Tag Archives: Apocalypse

A nice, slow, zombie movie

What I don’t get about zombie movies is how the zombie plagues inevitably wind up spreading so fast. It’s like, every movie starts out basically the same, everything’s fine, people are happy, there’s maybe like a random clue, a piece of background news or something about an unexplained riot somewhere else, and then it’s like a countdown, five, four, three, two, one, zombies.

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And from that moment, it’s just nothing but zombies. You look outside and you’re like, what? Zombies? Only there’s no time to even really ask yourself that question, because a whole swarm of zombies is coming at you from down the street. And, oh look, your wife’s a zombie too, sorry dude, yeah, she did complain about not feeling so well, and was that a Band-Aid she had on her leg? You didn’t think to maybe ask her what happened, did it have any relation to the zombie fever she was burning up with?

Well, too bad, because now she’s trying to bite you, and go ahead and run out of the house, but the police are no help by now, the entire force has already collapsed from within. The few cops that are alive have undoubtedly secured whatever firearms they could grab before the zombies made that whole station a zombie cesspool.

Someone should make a zombie movie, but make the pacing really slow. Like maybe they could just start out with like two or three zombies. They’d be walking through the park, maybe they’d have their eye on an unsuspecting jogger, someone who stopped to tie her shoe at the wrong place and the wrong time.

And then right before they approach, some police officer shows up, he’s like, “Hey! Stop it! Leave that woman alone!” Of course the zombies won’t heed the warning at all, but he’ll try to interfere, and when the zombies try to bite, they cop just kind of whacks them in the face with his police baton.

So then some sort of an emergency crew shows up, they contain the three zombies, and nobody gets bit. Or maybe one person gets bit, I don’t know, but they keep him in isolation. Under quarantine, he eventually turns into a zombie, and now the heavy-duty government science teams are brought in.

Would they let the public know about this? Of course they would. Come on, not two years goes by without some ridiculous overblown epidemic scare. Everybody stay inside so we can spray the entire country with mosquito-killing chemicals because West Nile disease is coming. Did we say West Nile? We really meant SARS. SARS is going to wipe out the planet. Or swine flu.

If there was a serious zombie pandemic, you wouldn’t see random news clips in the background, clueless reporters standing in front of a riot saying things like, “Nobody knows what’s going on!” Everybody knows what’s going on. Everybody knows exactly when something even has an very small chance of turning into a disaster. Media thrives on this type of nonsense. A real disaster like actual zombies would be a frenzy.

Of course, I guess that wouldn’t really make for that interesting of a movie. I mean, I could picture it, the whole film being a regular family just watching all of the news safe and sound from their living room. Super boring, yeah. But come on, even that would have been better than World War Z. “The cure is, you have to be sick!” Oh yeah, thanks Brad Pitt.

Futurology Part XVIII

Let’s think about the future some more. The future used to be so much cooler. Look at Back to the Future Part II. Our optimism was running so high, that when Marty McFly travelled to 2012, it was a techno-paradise. There were hoverboards. You could make a pizza go from the size of a dime to the size of a real pizza, right there in your kitchen. Every wall was a giant TV. Cars could fly. And did I mention hoverboards?

This vision of the future wasn’t sugarcoated either. It wasn’t perfect. Future Marty McFly still lived in kind of a dumpy house. He still got chewed out by his two-tie wearing boss. There were still truckloads of manure ready to be crashed into. That future was wondrous and marvelous and all that, but it still looked real.

The worst type of futures are where everything is too perfect. Like look at Star Wars. Everything is crisp, deluxe, clean, a little too clean. I don’t remember seeing any dirt anywhere in the entirety of the two trilogies. Nobody ever goes to the bathroom. Tattoine doesn’t count, because that wasn’t dirt, it was sand. Also, the ice planet Hoth doesn’t count either, because it was frozen. Now that I think about it, even when Luke and Han Solo spent the night together inside of that mountain yak’s stomach, they made it back to the base the next day looking cleaner than ever. That doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not a convincing future. I know, technically Star Wars took place “A long time ago,” but seriously, spaceships, droids, light-sabers. Call it what you will, it’s a vision of the future.

At least when my parents’ generation was making films about the future, they were at least somewhat optimistic. They had enough whimsy to think about hoverboards and self-pumping sneakers. Whenever people imagine the future now, it’s always dystopian wasteland this, apocalyptic nightmare that. The Road just came out a year ago. I didn’t see it, but apparently the whole world was shot to shit. The Hunger Games. I never saw that either, but I read the plot on Wikipedia, and it didn’t seem like they had a great outlook about humanity or society. Prometheus, well, I didn’t get to see Prometheus either, I’m still waiting for it to come out on Netflix, but I saw the trailer, and while all the technology looked cool, I mean, it’s a horror movie, right?

Look at Wall-E. I know that all of these movies have long-term hopeful messages about humanity, but it’s way too long-term. As John Maynard Keynes famously said, in the long-term future, we’re all dead anyway. In the short-term future, the best that we can think of right now is massive destruction and planetary relocation. And seriously think about Wall-E for a second. Everybody on Earth moved onto that spaceship? I don’t buy that for a second. There’s no spaceship big enough to hold every person on Earth. We can’t even feed or clothe every human being on Earth, there’s no way we’re going to have some sort of smooth moving process, an “OK, single file everybody, there’s plenty of room on the spaceship for everybody, no pushing please, we promise, nobody’s going to get left behind to die.”

I’m telling you, I bet like ninety-five percent of the population got left behind. Weren’t all of the people living on the spaceship white? I don’t remember. But weren’t all of the babies being born in test tubes anyway? Why would they only breed white test tube babies? What kind of a future is that?

Imagine that our Earth started dying, fast, and the government made a huge spaceship for us all to relocate to. We would all claw each other’s throats out just to make sure that we got aisle seats. And then there would be the deniers, the people that say, “This is bullshit! The earth is fine! I’m staying and so are my followers. And not only that, we oppose the creation of any spaceship for anybody! We believe that everybody should stay here on this planet with us!”

And the news would have stories saying stuff like, “Where are they getting the money for this giant spaceship? Are your taxpayer dollars being spent wisely?” It would never get done. We’d all go down with the dying Earth. Not all of us. The mega-rich would just build their own, private, luxurious spaceships. And they’d be the ones to repopulate the cosmos. Assuming that’s it’s not already repopulated somewhere else. It has to be. But that’s another topic entirely.

Man, the future is scary. Maybe it’s because the present is so scary. Maybe I’m scared of too much stuff. Wall-E wasn’t really supposed to be a horror movie, was it? I mean, it was a kids movie, right?