Cult-Movie Review: Doomsday (2008)

Neil Marshall’s Doomsday (2008) is all about...ingredients. 

The film is a visually stunning, high-impact pastiche of ingredients from many post-apocalyptic films, particularly those that were made in the seventies and early eighties. The film tells an original story, but one with recognizable elements from Mad Max (1979), Escape from New York (1981) and other beloved genre films.

In a sense, the Marshal film showcases a good alternative to today’s brand-name “remake” obsession and seeming compulsion. Instead of remaking a beloved post-apocalyptic film, Doomsday instead throws six or seven such efforts into the pot, stirs them up, and serves them to viewers as something fresh. 

The result is an action movie in which you recognize the pieces, but the whole is something new and different. The movie is a variation on a theme, but not a cash-grab rehash.

An extremely gory and violent film, Doomsday proves impressive in terms of its stunts and action sequences, but it also features some narrative blind alleys. The result is movie of intermittent success, of some highs and a few lows.  It’s fun recognizing all the influences and ingredients when they appear on screen, and Doomsday never fails to rivet the attention.

But in the end, the film doesn’t quite reach the level of "classic" enjoyed by so many of its brethren and creative inspirations.

“Once you’re over that wall, there’s no rules…no back up.”

In Glasgow, in April of 2008, a mystery virus infects the population. Only a few people escape, including a healthy little girl, Eden.  

Before long, all of Scotland is sealed off from the rest of the UK to stop the spread of the disease.

In 2035, the plague suddenly re-appears in London (Rhona Mitra), and Eden, now a major, is summoned by the Prime Minister (Alexander Siddig) to go inside the Quarantine Zone on a crucial mission. 

In particular, satellites have shown that life has continued inside the Quarantine Zone, which must mean that there is a cure for the disease.  Indeed, a doctor -- Marcus Kane (Malcolm McDowell) -- was working on just such an antidote when the city was quarantined in the first place.  Perhaps he is still alive, and has completed his work.

Unfortunately, the Administration wants the cure for England but to give it only to selected few...so that Britain can "thin out" the herd, and reduce over-population.

Eden Sinclair leads a team in two armored transports into the Quarantine Zone to recover Kane and hopefully his cure to the plague.  

Instead, she runs across cannibalistic savages led by his mad son, Sol (Craig Conway)...

“It’s Medieval out there.”

Doomsday draws its life-blood primarly from the post-apocalyptic and dystopian cinema of the 1970s. Although Marshall presents a coherent narrative, the film moves from influence to influence, knowingly reminding viewers of classics of the format.

For instance, the film starts with the same creative technique as Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978). 

There, as you recall, beleaguered SWAT officers went into an urban tenement building, and fought a bloody battle with its residents...before the first zombies were even seen.  

In some way, this scene punctured or blew up the idea that the zombie apocalypse had made mankind violent.  Pretty clearly, he was already violent, and the violence in George Romero’s Dawn is human against human first. Then the zombies get in, feeding off the carnage.  The ghouls are just one more problem to contend with, but not the first problem. The tenement shoot-out captures and expresses that idea.

Similarly, Doomsday’s hero, Eden Sinclair, is first seen on the job early in the film, tracking down and killing brutal criminals.  These shoot-out sequences are over-the-top bloody (much like those in Dawn’s tenement opener), a key reminder to viewers that apocalypse isn’t the thing that rouses us to violence.  

That violence already exists within us, even in “normal” civilization.   

One kill involving a woman in a bath-tub is especially gruesome, and a police officer gets half his face blown off in one fire-fight.  But this scene is important because it acknowledges that Eden Sinclair operates in a violent, corrupt world, even before she undertakes her mission for the Prime Minister.

Next up, Doomsday adopts many qualities and aspects of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), a dystopian if not apocalyptic film. For instance, Eden at times wears a patch over her eye, like Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), at times.   

Then, Eden is given a GPS locator (just as Snake is tracked by the government in Manhattan), and sent inside a walled-off zone, a kind of fully-contained Hell on Earth. In this case, it is all of Scotland that is walled-off from modern civilization, not New York, but the concept is virtually identical. 

Once inside, Eden is promptly captured by the denizens of the walled-off, barbaric area (populated either by crazy cannibals or criminals…) and eventually forced into combat for the pleasure of the audience.  

In Escape from New York, Snake battles one of the Duke’s (Isaac Hayes) burly minions in a boxing ring…and wins.  In Doomsday, Eden ends up in a Medieval Castle battling a knight to the death, a minion of Marcus Kane. She also wins.

Similarly, Doomsday ends with Eden releasing footage (from her eye camera…) of political corruption, of the replacement PM talking about trimming the fat from the population, allowing the plague to work through the populace. This leaked footage not only embarrasses him, but destroys his ability to lead.  His administration will fall because of his inhumanity.

This "political humiliation" ending harks back to Escape from New York too. 

There, the President (Donald Pleasence) is embarrassed when he presents the wrong tape at a peace summit, one (from Cabbie) that makes him look like a fool. Snake did this switcheroo for a reason. The President was unable to summon one genuine or sincere word of thanks for those who died in the process of saving him. 

George Miller’s Road Warrior/Mad Max saga is another significant source of inspiration in Doomsday.  

We see it, in particular, in terms of the wardrobe of those living in the Quarantined Zone.  Like Wez in The Road Warrior, many of these individuals wear mohawk hair-cuts and outfits that might politely be termed leather-chic.  

The primary action mode of Miller’s Mad Max saga is vehicular. Weird, modified cars battle it out on the old roads to determine supremacy in the new world. 

Accordingly, the climax of Doomsday occurs on the road, as Eden and her entourage of survivors race from the forces of Sol.  This chase sequence, while not lengthy, is one of the most impressive in the post-apocalyptic milieu, at least outside of Miller's work. 

In case viewers miss the point about pastiche, Doomsday names two of its soldier characters “Carpenter” and “Miller" -- John and George, right? -- just to assure cult-movie fans that it is in on the joke. Doomsday has thus blended the worlds of Snake and Max into one package, and -- not surprisingly -- they fit together pretty well.

In terms of other inspirations, the plague in Scotland might be seen as being  connected -- at least obliquely -- to contaminated London in 28 Days Later (2002).  Or if one goes back to the 1970s, perhaps the infected Los Angeles of The Omega Man (1971). 

Uniquely, at least one important ingredient in Doomsday seems to be piped in from a contemporary war film, and not a post-apocalyptic one. The best and most harrowing scene in the film involves two armored vehicles -- or APCs -- moving into the Quarantine Zone. While Eden and some soldiers go inside a hospital in hopes of retrieving Dr. Kane, others remain safely in the vehicles. 

At least they believe they are safe.  

But Sol’s people lay siege to the moving transports, and -- shockingly -- bring them down in an orchestrated, well-visualized assault.  

The loss of this mobile home base leaves the survivors on the chaotic streets of a failed city-state, surrounded by a population dedicated to killing them.  

This scenario -- the best modern technology overcome by hordes of enemies -- clearly evokes Ridley Scott’s brilliant Black Hawk Down (2001), which involves the bringing down of two American military helicopters in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.  

In both cases, people from "civilization" feel that their technology makes them untouchable.  Then, when their technology is destroyed, they must fight their way out the city on foot, on the run. Meanwhile enemies are literally everywhere...

In its use of “ingredients” from all these films, Doomsday makes for a compelling, action-packed ride, and the level of gore and violence is almost unbelievable at points.  Sean Pertwee, playing Lt. Talbot, meets a horrible fate, and the movie isn’t shy about showing it, point-blank range. He is burned alive on stage, and then eaten by cannibals, who tear the seared flesh from his bones.  I've already cited Romero as a key influence, but the eating scene here is every bit as grotesque as anything you'll find in Dawn of Day of the Dead (1985).

The level of violence in Doomsday is truly stunning and indecorous, but in a way, that’s really the point of all the films I’ve name-checked so far. 

Dawn of the Dead, Escape from New York, Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and even Black Hawk Down concern a world where the laws of man -- as we enjoy them now -- don’t exist, or at least don't hold sway. The best of these films also compare the apparently savage world with the apparently civilized ones...and find that they are not all that different.  

That's Doomsday's point, ultimately.

We see, in such films, that the world is an egregiously violent and corrupt place. To make that world seem real, directors such as Romero and Miller, especially, don’t shy away from depicting brutal, shattering violence.  

This is so that -- as I noted in my review of Fury Road (2015) -- audiences will feel un-tethered while watching, rocked back on their heels. It’s entirely possible that viewers will see something truly disturbing, and feel physical jeopardized while watching one of these films. We thus become, like the characters populating these films, uncertain about what to expect next.

Doomsday pushes the envelope to achieve that vibe, though not always successfully. When it succeeds, it is a stirring film. When it fails, it's just sort of gross.

Other scenes in Doomsday simply don’t work. Malcolm McDowell is wasted by the filmmakers as the sort of Kurtz-ian ruler of a Medieval Castle in the Quarantine Zone, and the overt fantasy visuals associated with his domain feel somewhat out-of-step with the post-apocalyptic and savage scenes in the film.  

Perhaps Marshall was hoping to channel Romero's Knightriders (1981) too?  

Nonetheless, the scenes featuring knights and castles feel entirely disconnected from the rest of the movie, which concerns savage human behavior, both in social interactions and political ones. I would understand if the castle and its surrounding society were meant to represent a nobler, more dignified time in human history.  But the savagery and dangers Eden finds there are just as bad as in the other parts of the Quarantine Zone.

One fresh twist on the material is the casting of Rhona Mitra as our lead character and action hero.  

Post-apocalyptic films (at least before Imperator Furiosa) very rarely focus on female characters, and Marshall makes a play for Mitra’s Eden to stand on the same hallowed firmament as Snake or Max.  

Some scenes in Doomsday nearly accomplish that feat.  

One involves Eden's grace-under-pressure handling of physical abuse during an interrogation scene with Sol.  Another involves her brutal duel with Sol’s girlfriend.  In both these cases, Eden rises to the level of cult-movie hero.

The effort is undone, somewhat, by Marshall’s determination to give Eden a back story. She is a little girl when the film starts, and separated from her mother when the plague hits Glasgow.  So her journey in the Quarantine Zone is also one of self-discovery, of going home.  Snake and Max, by contrast, stand apart from the worlds and characters they meet, which in some way makes them more iconic

Although we know much about Max’s family (and the tragedy surrounding it), he isn’t engaged in some grand quest; rather a series of adventures that inform his character, and lead him toward the ultimate destination of redemption.  

But Eden has a much more stereotypical “hero’s journey” here, going on a quest that humanizes her, but at the expense of mythologizing her, if that makes sense. Max and Snake both come from the Spaghetti Western school of “The Man with No Name.” They are unattached personalities who ride into town to reluctantly save the day...and then they leave.  

Eden is much more emotionally connected to her story. I guess that could be read as a positive or a negative.  For me, it made her more recognizably human and less like a 'Man" (or Woman) with No Name." Eden should be a little more mysterious in my opinion, and not saddled with a pre-packaged history to overcome.

I came away from a viewing of Doomsday with a sense of shock at the violence, and an adrenaline rush.  And that’s, in some sense, the point of many of these movies. 

There were also times, however, I wished the film had more fun with its ingredients, and was willing to go big and mythologize Eden a bit more as a warrior of the wasteland.

In the annals of post-apocalyptic films, there are many, many failures, and just few successes.  

Doomsday utilizes its fine ingredients -- Mad Max, Escape from New York, Dawn of the Dead -- to get closer to the goal post than many, even if it falls a bit short.

Welcome to the Post-Apocalypse: The Book of Eli (2010)

The Book of Eli (2010) is a post-apocalyptic action movie from the visual and thematic tradition of the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood as "The Man with No Name." 

Accordingly, the film is set mostly outdoors against a backdrop of Big Sky, and therefore lovely to look upon. One rousing action scene late in the proceedings is positively brimming with visual invention, and proves a real highlight.

In broad terms, the overall production design, the character blocking, the iconic positioning of Eli in the frame, and other visual facets of the drama are truly exemplary, and therefore well worth lauding.

Yet ultimately I feel somewhat conflicted about the film. In emotional, purely human terms, The Book of Eli plays as markedly flat compared to the harrowing The Road (2009), for instance. And most importantly, the deep religious message it conveys is not handled in an appropriately inspiring or nuanced manner.

The Book of Eli is set thirty winters after an unnamed apocalypse in which the sky opens up and burns to a cinder most of the human population. The surviving populations of the world blame this global catastrophe on the Bible (but not the Koran, and not the Talmud, apparently...). Thus all copies of the Bible -- everywhere -- are burned.

Three decades after this terrifying day of disaster, a humble "walker," Eli (Denzel Washington) makes a dangerous pilgrimage West carrying what may be the planet's final Bible in his satchel.

The book in his possession soon lands Eli in direct conflict with a small-time tyrant named Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who believes that ownership of the valuable tome will permit him to control and dominate an unruly population. 

Eli also befriends a young, impressionable slave, Solara (Mila Kunis), who takes up the book's learning with Eli. 

There is a final battle between Eli and Carnegie for possession of the Bible, and the end of the trek occurs at a sort of book repository/monastery on Alcatraz.

There are many truly fine elements at work here. The action sequence I mentioned above is a real humdinger. It finds Eli and Solara hiding in an isolated house in a western desert as Carnegie and his goons attack, utilizing superior firepower. 

The camera lunges back and forth between Eli's position and Carnegie's position, but eschews all conventional film cutting. Instead, (under the auspices of some amazing CGI...) we travel "through" bullet holes, race along the battlefield floor, pivot suddenly and zoom in the other direction, sometimes even through carnage and fiery debris. This is a dazzling and fresh way of visualizing a gunfight, and it's fluid, fun and exciting.

As a film buff, I also appreciated the plethora of touches here that appear purposefully reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" feature films (which in turn, I suppose, are purposefully reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo).

Eli may possess a name, but like his Spaghetti Western predecessor, he boasts a personal code in a mostly immoral terrain... and is a highly-skilled fighter, proficient, in particular, with a sword.

Remember in Yojimbo how Mifune's ronin chopped off the arm of an opponent with his sword? Early on, The Book of Eli presents a similarly violent sequence.

And like The Man with No Name, Eli is a fellow who brooks no nonsense from anyone, and is a loner, an outsider in the culture around him. He ignores or skirts reigning authority, and again like Eastwood's character, seems to be more than a mere mortal. Just as The Man with No Name survived hanging (twice...), so does Eli seem to endure and survive extreme physical challenges (like gunfights and a battle with a chainsaw-wielding opponent). Although Eli is joined by Solara, he gets no substantive help from the community that he ultimately helps.

So clearly, Eli is a heroic archetype, one perfectly in keeping with the Western and Samurai/ronin traditions he arises from. To accentuate this important connection to cinematic heroes of the past, the Hughes Brothers frequently shoot Denzel Washington from below, or in iconic silhouette to accentuate his power, virtue and strength. 

A variation on this idea involves a focus on the eyes. When you think of Leone's pictures, one of the first images that leaps to mind is a close-up of Eastwood's steely, penetrating orbs. In purposeful contrast, Washington's eyes are shielded almost constantly by opaque sun-glasses, to make way for a final act surprise twist. But the sub-text of the warrior's sight is part and parcel of both "The Man with No Name films" and The Book of Eli.

Post-apocalyptic films have re-purposed Westerns before (The Road Warrior was Shane, wasn't it?) and The Book of Eli picks a very good, very efficacious model to emulate in these classic Italian genre films. This Hughes Bros. movie also seems to acknowledge its myriad post-apocalyptic genre roots, especially with the prominence in one frame of a poster from the 1975 film A Boy and His Dog.

I also noted some real similarities between The Book of Eli and the 1936 H.G. Wells' penned film Things to Come, particularly the section of that classic movie involving "Everytown" in 1966-1967, post-apocalypse. In that middle-portion of Things to Come, Ralph Richardson's petty tyrant "The Boss" dominated a local population as a Dark Age for humanity loomed, and he even had a female squeeze at his side. Oldman and Jennifer Beals play similar roles here, in a comparable setting and situation.

Interestingly, however, ideology has changed dramatically from Things to Come in 1936 to The Book of Eli in 2010. In Things to Come, John Massey arrived from a pacifist socialist organization "Wings over the World," which almost literally forced a global government and New World Order on Richardson's tyrant and his warring people. Eli, by contrast, is a kind of fundamentalist missionary re-asserting the tenets of Christianity in a world where morality has largely vanished.

Another commendable element of The Book of Eli involves a useful, real-life historical analogy: the book-preserving souls on Alcatraz led by Malcolm McDowell are highly reminiscent of the Irish Monks, who, in the Dark Ages, took it upon themselves to preserve the literary treasures of Antiquity. 

Without their tireless and truly amazing efforts, much of humanity's greatest works would have been lost to the barbarism of the day. In The Book of Eli, another Dark Ages is broached, and the same thing occurs: human ingenuity is championed. Encoded here, then, is a worthwhile message about literature and books: that they hold the legacy and promise of the human race.

Even the broad religious message of The Book of Eli is eminently worthwhile. Simply put, the movie states that some people view religious belief as a method of control (Carnegie) and some see it as an authentic road to salvation and redemption (Eli). I appreciated the even-handedness of such a take; the yin-and-yang of the approach.

But then...there's this other aspect of the film that I found just didn't quite work for me. And yes, it involves Eli and the overtly religious aspect of his heroic quest. In crafting an interesting variation of "The Man with No Name" character, the makers of the film have gone too far for my taste. They've made Eli, actually, superhuman.

One of the most jarring and incongruous aspects of The Book of Eli is the style of fighting adopted by Eli during the frequent clashes. This is a malnourished, tired, ragged character adorned in layers of ratty clothes...and yet he moves at super-human speeds, as though a well-fed, highly-trained, agile martial artist. 

There's another handicap at work too that would seem to preclude such precise fighting movements. I get what the movie is trying to do; to offer a Christian, post-apocalyptc version of Eastwood's character, but Eli is very clearly God-Powered.

He's a Holy Warrior whose very quest is blessed by the attention of the Almighty Himself. At one point, he recounts a story that God spoke to him directly as a child, and instructed him to take the Bible out west.

Helpfully, God has thus made Eli virtually invulnerable in his ability to evade bullets, and fulfill his holy purpose. In one shoot-out set on a busy city street (another sequence taken right from the Western genre...), a half-dozen or so men open fire on Eli with blazing pistols. He is so confident in his continued survival that he does not even take cover. He just walks away in the middle of the wide open avenue, his back to the bad guys, as they shoot at him. And, he survives, without a scratch.

Even Eli's enemies perceive that he is, well, specially...endowed. One of Carnegie's minions states, in hushed tones: "It's like he's protected somehow. Like nothing can touch him."

Too often, alas, that's the level of nuance and subtlety at work. The ambiguity of the "Man with No Names" films is sacrificed for this modification in the format, and I submit it's a near-fatal subtraction from the formula.

I should specify. As intelligent and yes, even spiritual viewers, we are not asked by The Book of Eli to contemplate the notion that God could be guiding this battle, or Eli's very destiny. Rather we are told, in no uncertain terms, and in fight after fight, sequence after sequence, that the Almighty has got Eli's back. And I feel very strongly that this takes much of the suspense and intrigue out of the film.

Put another way, it's the difference between believing God exists and is possibly affecting outcomes and destinies, and the definitive knowledge that God is, well, perched on the third cloud from the right, micromanaging our affairs with a cosmic  i-Pad. 

What I'm saying is that God may be a mystery (even the Greatest of All Mysteries...) but this movie negates that mystery, spoon-feeding the audience easy answers. Not only is Eli righteous, he is literally on a mission from God, to quote The Blues Brothers.

We have no such certainty about the Divine in life, so why make God's presence and agenda so certain, so uninspiring in the movie? 

I mean, that's what faith is all about, isn't it? The belief that God is present even though we can't get text him, message him or e-mail him, right? If God is constantly our dutiful co-pilot, as is suggested in the film, then faith is actually moot. Who needs belief and faith when you know for sure that bullets can't touch you?
But here's the considerable problem the movie's approach opens up: if God can deliver messages directly to Eli, and render Eli virtually impervious to all but point-blank bullet wounds, he can surely just materialize the Bible on Alcatraz, right? Or, God could have prevented all the Bibles from being burned in the first place if he disapproved of that particular outcome.

In fact, the "history of the world" as depicted in The Book of Eli is baffling and contradictory. There's a global disaster, and we're led to believe that every surviving American -- even those living in the Bible Belt, burned their Bibles in response. There must be hundreds of millions of such Bibles in this country...and all but one of 'em get torched. Yet, as I noted above, the Koran and the Talmud both survive.

We can extrapolate from this oddity in the story that the survivors don't blame a "God" figure for their suffering, but specifically, a Christian God. Why else take out the anger on the Bible, and not the other religious books? 

And see, this nugget of information leads to even more problems. If everyone in the post-apocalyptic future has so thoroughly rejected the Bible, how is brandishing one going to grant the despotic Carnegie total control over his citizens?

Now, the people of this future era may be young and naive and living in a world without books, but it was their parents who burned the Bibles, so wouldn't they have at least some knowledge of it? If, as a parent, you deemed Christianity and the Bible responsible for the wholesale destruction of the Earth, so much so that you had to go on a book-burning tear, wouldn't you also, you know, tell your children: beware, these beliefs destroyed the planet?

On another tangent, if every Bible on the Earth were indeed burned, wasn't this God's plan too? And if Christianity really was the cause of the destruction of the planet, why would Eli want to re-introduce the very thing that hundreds of millions of people -- even in the Bible Belt, even devout Christians -- massively assessed responsible for the destruction of the planet?

In short, The Book of Eli wants to be a movie about how the world needs more Christianity in it. Yet by the movie's own storytelling details, Christianity is apparently what destroyed the world in the first place. There's a whopping narrative contradiction there. 

Scrape the surface of The Book of Eli and you detect how the narrative details don't make a lick of common sense. A spiritual movie is wonderful, but I would submit that a spiritual movie must work even harder to tell its story in a fashion that conforms to the tenets of our consensus reality. God doesn't erect actual protective force fields around those he loves, does he? We experience the Divine (if we see the Divine at all) in the little human truths, in an unexpected moment of grace, in the innocence and love of children, etc. That's an approach I would have preferred; one with a sense of nuance and subtlety.

But The Book of Eli's approach to religion is unnecessarily broad, and too unambiguous. The movie wants to be about the mystery of faith, but it is so obvious, so callow, so crushing in its depiction of the world, that it actually obliterates the necessity of faith.

This would have been a far stronger (and much more inspiring...) film if it had concerned a man struggling with, and ultimately re-affirming his faith. As it is, the movie is about a man with rock solid certainty that God has spoken to him directly, and who is never challenged in that belief. Eli begins and ends the movie as a Holy Warrior. He doesn't grow, he doesn't change, he doesn't evolve. He never even wavers.

It's a creative and imaginative idea to make the archetypal Man with No Name a religious crusader. I just wish The Book of Eli had tread more deeply into the mysteries and profundity of belief and faith instead of presenting certainties that we, as humans, just don't receive on this troubled, mortal coil. It takes the fun out of an action film to know that God is intervening on one side, and that the result of a war is already decided.

Eli's book is never opened to us, the audience. It's slammed shut before we get to read the first page for ourselves.

But golly, the cover of that book sure makes the story look terrific.

Welcome to the Post-Apocalypse: The Road (2009)

John Hillcoat's The Road, a cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 best-seller, opens with idyllic views of Mother Nature. We see crimson and yellow flowers and abundant green leaves. The wind blows gently....but only briefly.

Still, these stolen glimpses of Earth's natural beauty immediately set the appropriate tone; reminding audiences of the paradise we have now...and largely take for granted.

The remainder of this haunting, deeply-affecting film is set on a scorched, post-apocalyptic Earth, a washed-out, gray world in which a beloved piano is but more kindling for the fire. In this time and place, shampoo and toothpaste are not merely luxuries...but archaeological discoveries: relics of a lost world, a lost time.

And yet this is not at all a film about "things" or material possessions.

Instead, The Road very explicitly -- and very emotionally -- concerns the bonds of family, and in particular the relationship between a loving father (Viggo Mortenson) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as the duo attempts to navigate a planetary graveyard; one populated by hungry vultures, in the form of scavenging human cannibals. The boy's mother (Charlize Theron) has taken her own life rather than exist in such a world, and in his quiet moments, the boy fantasizes about joining her. The child doesn't really understand death, and wonders, when his father dies, if he will see him again; or if he can take him with him.

In a word, the movie is heartbreaking.

The father, who is battling a terminal illness, realizes it is his most important task now to toughen up his innocent and imaginative son -- God's hand on Earth, in his words -- so the boy can survive this perpetual winter of Mother Earth and the human soul.

So the father demonstrates for the boy how to commit suicide by firearm (a pistol), should capture by cannibals become inevitable. He lets the boy look long and hard at rotting corpses, at death itself in hopes that it will somehow become commonplace, and therefore not frightening. Weighted down by his sense of responsibility, the father also sees betrayers and monsters in every encounter with other human beings. He trusts no one.

By contrast, the boy is so loving and pure it will make your soul ache. The child virtually craves something hopeful in his life, something good. In specific terms, the father wants the boy to survive in a frightening, menacing world, and the boy just wants to hold the hand of a lonely old stranger (Robert Duvall), who lost his own son in a tragedy so horrible he can't speak of it. The boy wants to know that he and his dad are still "the good guys."

I'm the father of a young son, myself, and I was moved by The Road, which -- without ever seeming cheesy or maudlin, or even relying on rampaging cannibals for drama -- raises questions about what it means to be a "good" parent in a grim situation like this. 

The boy is portrayed brilliantly by McPhee as, well, an absolute innocent...one who carries a stuffed animal elephant in his arms at all times, and who collects little trinkets that catch his youthful fancy: bottle caps, pennies, and the like. The boy's tenderness and vulnerability are absolutely palpable, and so you feel intimately the Father's existential dilemma.

On one hand, you want to preserve that innocence at all costs. And on the other hand, you know that it must be utterly stamped out so that the boy will survive this chaotic terrain when he is left all alone.

The weak link in this family dynamic is the Mother, who selfishly selects suicide because "all the other families are doing it," the most-bizarre form of Keeping up with the Jones you've ever encountered. She walks off into a dark winter night alone, leaving her husband and son behind...and is never seen again. If the Mother had chosen to live -- to fight -- perhaps she could have tempered the Father's harshness, and helped the boy understand his life and those in it, better. But it wasn't to be.

You know all along what's coming in The Road, and you start to dread this emotional, gut-wrenching crescendo, the impending separation. The father grows progressively weaker, until finally, there's the moment when he must say his final goodbye to his son, to his beloved boy.

By this point the Father has done everything he could for the child, and as he prepares to leave this world, the Dad must simply...let go. He must trust that his son will be okay; that he has learned the lessons he tried to impart to him.

It's terrifying, however, this thought of never seeing your child again; of knowing that there are dangers looming out there that you can never help him bypass.

But again, that's what parenting is all about, and The Road understands this reality all too well.

My wife, Kathryn, often reminds me that Joel doesn't belong to us; that he's his own person, with his own path and his own destination in life. So it's our most critical job as parents simply to set his course, to prepare him well for the challenges he will face. "Healthy and happy," she often whispers in my ear, when I threaten to over-protect or smother him with helicopter parental coddling. Because we can't fight all Joel's battles for him; because when we're gone, he needs to fight those battles successfully. He needs to have experienced successes doing so too, so he doesn't feel hopeless, or alone, or less-than-confident in his abilities to navigate life.

That's difficult, though, isn't it? To step back.

And that's the pain that Mortensen's character carries like an albatross around his neck. Has he done enough? Has he made the right calls? Has he erred by being too hard, or was he too soft? The film's powerful last scene provides an answer of sorts to these questions. The movie comes right up to its last moment before shedding, even partially, a sense of ambiguity about the boy's fate.

The Road also asks some pretty meaningful questions about the kind of world we are leaving to our young sons and daughters. The nature of the apocalypse in the film is deliberately left unspecified. It could be a nuclear winter after a terrible war; or it could be post-asteroid impact for all we know. But still, there's a powerful notion at work here, about the things we hand off to our children. Our morals. Our hopes. Our planet itself. Do we leave it for them better than we found it, or worse than we found it? Is this not the most important question we, as parents, should ask ourselves? Isn't everything else -- the bills, the bedtimes, the Christmas presents -- pretty damn unimportant by comparison?

There are plenty of end-of-the-world movies out there. Ones that focus on destructive spectacle (like 2012 [2009]), or the survival of the species after "the end" of our way of life (I am Legend [2004]). But The Road is surely the most intimate of such cinematic stories.

It understands that the end of the entire world is -- perhaps paradoxically -- a very...personal thing. Especially if you're a parent.

Movie Trailer: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

The Mad Max Movie Matrix

	Civilization is Corrupt	An ally betrays Max	The legend of Max grows	Kids	Max is severely injured	Main villain has a minion	Love interest dies.	Final Chase with vehicles	Max redeemed
Mad Max (1979)	Yes: Australia	No	No	Sprog	No	Johnny	Jessie	Yes	No
The Road Warrior (1982)	Yes: Oil Refinery City	Yes: The oil wasn’t on the tanker.	Yes	The Feral Child	Yes	Wez	Warrior Woman	Yes	Yes
Mad Max Beyond Thunder-dome (1985)	Yes: Thunderdome	No.	Yes	Crack in the Earth Kids	Yes	Master/Blaster	No	Yes	Yes

At Flashbak: The Five Greatest Heroes of the Post Apocalyptic 1980s Cinema

At Flashbak, I celebrate Post-Apocalypse Week (leading up to Fury Road) with a look at five great heroes of the 1980s Post-Apocalyptic Cinema

Here's a snippet (and the url: http://flashbak.com/cock-walk-feather-duster-five-greatest-heroes-1980s-post-apocalyptic-cinema-34516/ )

"Thanks to George Miller, Mel Gibson and The Road Warrior (1982), the eighties represents the great era of post-apocalyptic movies. 

It wasn’t just the success of The Road Warrior, either. 

During the Reagan Era of politics, there was a pervasive “apocalyptic mentality” roiling the culture. This may have been because the senior citizen president joked on an open mic (on August 11, 1984) about outlawing The Soviet Union, noting that bombing would commence in “five minutes.”

Or the zeitgeist of apocalypse might also have arisen because President Reagan and his Secretary of the Interior, James Watt both spoke in public about the possibility that the End Days were coming. Reagan did so in an interview in People Magazine in December of 1983 -- as commander-in-chief -- stating that the 1980s was the first time in history that so many Biblical prophecies were coming together. He had also said, on the campaign trail in 1980 -- to televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Baker -- that “ours might be the generation that sees Armageddon.”  

Watt, on the other hand, testified before the U.S. Congress on February 5, 1981 that there was no need to preserve America’s national resources for future generations because he did not know “how many future generations” we could count on before “the Lord” would return.

As a tuned-in kid of that era, I paid attention to such terrifying words, as did many filmmakers, musicians and writers.  Accordingly, the 1980s imagined all kinds of apocalypses (nuclear, comet-based, and even zombie-oriented) but also provided the strategy for surviving it: creating a brand of sturdy hero who could adapt to the world after the fall of civilization.

Here are five of the greatest heroes of 1980s post-apocalyptic cinema.  I have included Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) -- a character from a post-apocalyptic future – only because he does all his fighting in The Terminator in the 1980s, not in the new landscape of the post-apocalypse."

Continued at Flashbak

The Films of 1975: The Ultimate Warrior

“It’s interesting what becomes valuable to us when almost everything is taken away,” one character muses in The Ultimate Warrior (1975), a violent action film that heavily forecasts The Road Warrior (1982), Cyborg (1989) and other films of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre. 

In this case, it is Yul Brynner rather than Mel Gibson or Jean Claude Van Damme who plays a warrior of the wasteland, one who must protect the remnants -- and indeed the future -- of human civilization. 

As in the case of the other films name-checked above, there’s a powerful Western vibe or overlay to The Ultimate Warrior.  This is the story of a Clint Eastwood-like stranger who arrives at the City, and either saves it from injustice, or induces it to experience a rebirth.  

It’s fascinating how the hero/stranger in such tales is always an outsider to the community or village at large, isn’t it?

The myth of the hero on a white horse arriving to clean up town -- and then leave it for the better -- is a deeply entrenched one in American culture. So much so that it still exists today in political campaigns.  Everyone (on both sides of the aisle) wants to be cast as the heroic outsider riding into corrupt/failed Washington D.C. to clean it up. 

The Ultimate Warrior -- directed by Robert Clouse -- certainly puts an interesting spin on this old archetype, recognizing in this case that the City will fall, but that mankind can survive nonetheless. The hero’s responsibility is not, then, to the City, in this case, but to the very future of the species.  The film uses as symbols for that future both plant seeds, and a human fetus, carried in the abdomen of quite possibly the world’s last mother.

The future world of 2012 (!) as depicted viscerally in The Ultimate Warrior is one of starvation and desperation, scarcity and shortages. There is no gasoline, no medicine, and no hope. The Baron’s (Max Von Sydow) community suffers from a plague of “fatalism,” according to the film’s dialogue.

In terms of historical context, it is easy to see why the apocalypse takes this form. The film arises, like No Blade of Grass (1970) or Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) (1972) from an age in which resource shortages, pollution and over-population looked like the trifecta of impending doomsdays, the three-headed bullet that had our name on it. Similarly, the country was still careening from the morale-sucking failures of the Vietnam War and fall-out from the Watergate Scandal.  “Fatalism,” in those days, wasn’t the purview of only sci-fi films.

The film’s great virtue is its sense that mankind will endure. That fatalism can be outlived. The final scene -- set outside the confines of the de-humanized City -- promises a re-birth of hope, and an end to the fatalism that reduced man to selfish barbarian.

But of course, such catharsis can only arise after a particular brutal confrontation between Brynner and William Smith -- local warlord -- in a subway car.

That’s as it should be, however, since this is an action film. The Ultimate Warrior is vastly underrated in terms of its action, story, and value to the genre, but even worse, it often gets no credit for imagining the savagery of the post-apocalyptic world that filmmakers and critics would later associate with the Mad Max saga.  It’s a film that deserves a second look, even forty years later.

In the year 2012, the civilized world has collapsed into anarchy due to famine. The Baron (Max Von Sydow) -- the leader of small community of survivors in New York City --realizes that his people will not survive long when faced with vile scavengers like the evil Carrot (William Smith) and his men. 

Thus, the Baron recruits a soldier of fortune named Carson (Yul Brynner) to act as guardian to his people.

But the Baron has another motive for bringing the warrior into the fold. He recognizes the inevitable; that there is no future in city life.  Specifically, The Baron wants to send his pregnant daughter, Melinda (Joanna Miles) to safety in North Carolina along with a batch of specially-engineered seeds that can grow despite the famine, and re-start the cycle of life. 

The Baron tasks Carson with the care of his daughter and the seeds during the journey, but Carrot does everything in his power to stop the mission.

The Baron’s people are none-too-happy either, to learn that their leader has determined that their lives and futures are expendable.

The Ultimate Warrior’s depiction of its dark future world remains quite powerful. The city looks like a vast junkyard, and the Baron’s community lives on a city block barricaded on all sides. The entrance is accessible only through a parked-bus, and inside the community we see small gardens, wind mills (for energy production), and a community pantry running very low on provisions. 

Impressively, The Ultimate Warrior considers that in a new world order like this one, new laws will be necessary, and the film reveals how even the best society’s -- like the one established by the Baron -- must operate on draconian law.  There’s nothing to waste, nothing to squander, and yet the laws are so harsh that some essential sense of humanity is sacrificed.

For example, one citizen in the compound is accused of stealing a tomato, and forced to endure cruel justice.  The Baron declares “Give him to the street people” and the offender is cast-out into the urban jungle.  The Baron pays for his own trespasses as well.  After sending away his daughter, Carson, and the seeds, he stays behind, and his own people beat him to death for selling them out. This sequence seems indicative of the proverb that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.  The Baron showed no mercy to offenders, and is, finally, shown no mercy, himself.

           

A real sense of human savagery permeates The Ultimate Warrior, and one sequence involves the desperate mother and father of a small baby venturing out into the “wilderness” of New York to acquire powdered milk for their infant.  A less frank, less honest film would have had them survive; would have had the hero rescue them.  In this case, Carson is too late to help the family, and barely escapes with his own life. The fate of the baby is pretty grim too, an indication that the City is running out of tomorrows.

The Ultimate Warriors’ last act leaves behind the terror of the City, as Melinda and Carson (carrying the seeds), flee the metropolis through the subway system, Carrot and his men in pursuit.  In this section of the film, the tension is especially high because The Baron -- Melinda’s father -- has actually given explicit instructions that Carson is to consider the fate of the seeds ahead of the fate of Melinda and her child. 

That’s how desperate things have gotten for the human race.  Family ties are now less important that a life-giving crop. When Melinda goes into labor, with Carrot’s men in pursuit, the film reaches its pinnacle of anxiety, since one wonders what decision Carson will ultimately make. It’s a tough choice, and one I don’t envy.

Carson chooses the morality of the old world, interestingly, and stays with the pregnant mother.  He thus risks everything, but maintains his soul.  It’s a fair trade, given the film’s outcome.  As the titular “ultimate warrior,” Carson dispatches Carrot and his men with great aplomb, violence and blood-shed. The final set-piece in the subway (wherein Carson must chop off his own hand to kill Carrot) is gruesome in the extreme, but the final shots of Carson, Melinda and her baby reaching the picturesque beaches of North Carolina provide the film its final punctuation, a visual and emotional catharsis that makes the whole journey worthwhile.

For my money, the cutthroat No Blade of Grass still takes the cake as the bluntest, nastiest slice of post-apocalyptic life in the 1970s cinema, but The Ultimate Warrior absolutely points the way to the genre’s future. The film re-purposes old Western myths and tropes but doesn’t candy-coat the grim realities its characters encounter.  While it is not, perhaps the “ultimate” post-apocalyptic film, The Ultimate Warrior is nonetheless a really fine piece of work, and the grandfather, perhaps, of The Road Warrior.