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global warming causes mass panic
Jun. 18th, 2007 09:39 amHollywood churns out movie after movie of apocalypse scenarios.
A little tour of the new apple movie trailers reveals the shocking truth: the day of the slasher has passed - even the ghosts have gone home. The age of the zombie has come back from the (un?)dead.
I Am Legend - a remake of the 1954 doomsday tale about the last man on Earth (or more specifically, some major city). It's been remade twice before this, the more famous of the two being Charlton Heston's The Omega Man. This time it's been resurrected by the director of Constantine. It was supposed to come out in the '90s with Ridley Scott and the Governator, but we didn't have the wallet for apocalypse expenditures then. Now Will Smith is at the helm as the last uninfected human in New York City after some horrible mutant-causing disaster. True, the critters are supposed to be vampires, but come on. Vampire movie implies cool, stylish, subversive, gothic underground. This is a zombie movie.
Fido - for more light-hearted fare, this seems to be the sequel if you will to Shaun of the Dead. As seen at the end of that one, zombies can become domesticated, capable of routine and mundane tasks. This one expands on that scenario, featuring a 1950s world where zombies are household servants and traffic cops. I'm guessing it's sort of like one of those boy-and-his-dog movies, except it's boy-and-his-zombie. I predict sympathy toward the pet zombie and derision toward the particularly heartless human masters.
And don't forget the really promising Resident Evil: Extinction trailer, and the weird-ass sheep-as-zombies Black Sheep movie.
I'm sure that they're piggybacking on the success of 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the previous two Resident Evil movies. Yesterday I saw this odd straight-to-video movie, The Plague. It was playing on the sci-fi channel. It was... so odd. Basically all the world's children go into a coma for ten years, then come back with "one collective brain" and start killing everybody else (the reason is never explained). But it's definitely an apocalypse movie with definite zombie overtones. It was made in 2006.
Now, zombie movies got first blood in the late 1970s. Between then and, I would say, 28 Days Later, zombie-related releases have been B movie camp, the kind of thing you have to rent in the shady section of the obscure downtown video store - Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town, etcetera. They certainly wouldn't get Will Smith in one. Accompanying this trend of more high-profile zombie movies with cleaner casts and more critical acclaim is the general apocalypse trend that started off as an alien thing: Independence Day (1996), Signs (2002), War of the Worlds (2005). One, however, relied less on interspecies battle and more on earthly sins and woes - Outbreak (1995), and it's from this one that I believe the current zombie-apocalypse trend was spawned.
And what an odd time was the 70s. On the one hand, no major wars (those had all boiled down to nothing, and we were left dealing with the aftermath). On the other hand, massive social changes. Globalization, environmentalism, women's lib, gay rights, a middle class... the "me" generation. Western economies were in bad shape since the oil-producing countries figured out they might be able to wield some power over the mighty former imperalists. Computers started to take over. Blockbusters - The Exorcist, Jaws, Star Wars - were born. Some controversial movies born in this period that have similarities to the zombie genre were The Last House on the Left and the original The Hills Have Eyes. War movies had become less heroic, less action-based; instead they had become sad, creepy, bitter... disillusioned - Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter. This is my theory. Cinema diverged. There were the blockbusters, the ones that celebrated the modern world and its changes while at the same time sticking to core traditional principles of family, God, and country. And then there were the quieter and yet more extreme movies that slunk around in the dust stirred up by the blockbusters, and that is where the zombie movie came from. The zombie movie is a response to social change, in other words - a cynical, postmodern response - both then in the 70s and now in the 2000s. Maybe my mom is right and it reflects a fear of global warming destroying the world. But I think, especially given the fact that both 28 Days/Weeks and Shaun of the Dead have been British instead of American, that they're also a response to the devastation of wars that no one can spin as heroic. It was Vietnam for George A. Romero's zombie movies, and I think it's Iraq for Danny Boyle's zombie movies. Things have changed in between, but ah, don't the past just keep coming back to bite us.
A little tour of the new apple movie trailers reveals the shocking truth: the day of the slasher has passed - even the ghosts have gone home. The age of the zombie has come back from the (un?)dead.
I Am Legend - a remake of the 1954 doomsday tale about the last man on Earth (or more specifically, some major city). It's been remade twice before this, the more famous of the two being Charlton Heston's The Omega Man. This time it's been resurrected by the director of Constantine. It was supposed to come out in the '90s with Ridley Scott and the Governator, but we didn't have the wallet for apocalypse expenditures then. Now Will Smith is at the helm as the last uninfected human in New York City after some horrible mutant-causing disaster. True, the critters are supposed to be vampires, but come on. Vampire movie implies cool, stylish, subversive, gothic underground. This is a zombie movie.
Fido - for more light-hearted fare, this seems to be the sequel if you will to Shaun of the Dead. As seen at the end of that one, zombies can become domesticated, capable of routine and mundane tasks. This one expands on that scenario, featuring a 1950s world where zombies are household servants and traffic cops. I'm guessing it's sort of like one of those boy-and-his-dog movies, except it's boy-and-his-zombie. I predict sympathy toward the pet zombie and derision toward the particularly heartless human masters.
And don't forget the really promising Resident Evil: Extinction trailer, and the weird-ass sheep-as-zombies Black Sheep movie.
I'm sure that they're piggybacking on the success of 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the previous two Resident Evil movies. Yesterday I saw this odd straight-to-video movie, The Plague. It was playing on the sci-fi channel. It was... so odd. Basically all the world's children go into a coma for ten years, then come back with "one collective brain" and start killing everybody else (the reason is never explained). But it's definitely an apocalypse movie with definite zombie overtones. It was made in 2006.
Now, zombie movies got first blood in the late 1970s. Between then and, I would say, 28 Days Later, zombie-related releases have been B movie camp, the kind of thing you have to rent in the shady section of the obscure downtown video store - Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town, etcetera. They certainly wouldn't get Will Smith in one. Accompanying this trend of more high-profile zombie movies with cleaner casts and more critical acclaim is the general apocalypse trend that started off as an alien thing: Independence Day (1996), Signs (2002), War of the Worlds (2005). One, however, relied less on interspecies battle and more on earthly sins and woes - Outbreak (1995), and it's from this one that I believe the current zombie-apocalypse trend was spawned.
And what an odd time was the 70s. On the one hand, no major wars (those had all boiled down to nothing, and we were left dealing with the aftermath). On the other hand, massive social changes. Globalization, environmentalism, women's lib, gay rights, a middle class... the "me" generation. Western economies were in bad shape since the oil-producing countries figured out they might be able to wield some power over the mighty former imperalists. Computers started to take over. Blockbusters - The Exorcist, Jaws, Star Wars - were born. Some controversial movies born in this period that have similarities to the zombie genre were The Last House on the Left and the original The Hills Have Eyes. War movies had become less heroic, less action-based; instead they had become sad, creepy, bitter... disillusioned - Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter. This is my theory. Cinema diverged. There were the blockbusters, the ones that celebrated the modern world and its changes while at the same time sticking to core traditional principles of family, God, and country. And then there were the quieter and yet more extreme movies that slunk around in the dust stirred up by the blockbusters, and that is where the zombie movie came from. The zombie movie is a response to social change, in other words - a cynical, postmodern response - both then in the 70s and now in the 2000s. Maybe my mom is right and it reflects a fear of global warming destroying the world. But I think, especially given the fact that both 28 Days/Weeks and Shaun of the Dead have been British instead of American, that they're also a response to the devastation of wars that no one can spin as heroic. It was Vietnam for George A. Romero's zombie movies, and I think it's Iraq for Danny Boyle's zombie movies. Things have changed in between, but ah, don't the past just keep coming back to bite us.
