All the previous movies have given us the events in sequence, but there has always been a liquid quality to the passage of time in this narrative and there’s been lots of discussion about that. So this feels like a prequel as well as a sequel, which is actually kind of cool if you think about it. Here we get into the narrative before John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time. Kyle is in his teens and in danger and if he doesn’t make it then the future is reset again and you really can break you brain thinking about stuff like that.

Bale plays John Connor as a soldier and a good one at that. He still has people to answer to and the chain of command goes all the way up to General Ashdown (Michael Ironside). He is spare and intense and not pleasant, but that is what can be expected.

The story does not start with him, though. It starts with Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) being executed for murder and giving his body to science. When he wakes up a long way off from where he fell asleep, he is unaware that he has been rebuilt anew. They’ve let him keep his mind and his heart, though, and that alone is enough for the academic body to hit the ground running on the old Descartian dichotomy of the head and the heart, emotions and rationality. I won’t though, because I am trying to keep this reasonably short.

Marcus teems up with the young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and again, this is a good casting choice. He is a grey hound in a world where machines are out to kill people in general and him in particular. He’s got survivor written all over him and still there is a heart there. He keeps company with a young mute, Star (Jadagrace),  so we get a glimpse of his care-taking qualities.

I have to say, that is one of the things I liked about this version of the future. We get a populous that actually represents the young and the old as well, not only the strongest survive, but those most fitted to their environment.

The machines – they are the real stars here – to my mind. We get to see a variety of model T’s – and they show the typical development, they start out clunky and heavy and grow lighter and more efficient as the model develops. That is very clever of the writers, I think.

We also have the big HKs and the smaller modo-terminators, a motorcycle variety, and a hydrobot. We also have the huge, big enormous destroyers and the smaller spies. All of these machines have various insect-like qualities, many mandibles and arms and a carapace.

Skynet was always clever enough to work its way around mankind and you have to think of the plot like you’d approach playing chess against a computer. It will sacrifice and it knows every variable, every play ever made and you will find fighting it a lesson in humility. The basic plot is that Skynet is laying a trap for the scraps of human Resistance still out there.

The Marcus character does signal what it is right from the get go, if you know what to look for, like the ability to make anything mechanical run, and just the speed and stance and the beatings he survives.

So all in all, I like the premises of the movie, I like the blasted desert version of the future. I think the key figures, John Connor and Kyle Reese are well represented. I think they could have done a better job on following up the tradition of a strong female character, because the female fighter pilot falls into some of the typical traps of the action genre. It’s not enough to make her a soldier, that does not a warrior make, as we all well know. And the token cute kid is mostly just there for form as far as I can see.

Worse, maybe just because I don’t like the delivery, is the “take my heart” moment towards the end. For those of you who have not yet seen it I won’t spoiler the thing, but it rivals the “thumbs up” in pure cliché to my mind.

As far as the actual action is concerned I have less than no complaints, actually. These guys can blow stuff up with the best of them. McG has also made sure to reference the other movies in stylish shots, settings and a thousand other things (including the Gun’n'Roses song “You could be mine”) that makes my fan-ish side grin with glee. I happen to think the industrial site fights and the visual references (ah, the crushing of a human skull under a steel Terminator foot) work very well. It’s not lack of imagination, as some critics have suggested, it is homage. Homage is allowed, even if it is just an action movie, you know.

My overall impression is that this is the movie I wanted after T2. I might actually have wanted it after the first movie, come to think of it… That would have done interesting things to the ideas of time and narrative. But as things stand, it is a good movie, it is entertaining and thoughtprovoking, if you are of that bent and it is more true to the original concept than I had expected.

Also – there are explosions. Did I mention the explosions?

Mule