Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 04/19/24
One For You Nineteen For Me Edition
It’s been a particularly unpleasant week here at the Bunker, as the taxes are due and our state-sanctioned overlords are determined to collect what they are owed. The crush of numbers and monies owed and properly filled out forms and dealing with the functionaries attached to the collection of taxes has left everyone here in administration feeling like someone scooped out their brains with melon baller and filled the spacious cranial cavity with ball bearings. As God is my witness, I heard my brains clacking together on Wednesday.
Worse, I’m still not quite finished yet. Ugh. Hopefully, you’ve all paid your fair share so that the 806 billionaires who control more wealth than 65 million Americans can complain about the broken system on social media and rail against the unfair practices of a capricious government. None of this should be on your mind in November; instead, when you vote, please let it be for some reactionary and arbitrary reason that has no economic weight or impact but instead makes you feel like you totally dunked on some nebulous political adversary hell-bent on destroying your life.
Further Thoughts on the Impending Apocalypse
Even before the Pandemic, I noticed an uptick in End of the World movies and TV shows. From The Walking Dead (see below) to Zombieland and World War Z, we’ve been waiting for our friends and families to eat our brains since 2010 or thereabouts. It’s when The Purge (2013) movies started up, followed by a resurgence in neo-Cold War spy flicks and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) that I started to notice we were pivoting off of the Zombie Apocalypse to Any Apocalypse Will Do. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2015) restarted the venerable franchise, with genetic manipulation being the Thing that Does Us In, rather than atomic war, but the result is still the same; they could not get the apes on horseback soon enough.
These have all flown under the radar, I suspect, because we tend to think of these movies and TV shows as a bag of recognizable cliches wrapped in a familiar genre. Or worse, a franchise reboot or series “re-imagining.” Planet of the Apes is its own thing, and the novelty of gorillas on horseback tends to obscure the idea that the world is decidedly post-human. Ditto most of the rest of what’s listed above and I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of examples all your own, too. Whether it’s intelligent gorillas, or super-fast zombies, or gearheads from the local car club, the trappings of these stories, for the point I’m trying to make, isn’t that they are genre flicks, but rather that they start with the premise that we are doomed and this is merely a slow walk to the nearest tar pit.
But why is this? I think I have an idea, but it’s not a very uplifting one. Prior to the year 2000, we were mostly in the Cold War, and there’s certainly some memorable films in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that deal with the end result of mutually assured destruction. By the 1990s, things had wound down somewhat, but there were still a few dozen films made with an “after the end” theme.
The less said about Y2K, the better. It’s not hard to see that in the absence of a far away enemy to hate on, like the U.S.S.R., we had to hate someone, something, and the 1990s is where you started seeing “survivalists” who came together under a common, often misspelled manifesto to wait out the end of days. The world’s computers all resetting themselves to 1900 is the stuff that dreams were made of for these guys, who were all convinced that we were inches away as a society of knifing each other for bottled water and canned meat.
Personally, I am glad that it didn’t happen, and I’m sure had we been a YouTube culture at the time there would have been a slew of reaction videos of guys in urban camo vests and wraparound shades leaning into their cellphone cameras and saying, “Just because it DIDN’T happen this time, that don’ mean it ain’t gonna happen eventually!”
As mentioned, I love me a good old-fashioned apocalypse—provided it’s fictional, see? But Post-9/11, we all got really scared as a nation. I’d go so far as to suggest we picked up a collective psychic wound that has yet to heal, and may in fact have become septic. This build-up of worry, of ennui, of low-grade daily anxiety churns in our guts because now our enemy isn’t a nebulous concept, on the other side of the world; it’s the new neighbors who just moved in next door with different bumper stickers on their SUV than me. We’ve turned against ourselves, all but ignoring that our old enemies on the other side of the world have bought back into the game and are playing to win.
It's not surprising, then, that we’ve become so fascinated with the end of the world, and by that I mean, the end of America, of civilization, right? We’re so enamored with it, and so certain that it’s going to happen, that we’ve mentally moved on past the killings in the streets, to the next phase, which is surviving the Apocalypse. It’s the “Post-” part that we have a keen interest in, which is why some folks are hoarding guns, and others are buying gold, and still more of us used the Pandemic as a dry run for what to do when you run out of toilet paper and you need to bake a loaf of bread for the barn raising.
That’s really what the post-apocalypse is about, after all. It’s not the how we got here, or the why, but rather, it’s the “what happens now?” question that we want answered. I think that’s why the number of post-apocalypse movies and TV shows has nearly quadrupled in the last 20 years, compared to the 1970s and 1980s, in the midst of the first Cold War. We can all accept that things are bad, and when the zombies come, things’ll get worse, but we all really want the reassurance that after the zombies (or the killer robots of Skynet, or the death of all the bees), we will be okay. We’ll make it. Things will get better.
That’s why we turn to stories, isn’t it? We want some assurances that no matter how messed up things get, stories like what we are routinely consume on TV and in film tend to show us that yeah, evil will be thwarted, true love will triumph, the people survived the night, and so forth. We need that reassurance so that we can get back to the business of, well, whatever else we might be doing that requires most of our attention.
As you no doubt find yourself watching Furiosa, or Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, or any of the other post-apocalypse films this year, remind yourself that it’s not too late to do a little something to forestall the end of days. After all, it’s an election year, and if the last 24 years has taught me anything, it’s that election years suck. People get even more angry, more worked up, and these days, more threatening. My advice is to practice de-escalation in our personal lives. Try not to get so mad at the computer that you end up throwing something. Work on taking a beat and looking at pictures of baby otters before you Rage-Post whatever latest lie the Russian Troll Farm just vomited up. Let’s all try to take it down a notch, at least until after November. Then we can go right back to caring about meaningless crap and fighting about Zach Snyder online. Our eventual ending won’t have T-60 power armor, or samurai swords, or even gorillas on horseback (more’s the pity). The real end of the world would suck. Let’s all decide together that we would rather that not happen, instead.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Note: administration has instructed us to clear out the backlog of reviews in the interest of expediency. We want to point out that not a month ago, administration asked us for longer form reviews with a “bit more meat on the bones,” whatever that means. We’re just hopeful that when he changes his mind again, in three to four weeks, that he’ll return to a format that we can readily adopt again without having to reinvent anything.
Walking Dead: Those Who Remain (et.al., AMC)
Rick and Michonne are reunited in this third mini-series spin-off from the original franchise, following the end of the main Walking Dead series, which took its fair share of criticism for being too bleak, too depressing, too violent, too too too too. For just about every fan, the linchpin moment was when Negan, um, met Glenn. When that little cliffhanger got resolved, I know a lot of people who just stopped watching it, citing that it was “too much.” I won’t ever disagree with that assessment, but I remained curious.
You see, most zombie apocalypse movies end when things are getting interesting. George Romero’s “Dead” films all make it to the end of the emergency and then cut away. The sole survivor who made it through the night gets shot. The mall is overrun. The army gets wiped out. We have a witness or two to the destruction, but we never find out “what next?”
The Walking Dead (both the comic book and the TV series) answer that “what next” question. I don’t know if everyone liked, or even agreed, with the show’s answer, but Walking Dead: Those Who Remain and also Walking Dead: Dead City and Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon all presume to tell additional stories about the main characters because even they knew that their show’s ending wouldn’t address what happens to these broken people, nor would it satisfy the remaining fans.
Of the three post-show spin-offs, I liked Those Who Remain the best, but mostly because Rick and Michonne are so good together, both as actors and as characters. This mini-series, more than any of the others, felt like a bit of an apology (when Rick was “killed” and “written off” in the series, it drove more fans away and, I’ll just say it, the show’s overall quality slipped several notches afterward). It’s as if someone said, “you know what? We didn’t handle that well. Let’s walk it back.”
For the sake of completeness, here’s my thoughts about the other two mini-series. I was most looking forward to Daryl Dixon, thinking perhaps that this would be a Conan-esque kind of story featuring Redneck Aragorn, shades of “Beyond the Black River,” but then he ended up taking a kid to France in a boat. Yeah. Because that’s exactly what I want to see Daryl doing: struggling with the language barrier. The glacial pacing didn’t help, either.
Dead City was the first of the mini-series released, and it was essentially a buddy-cop/fish-out-of-water extension of the main show, with new whackjob villains and gangs, a whole new city to run around in, and the interminable continuation of the “will they/won’t they,” “forgive me or kill me” back and forth between Negan and Maggie. It’s really more Negan’s series, because you get to see him be Negan again (addressing another wrong from the original series). As such, it was the easiest to get into and it felt like something familiar. That’s growth, somewhat.
Here's the funny thing, though: as much as I loved the happy ending of Walking Dead: Those Who Remain, I was prepared for people to blow up for real this time. That’s been a promise that the show always kept: don’t get too attached, because you never know who’s going to get torn apart. It was a guaranteed certainty that someone was going to die, maybe not every episode, but certainly every other episode, and if that design concept was something you weren’t on board with, you weren’t likely to last past season three, if you even made it that far.
As for the rest of us, I think it was made pretty clear to the fans who stuck around at least until Negan showed up that, while people would die and be replaced by other cast members, that we’d end up okay, or nearly okay, struggling to rebuild society, even as the zombies became more of a mundane, almost natural phenomenon, like tornado season, with very dispassionate solutions to their presence, like patching holes in the outer wall. Everyone kept an eye out for hordes. Otherwise, it was a matter of being smart and staying alert, which is already something people do in the woods. The monsters in The Walking Dead were always the living.
I guess I was expecting the showrunners for The Walking Dead to kill everyone at the end, like how the Romero movies did. I don’t know if their series finale was optimistic, but it was at least optimal for making new spin-off shows. I wouldn’t mind a second season of Daryl Dixon, provided they let him do some Conan-inspired stuff like out of “Red Nails.”
Fans of the original series will like Walking Dead: Those Who Remain and very likely the other two spin-offs if you haven’t already seen them. They aren’t long, so the buy-in for time is shorter than a regular season.
The Gentlemen (Netflix)
A young soldier finds out that his father, the Duke of Halistead, has bypassed the usual bit about the oldest son inheriting the estate in the event of his death and has named his second-oldest son as the rightful heir, instead. He further finds out that there’s a marijuana farm under the barn, and yeah, his old man knew about it, too. How do you fix it? Or do you even try?
If you saw Guy Ritchie’s movie, The Gentlemen (2019), then you know what to expect from this slick and stylish expansion of the original story. If you thought the movie was a bit too rushed and not detailed enough, then this is your lucky day.
That’s not to say that the series is plodding or that the plot doesn’t move. It’s a weird mix of dense storytelling and deft editing to make the story skip across the screen. There’s no apparent wasted space and it doesn’t sacrifice any of the pacing just to be cool. Some episodes even make good use of those graphic flourishes, those cards that are both supplementary to the narrative and also a bit of an unreliable narrative device.
The Gentlemen a crime story with some caper elements thrown in for good measure, all with an engaging premise—a man inherits a share in a criminal enterprise and wants to extricate himself out of it without getting killed. When filmed using the Guy Ritchie style guide, there’s plenty of violence, profanity, and stacks on stacks on stacks of cockney slang spoken with thick British accents. You may want to watch the show with the close captions enabled, just in case. I’m looking forward to a second season, especially if they can deliver the goods as well as the first season does.
Damsel (Netflix)
Millie Bobby Brown is set up into an arranged marriage by her father, the king, to secure her nation’s economic future. Unfortunately for her, the goal wasn’t so much marriage as the paying off of a debt to a—well, you’ve seen the trailer, I trust. You know we’re talking about a dragon, right?
I don’t want to spoil the movie for you, but if you watched the trailer on Netflix, congratulations, it’s too late! Yeah! It gives away every single story beat. Enjoy!
This is a straightforward story, with not so many twists and turns so much as it weaves back and forth down the center line. I’m serious, it’s the most linear film I’ve seen in a while. Thankfully, it’s an interesting story, put together well enough, and Brown, who is a gifted 20-year-old actress (a thing that makes me a little sick to my stomach, but I guess Natalie Portman is too old to be The Celebrity Waif anymore, and Hollywood has standards that mustn’t slip, don’t you know), makes the most of the script, and that’s as it should be, since she’s in very nearly every scene.
Probably the best thing going for this little potboiler is that, amazingly, the innovative design of the dragon itself. Somehow—and this might be the real selling point—they managed to design a dragon that (A) looked like a dragon straight out of D&D and (B) it didn’t look like Vermithrax Perjoritive from Dragonslayer (1982). That means, via the transitive property, that it also didn’t look like any other big movie dragon in the last 20-something years *COUGH*Reign of Fire*COUGH*. That alone merits a golf clap, as it’s something no other special effects team has been able to do with the notable exception of DragonHeart (1996) and I realize that may be damning with faint praise.
I think it’s telling that the one thing the trailer to Damsel didn’t ruin for me was the dragon itself; they did a good job of keeping it hidden like a good low budget monster should be. Brown carries the story on her 20-year-old shoulders, but it’s definitely a sprint and not a marathon. This is light fare, but it’s decent, if uninspired, grist for the mill if you’re regularly playing D&D or thinking about starting up a game. Watch it as part of your session zero when you’re rolling up characters.