Posts Tagged ‘End of the World’


The Dead Outside

April 16th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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company: Mothcatcher Films
year: 2009
runtime: 86′
country: United Kingdom
director: Kerry Anne Mullaney
cast: Sandra Louise Douglas,
Alton Milne, Sharon Osdin
writers: Kerry Anne Mullaney, Kris R. Bird
cinematography: Kris R. Bird

It’s six months after the outbreak of the viral apocalypse (again). This time, a neurological virus in combination with a badly working vaccine (although I’m not sure the film really means “vaccine” and not just “specialized medication”) has caused large parts of humanity to become dangerously deranged. Virus victims develop symptoms of schizophrenia which get worse until the only thing they seem to feel is anger. Still, these virus victims stay very much human, most of them are even still able to ramble angrily, so calling them zombies wouldn’t feel proper.

Daniel (Alton Milne), who has lost (how and why will be sort of explained in flashbacks and visions) his family, drives through the Scottish countryside looking for a safe place to stay. His car runs out of gas, but fortunately there’s a farmhouse close by for him to seek shelter in. At first, the place seems to be deserted, but the next day Daniel meets April (Sandra Louise Douglas), an armed, emotionally devastated teenager, whose grandparents were the owners of the farm. Initially, April doesn’t want Daniel staying there, is even close to shooting him, but something changes her mind.

In the following weeks, the girl and the man grow closer, although both need some time to get over the distrust one develops when everyone else is mad and one can’t even be all that sure about one’s own state of mind. Daniel and April aren’t really willing or able to disclose much about their pasts or their feelings to each other. He thinks she might be immune against the virus, while she panics at the mere thought of getting close to any of the remaining medical facilities. Still, there is trust growing between them.

Things get difficult again when another sane survivor, Kate (Sharon Osdin) arrives one day. Her presence disturbs the brittle, unspoken pact between April and Daniel, and catastrophe already waits around the corner.

It seems as if the British isles are the place to look when it comes to ultra-low budget outbreak films. Although this Scottish production isn’t as excellent as Colin, my favourite example of the type, it is still a much better film than a lot of its peers are.

It is also a film many viewers won’t like for its very slow pace, the conscious lack of clarity in its storytelling and its rather wonderful disinterest in gore. These things aren’t caused by any lack of care in The Dead Outside‘s director Kerry Anne Mullaney, though, they are very much part of the film’s design. The film’s slowness fits a film about an end of the world that isn’t flashy or explosive, but that instead has come slowly and creeping (the same way as the virus works).

The lack of clarity is a necessary part of a film which lets us see through the eyes of characters who aren’t at all sure about their own sanity, and who can’t and don’t want to remember everything they have done too clearly. Mullaney bases some effective moments of dread on the lack of certainty about what’s real and what’s not her characters live in. I found the way Daniel’s dead family and very real danger mingle much more effective than the typical goresplosion.

This is not to say that the film doesn’t contain any action at all. There are two (probably budget-stretching) action set-pieces – of course without explosions – that impress through clever editing and the ability to build up a feel of claustrophobia in open, but dark, spaces.

Mullaney is obviously more interested in her characters than in the action or plot. This is not the sort of film that believes in expository dialogue (although there is one large expository monologue late in the film); much is insinuated and hinted at, probably in the hope for an audience willing and able to put a little work into understanding what is going on with the characters. One of the points the film is trying to make seems to be that there really is no clear difference between the state we call “sanity” and “madness”. I don’t think that’s a point it could make by being clear and obvious about everything.

I thought that the actors were really selling their roles quite well. Sure, the acting is a bit strained in a “look! I’m acting!” way from time to time, but more often than not Douglas and Milne project a mix of normalcy and brittleness that is absolutely right for the direction the film is going in. Sometimes, acting that doesn’t read as ultra-professional is of help to let the characters on screen seem like everyday people.

I had some problems with the film’s visual side. While there are some impressive shots of the farmhouse and the creepy landscape around it (you know I’m a sucker for nature in its less sweet and mellow variations), the film suffers a little from desaturation syndrome. Of course, muted grey and brown colours help emphasize the desolation of the situation, but there’s a lot to be said for using other parts of the colour spectrum too, if only to contrast them with all that grey.

Probably even more problematic is Mullaney’s decision to shoot about eighty percent of the film with the camera tilted at an angle, as if everything took place on a ship close to sinking. Creepy angles might be a well established way to build mood, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. The last point is certainly reached when I find myself tilting my head to the side while watching a movie.

Still, I found these to be minor problems that The Dead Outside more than made up for. I am an easy mark for the film’s charms, seeing how much I despise exposition and clarity in movies, and how much I like the ambiguous and the slow, but even people who aren’t me could be able to find something quite irresistible in the film’s rhythm, in the way it feels like it was made by someone with very personal ideas of what could be interesting about a viral apocalypse.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?


2012

December 16th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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postercompany: Columbia Pictures
year: 2009
runtime: 158′
country: United States
director: Roland Emmerich
cast: John Cusack, Amanda Peet,
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton,
Oliver Platt, Thomas McCarthy,
Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover
writers: Roland Emmerich
and Harald Kloser
cinematographer: Dean Semler
out in wide release

Warning: This article probably contains some spoilers.


Plot: An increase in solar activity coupled with a rare galactic alignment showers Earth with neutrinos, heating up the core of the planet and causing its crust (and its magnetic poles) to catastrophically shift.  The world’s governments work together to preserve some semblance of humanity.

Roland Emmerich seems to have the dubious title of reigning king of the contemporary disaster genre, in spite of having only directed a few films on the subject.  His penchant for destruction on a global scale reaches dizzyingly absurd new heights in 2012, coupling a near bottomless production budget with a script that wouldn’t pass muster with a When Time Ran Out-era Irwin Allen with consistently hilarious and occasionally awe-inspiring results.

The narrative plays like a lopsided retread of the 1951 classic When Worlds Collide, only with pesky subatomic particles in the place of invading heavenly bodies.  Whereas the focus of that film was on the vast public works project to construct the humanity-saving space ark, 2012 zeros in on the disaster early and often – the ground quakes and oceans rise while familiar edifices of civilization crumble into oblivion.

Throughout Emmerich strives to retain a sense of immediacy, with the action revolving primarily about a broken family (Cusak, Peet, and McCarthy as a father, mother, and stepfather, with two preteen kids along for good measure) and their journey to save themselves.  That the father, a part-time chauffeur for a rich Russian and a full-time writer, has penned and published an under-appreciated apocalyptic science fiction novel with an optimistic conclusion ensures us that all the principle players will make it through just fine.  The catastrophe even offers up an opportunity to put Cusack and Peet’s marriage back on track, offing step-dad as soon as it’s expedient to the plot.

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Providing a secondary view on things is a government scientist (Ejiofor) with a kind heart an eye for the President’s daughter (Thandie Newton).  We also, briefly, glimpse things from the prospective of the President himself (an unlikely Danny Glover), himself lost when the USS John F. Kennedy comes tearing across the lawn of the White House.  Woody Harrelson even pops up in a minor but important supporting role as a crackpot radio host who just happens to know where Cusack and co. can find safety.

Most of 2012‘s drama falls pretty flat, from the forumlaic broken-family fantasy (the wife really still loves her old husband in spite of having remarried) to a half dozen or so people who realize too late that family ties are all that matter.  Characters plainly aren’t, with the accomplished cast struggling to provide them with any dimensionality at all, and most ultimately wind up as fodder for the apocalypse.  Here Emmerich presents with a certain cruelty, allowing numerous individuals to think they’ve reached salvation only to have the tables immediately turn on them.

In fact, there’s a nasty streak running through much of the destruction on display in 2012.  Emmerich takes obvious glee in plunging millions, even billions of people to their assorted dooms, including a pair of old ladies he sends crashing head-first into a wall for the minor sin of being in front of our escaping heroes.  Worse, he seems to want things both ways – tugging at our heartstrings with sad music and teary close-ups between shots of people trying to survive in torrents of debris before widening his scope so that we might revel in the shear spectacle of the thing.  It’s an uneasy combination, and one Emmerich isn’t nearly competent enough to pull off.  He’d have been better off forgetting such obvious attempts at garnering audience sympathy and just presenting his thrill-ride apocalypse for what it is – pure exploitation.

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Emmerich also seems to have a particular bent against the rich and powerful, apparently having realized that public opinion of both is scraping the bottom of the barrel in this time of recession.  The sentiment is no different than in the George Pal classic 2012 so obviously emulates.  The rich are condemned just for being so, even though the literal arks that save whatever is left of mankind are financed in large part by private backers.  That age-old government conspiracy subplot also rears its ugly head, and it takes our kind-hearted scientist to convince world leaders (all of them!) that they should do the right thing and save as many people as they can.

While the drama simmers at a low level throughout the rest of the narrative twists itself into impossible knots of contrivances.  We see not one, but three last-minute edge-of-your-seat plane takeoffs of the Independence Day variety, the outrunning of a pyroclastic flow by an RV, and even the shifting of an entire continent some thousands of miles just so our family can make it there reasonably unscathed.  The crowining absurd moment comes at the end, when an ark is threatened by a collision with a mountain.  What mountain, you ask?  Why Everest, of course!  In a film like this, no lesser peak will do.

I could gripe about this picture all day, but I won’t, because I was so damned entertained in spite of it all.  The expansive CGI work has been credited as “photo-realistic” by some, which is utter baloney, but that doesn’t keep it from being a world of fun just the same – it’s certainly one hell of a cartoon.  2012 explodes Yellowstone, sinks California, and wipes the rest of the world clean with gargantuan tsunamis before it hits the two hour mark.  It may struggle for momentum in the ark-bound final act out of a shear lack of more destroy, but memory of what came before is more than enough to pull one through to the end of things.

For Emmerich the world is obviously not enough (perhaps we’ll get a cataclysm on a galactic scale next go around).  I may lament its furthering of the popularity of the asinine doom-sayer lunacy surrounding the year in question, but I enjoyed 2012 for what it is – the kind of dumb loud entertainment only a hack like Emmerich can get away with (and he has, again, handily).  Art it isn’t, but recommended matinée viewing?  Absolutely.

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The Road

November 28th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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poster

theatrical poster, copyright 2009 Dimension Films

company: Dimension Films
year: 2009
runtime: 112′
country: United States
director: John Hillcoat
cast: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee,
Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Molly Parker,
Michael K. Williams, Charlize Theron
writer: Joe Penhall, from the
novel by Cormac McCarthy
cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe
order the novel from Amazon.com
The Road is currently in theatres in the USA

Plot: A father and son wander the blasted remnants of the United States after an unnamed cataclysm destroys civilization and most life on Earth.

It’s always unfortunate when the best word I can think of to describe a new film is “underwhelming”.  That’s not to say that John Hillcoat’s film isn’t a noble attempt at bringing the award-winning Cormac McCarthy source novel from 2006 to the screen, but I couldn’t help but feel that twinge of dissatisfaction when the end credits finally rolled.

To be fair, The Road gets plenty right.  The major success of the picture is in its depiction of the apocalyptic landscape the unidentified father and son (Mortensen and Smit-McPhee respectively) traverse.  Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (Goya’s Ghosts and, it pains me to say, the latest entry in the Twilight series) captures the many locations (from Pennsylvania to the truly other-worldly Mount St. Helens, looking as much like the end of the world as it did the summer of 1980) brilliantly and allows Hillcoat to present his desolate world with a minimum of computer trickery.

As important as the cinematography is the sound design.  There is near constant noise, be it of wind, rain, or the deep rumblings of a world still in the process of tearing itself apart.  When coupled with Aguirresarobe’s images and an understated score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis the illusion is complete, and I doubt any viewer will be able to argue that The Road‘s vision of the sunless gray future is anything less than unsettling.

There’s also nothing overtly wrong with The Road‘s depiction of its sparse drama.  The father and son encounter a number of threats throughout, including a family who keeps people huddled like animals in their basement while slowly harvesting their limbs for food, but violence is kept to a minimum.  The high points of the story are undoubtedly the few quiet moments in which the father and son are simply allowed to be themselves, given brief respite from the dangers we know could be lurking just beyond their, and our, range of sight.

The father is understandably protective, dedicating his life to the survival of his son after his wife commits suicide, and is instinctively distrustful of anyone who crosses their path.  Aware that he is dying, the father knows that his ability to fulfill his duty is dwindling as much as their arsenal – a single pistol loaded with their last two rounds of ammunition.  He sees a glimmer of hope for the future  in the naiveté of his son, who wishes to help everyone they pass (a thief, a dying old man), but realizes the immense danger it poses in this harsh new reality.  As far the father is concerned, charity is dead.

Both Mortensen and Smit-McPhee work well in their respective roles.  Their performances are honest, and neither succumbs to the temptation to be overly dramatic.  Other characters are few and far between, and most have no lines at all.  A fine exception is Robert Duvall as an elderly man named Eli, near death and almost blind, who is invited to stay with the father and son for a night.

That so much is right with The Road makes it all the harder for me to place just what is wrong with it.  I’ve not read McCarthy’s source so I can’t speak for how faithfully it was adapted here (I know that the role of the mother is expanded considerably, albeit in flashback).  There just seems to be something missing from the equation, something that keeps all of The Road‘s accomplishments from coalescing into a satisfying whole.  It’s a picture that strives hard for depth and resonance, but that rings hollow in the end.

Dimension has pushed back the release for The Road numerous times over the past year and a half, and its latest push to the 25th of this month is assumed in some circles to be an attempt at improving its Oscar potential.  Perhaps the Weinsteins are hoping for a repeat of No Country for Old Men‘s earlier Academy Award success.  There is certainly some buzz surrounding the film’s release, and the theatre I screened it in was relatively packed (even at 6 in the evening the day after Thanksgiving).  The audience seemed pretty approving of the production by and large, though a group of three (out of 200 or so) did leave early on – never to return.

Don’t let the rather intangible concerns espoused above dissuade you if you’re looking forward to this one, as The Road is undeniably a good film and a fine alternative to the artless spectacles of destruction that typically populate the corners of the multiplex (sorry, no explosions here).  It just isn’t a great film, which I was perhaps unjustly expecting after the Coen brothers’ previous McCarthy adaptation.  The Road comes recommended, but keep those pesky expectations in check.