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.

Cult-Movie Review: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

(Watch out for spoilers!)

It’s been a long time since I felt physically endangered or jeopardized while watching a movie. 

That may sound silly, but the best genre movies, traditionally, have accomplished just such a feat. In these works of art, the viewer feels so immersed in the action unfolding on screen that all distance between movie and audience vanishes. 

Instead, you are there, in the thick of it, living the action moment-to-moment, holding your breath, clutching your hand-rests.

I felt that way a lot in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

In fact, I felt that way for two full hours. This is a movie that begins with a bang, and then never lets up till the end credits roll. In a word, the R-rated film is amazing.

There is a pervasive feeling here -- one carefully engendered and nourished by director George Miller -- that anything can happen, and anything will happen. In fact, an event that occurs about half-way through Mad Max: Fury Road -- totally unthinkable in your standard summer blockbuster fare -- shatters any illusions that you know how this film is going to turn out. 

All bets are off.

This movie is hard-core. It is dangerous, and you feel that danger in your bones and in your brain.  At one point, as some piece of cast-off metal whizzed at the screen (and therefore, at my face) I reflexively flinched.  That’s how certain I was that I was actually, physically imperiled by the film’s demolition derby action.

I’ll put this another way. 

I’m an optimist by nature, but I wasn’t entirely certain I would ever see again another film like The Road Warrior (1982); one that pushed the envelope of decorum so far that it created -- by its sheer kinetic wake -- a whole new movie genre (the post-apocalyptic wasteland movie, for lack of a better descriptor). 

But Mad Max: Fury Road has proven me wrong.  It is not only a legitimate genre masterpiece, but one that reveals just how shallow, predictable and safe this summer’s other blockbusters have been thus far.   

Mad Max runs over traditional movie decorum at 100 miles an hour, and then backs over it two or three times, just to make sure it’s really dead. The film is not only the equal of The Road Warrior, it is superior to that thirty-three year old classic in just about every way imaginable.

Again, none of this happens by accident.

Mad Max: Fury Road is, in a canny way, constructed to augment immersion and unpredictability.  Beyond the narrative/structural surprises, the vehicle/chase choreography is a thing of destructive, wild, imaginative chaos and beauty.  The film leaps from one sustained, unrelenting, gasp-provoking action scene to another and yet, miraculously, still finds time to be about the people who inhabit this world.  And on a wider terrain than that, even, this film is about humanity, or human nature, itself.

Mad Max: Fury Road spoon-feeds you nothing. There are no conversations here in which people sit down and talk about their feelings or their motivations. Some less-than-insightful folks might consider the film dumb because they aren’t specifically told how to feel, or what to think, but these individuals have given short shrift to the power of visual imagery, and director Miller’s skillful use of it.  Everything you need to know to understand the movie’s story, world, and ideas is right there, on screen, a true feast for the eyes.

And what is the film about? Nothing less than Max’s (Tom Hardy) one overriding instinct -- survival -- and the conflicts that occur when that instinct runs smack against not one, but two brick walls.

One of those brick-walls is named Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). She is an individual who is as dedicated to her mission of “redemption” as Max is to his mission of self-preservation.

Another, even more dangerous brick wall Max encounters here is the fanaticism that too often accompanies fundamental religious belief.

In the film, this impediment to continued survival and civilization itself is named Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). He has set up a society that worship him as a God. People live and die by his command, and that’s exactly how he desires it.

In the last instance -- the exploration of cult fanaticism -- this Mad Max entry very much reflects our age. This is an era in which some people believe it is perfectly acceptable to burn and behead those who don’t share their restrictive, draconian ideology.  It is also an era when others believe that their personal religious convictions are more important than basic human decency, courtesy, or the ties that bind a society together.

In both cases (one murderous, and one merely sanctimonious), zealous belief has replaced common sense, community, and the desire to erect a just world.  Mad Max: Fury Road’s depiction of this belief mind-set gone mad, in a place called the Citadel is -- like so much in the film -- unforgettable.

I’m not one for hyperbole. Indeed, if you scroll over to the side-bar featuring critic comments about me on the right side of this review, you’ll note that I was once called “ever the judicious critic.” 

Well, with that descriptor in mind, let me say simply that Mad Max: Fury Road has not only revealed how fake, flat and uninspired most summer movies are, it has given us the finest action film in the last several years, and perhaps of the 21^st century.

Go see it as soon as you can.  And hold on tight.

“We are not things! We are not things!”

Following an apocalyptic war and the end of civilization, humanity has attempted to re-assert itself in the desert. But the twisted forms it has taken are horrifying, as a wanderer in the wasteland, former police man Max (Hardy) has discovered.

One day, Max is captured by the forces of the Citadel and Immortan Joe (Keays-Byrne). This cult does not see outsiders as possessing any value, and Max is turned into a living blood bag; one servicing Immortan’s “War Boys,” whom he sends on wasteland jihads.

In particular, Max is the blood donor for a callow youth named Nux (Nicholas Hault), who wishes for just one thing: entrance into Valhalla, the land of heroes.  To get there, he must obey Joe, and kill on his behalf. “I live. I die. I live again,” he recites, as if his words are Scripture.

When another of Joe’s people, Imperator Furiosa (Theron) leaves the Citadel in a war rig, events take a strange turn.  Furiosa has taken with her on her journey Joe’s five wives, whom he keeps locked in a vault, and is making a run for freedom. Some of the young women are pregnant.

Joe, who also keeps his people starving and thirsty, rallies all his forces to get the women back. Max becomes an unwitting part of the war party when Nux refuses to leave his blood supply behind.

After several dangerous, destructive encounters, Max and Lux end up on the war rig with Furiosa and must re-evaluate their allegiances and belief systems. 

With Joe hot on their trail, the group must decide if it can reach the mythical “Green” lands (and land of “Many Mothers”) or if it should choose a different course.

“Who Killed the World?”

At a few key junctures in Mad Max: Fury Road, we see the legend written or spoken, “who killed the world?” 

The answer, as enunciated by the film, is religious zealotry. 

What killed the world is the perverse, destructive desire of the devout to force their belief system on those who simply wish to leave in peace and freedom.

In the real world, we have ISIS, of course, as an example of just such zealotry. Indeed, the atrocities committed by ISIS remind us that Fury Road isn’t so fantastic as to be unbelievable.  The world in the film is only a single step removed from reality, and grounded very much in the truths of today.

Historically speaking, we know that the Mad Max movies feature an apocalypse caused by demand for oil.  And we have now waged two wars in Iraq and the wider Middle East, with different ideologies clashing, and oil fields as the coveted prize. Thus, Miller’s sci-fi world even looks more plausible today than it did thirty years ago, during the Cold War.

In the Citadel of Fury Road, those who don’t profess devout belief in Immortan Joe are literally nothing except spare parts…blood to be used by the War Boys. Their beliefs are wrong, so they are worthless as human beings.

In the same culture, women are treated as property, and there are no families.  Some women are designated breeders, while others are nurse-maids, but all the boys are raised to be murderous warriors, never knowing the milk of human kindness that a mother (and father) can provide.  We see some women in the film, pumping breast milk, but it is just a commodity, not something to be shared in a family.  The women and the War Boys don’t mingle.

The boys exist not to be human, but to kill and conquer, and convert more followers to Joe’s holy cause.  The Citadel, then, is a theocracy, a metropolis where religious belief dictates all decisions.  If you believe, you fight for Joe without question.  If you believe, you breed for Joe without question. 

But if you don’t believe, you are worthless except that your precious blood may of value to one war boy or another.

This dynamic reflects the religious world view that God has chosen a particular people, and the belief that those people are above all others in terms of value and worth.   

We see in the film how Nux -- in many ways the film’s most intriguing character -- longs to die in service of his God. He wants to die and be reborn, and then die again.  He wants to enter Valhalla as a proud, heroic warrior. He wants the blessings of his God, and will do anything to achieve that goal, even if it means snuffing out human life. This world and such matters as humanity or family matter very little to Nux.  He has been indoctrinated not to want or desire those things, only to “believe” in Joe’s divinity and to serve without question.

It is therefore, in authentic terms, heart-wrenching when Nux fails in direct eyesight of Immortan Joe. Nux slips and fails in his mission, and he sees with his own eyes Joe’s utter disdain for him.  He has disappointed his God.  He has lost all value and self-worth, and knows it cannot be retrieved. 

At this point, Nux’s journey to become a human being and not a religious slave begins in earnest. Isolated and lonely, he reaches out, a little at a time, and starts to see how belief has imprisoned him, given him only the narrowest of visions of life. 

In the end, Nux makes a choice that one might think is, ironically, in keeping with his religious beliefs (and the desire to die), but he does so because -- for the first time -- he actually cares about someone other than himself and his “God.”  He makes his final choice because he wants someone else to live, not glory in some fictional afterlife.

As I’ve written before, that’s what civilization really is. 

It isn’t taking care of your own, or sticking to a tradition you know and practice.  That’s simply self-preservation. 

Civilization is what comes into being when you think of other people, and their survival, and take steps to preserve those things.

Max undertakes a kind of parallel journey in the film. 

Here, he has forsaken so much of his humanity to survive in the wasteland. In part, this may be because of his extreme self-loathing. We know from the events of Mad Max (1979) that he undertook vengeance -- an anti-social endeavor -- even knowing the consequences of that vengeance.  He murdered those who killed his wife and son, and in the process sacrificed his humanity and civilization itself. 

When we meet him again in Fury Road (which I believe, chronologically, precedes Thunderdome, but I could be wrong…) Max is still a barbarous “thing,” a man driven only by the desire to see the next minute alive.  He is unable to trust, unable to do much of anything, in fact, save for react to attacks.

Over the course of the film, he too starts to reach out, and sees that if man’s civilization is ever to return, that return must occur where civilization has the best chance. And for all its monstrosities and terrors, the Citadel is that place. There is green grass there.  There is water there.  There are children there.  Accordingly, Max convinces Furiosa to return there. They leads the war rig back to take on Joe, and reclaim the Citadel for humanity.

Furiosa is an intriguing character, but unlike either Nux or Max (and notice the similarity, please, in the names of those two male characters) she is in touch with her feelings; with her guilt and shame.  

She says she is out for “redemption,” because she has seen Joe for what he is and was still a part of his corrupt regime. She wants to escape him, and run away.  She wants to run away and not look back.

Ultimately, however, as Max proves, you can’t achieve redemption by running away.  You can only achieve it by reckoning with it at the place where the shame and guilt began.  And for Furiosa that is the home of her captors, the Citadel. As Max informs her, from personal experience: “If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.” 

In a very compelling way, Mad Max: Fury Road concerns three flawed characters who must open their eyes to the fact that they have been living in a destructive, anti-human way, and who therefore decide to address it by joining forces to take down the anti-human God, Joe.  Not a one of the three is perfect alone, but together…what a team they make. As dangerous as it is, they tall take one final shot at fixing what’s broken.

Some viewers have also picked up on the male/female conflicts in Mad Max: Fury Road, and attempted to state that the film is somehow anti-male, or that Furiosa assumes Max’s role as primary hero. 

I don’t believe either accusation is true. 

Furiosa and Max make a great team. She helps Max escape from danger, so that survival is not so important to him.  And he makes Furiosa return home, so that she can achieve the redemption she desires.  It is true that Furiosa, not Max, deals the death blow in the film to a significant villain, but if you look at Mad Max history, that is not entirely out of the norm.  If I remember correctly, Max never kills Auntie Entity in Thunderdome (1985), either.

Furiosa is not better or stronger than Max, and Max is not stronger or better than Furiosa.  That’s sort of the point.  They each possess different strengths and so can work together beautifully and effectively.  Max and Nux are “reliable,” as Furiosa notes, and Max sees for himself how committed Furiosa is to saving Joe’s brides from a life of enslavement, as property.

I don’t see why it has to be a competition between Max and Furiosa, frankly.  The film provides us several great characters, especially once you factor in Nux. They are all memorable, and they all serve the story well.

The other quality that serves the story well is, as I noted in my introduction, Miller’s structuring of the screenplay. 

The most independent and head-strong of the brides, The Splendid Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) is very pregnant in the film, and she demonstrates all the qualities that would make her the movie’s perfect hero. She is smart, brave and resourceful. She is a leader. She knows that her baby must live free, and that she must do so as well.

But what happens to noble Angharad is unexpected and terrible, and totally outside the confines of Hollywood movie convention. 

Again, I repeat: she is a pregnant, mother-to-be, and a person who wants only one thing. to be free.  But fate is so cruel to her and her dreams.  Once Angharad meets her fate, Miller demonstrates that he is committed to his hardcore cause.  He will not play Hollywood B.S. games and will not back away from taboo material. Instead, he makes his point about a world in which “believers” treat non-believers as “things” to be used, not as people.

It is a cliché, often spattered on newspaper banners, to claim that a film consists of “non-stop” action.  I shit you not when I say that Mad Max: Fury Road is non-stop action.  The film never stops moving, either literally or philosophically.  And visually, the film not only accelerates to the point of madness, it reveals, along the way, a splendid imagination in terms of characters and art design.  The war rig is a miraculous design, for instance, but it is just one such imaginative creation.  Max and Furiosa encounter a war party that drives around in giant spiked cars -- an homage to The Cars that Ate Paris (1976), perhaps? -- with wicked buzz-saw attachments. At another juncture, we see mysterious nomads on stilts navigating a swamp environment by night, and the imagery is evocative of a larger, unseen, unexplored world.   The action is spectacular on a whole new level, but the imaginative visuals go far beyond the action, and also lend support to the depiction of a (believable) world gone mad.

I don’t know how much money Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) will ultimately make, but I do know that we will be extremely lucky if any other genre film this summer – or in 2015 -- gets even close to Miller’s masterpiece in terms of wild ingenuity, excitement, and philosophical meaning.  It’s already made road-kill of Avengers: Age of Ultron on those fronts, and I hope Hollywood takes note.

In future years, I hope when people ask who killed the world of safe CGI summer blockbusters, we can all answer in unison…Mad Max: Fury Road.

Movie Trailer: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Welcome to the Post-Apocalypse: Survivors (1978)

For those of you who have never seen it, Survivors is an absolutely grim and thoroughly fascinating British program about an insidious pandemic which wipes out modern civilization and leaves the shattered survivors to re-learn all the old trades in order to build a new -- and hopefully better - world.

In other words, Survivors is sort of The Walking Dead, only without the periodic threat of rampaging zombies.  

Here, the true enemies are modern mankind's ignorance of his own technology and history; and the threat of dangerous, power-hungry men and women who see only opportunity in global tragedy.  The series is set in a new Dark Ages of sorts, with (some) humans afforded a second chance to get things right.

Survivors first aired on the BBC beginning in April of 1975, and was conceived and written by Terry Nation, the man behind Dr. Who's pepper-pot Daleks as well as the classic cult-tv series, Blake's 7 (1978-1981). 

Produced by Terence Dudley, the first series of Survivors stars Carolyn Seymour (Space: 1999, Star Trek: Voyager, Otherworld)  as Abby Grant, a not-terribly special or notable middle-class housewife living outside London.

But Abby's life changes forever in "The Fourth Horseman," the inaugural episode of Survivors.  After the opening credits, we find ourselves in Abby's comfortable country home as she deals with the inconvenience of a "couple dozen cases of the flu" in nearby London.

In short order, the inconveniences pile atop each other, and snowball  The phone lines become jammed.  The trains from London are not arriving on time, or have been canceled all together.  The radio tells an even worse story in America.  There's no electricity in New York, and a State of Emergency has been declared.  There are rumors that millions of people have already died in India and in secretive China.

Before long, the episode cuts to another main character, a single woman named Jenny (Lucy Fleming), whose roommate is suffering from the mysterious illness.  While her roommate is succumbing to lumps under the arms, fever and chills, Jenny goes to the hospital to seek help, and it's a scene of a modern health system in chaos, overrun and failing.  This is one of the most chilling moments in the entire episode.  A line of scared citizens are lined up in the halls, getting flu vaccines in their arms while an understaffed facility attempts to deal with the frightening and fatal unknown.

A doctor soon informs Jenny that the flu-like sickness has a six day incubation period and almost inevitably results in death, but that certain people appear to possess a "natural immunity" to the "mutant virus, not yet identified."  The doctor also implores Jenny -- who appears to be immune -- to escape while she still can, before the cities become "like open cesspits."  

Soon, he warns, garbage and corpses will line the untended streets...

The remainder of "The Fourth Horsemen" is every bit as bleak as this initial act. 

Abby grows ill but after several days unconscious, awakens "cured."  She promptly  finds her husband (Peter Bowles) dead on the sofa, and civilization, essentially, destroyed.

While Jenny wanders the  London streets alone and deals with thugs and looters, Abby sets off in search of her son, Peter, at his boarding school. 

Instead, she finds only an old man with a hearing aide, a teacher, who discusses the state of the world and a possible future. His perspective proves valuable. 

"The aftermath will be worse than the disease," he tells her.  "What is important is learning again," he establishes, pointing out that most 20th century people would not know how to make a candle from scratch, let alone create a machine to generate electricity. 

As this man stresses, "you need to know every part of every process" and "all the old skills and crafts must be learned."

This is difficult and frightening for Abby to accept at first, as part of the "generation that first put man on the moon," but soon she starts to see the wisdom of her mentor's words; and begins formulating, even in this pilot episode, a way forward. 

I admire this aspect of Survivors very much, and it fits in well with Space:1999, which also premiered in 1975 and concerned a global apocalypse of sorts.  Both series very much involve what Science Digest editor Arielle Emmett called (in regards to 1999) "the downfall of 20th century technological man."

What remains most shocking, perhaps, about Survivors is that this pilot episode has not aged significantly in thirty-five years.  Any fan of Dr. Who will immediately recognize the 1970s era visual aesthetic: film for exterior location work and videotape for interior studio work.  But the important thing is that the ideas have not aged a day, and indeed, the teleplay and its presentation are rather artful in presentation

For instance, "The Fourth Horseman" opens with a shot of an automated tennis ball machine, one that "serves" tennis balls to a human player, in this case Abby.  Thus the very image that the Survivors story commences on is one of, if not excess, let's say "leisure technology." 

Abby spends her afternoon staying fit, playing tennis with a recreation machine.  This idea fits in with the theme of the story: that the technological man of the 1970s, faced with a population-destroying pandemic, will no longer have access to such leisure pursuits, nor the wherewithal to construct such machines.  Later, close-ups and insert shots of radios, televisions and other modern conveniences appear, making the idea of the soon-to-be-lost technology a leitmotif of "The Fourth Horsemen.'

Another great moment comes late in the show, when Abby cuts off most of her long hair and burns down her house, making a clean separation from the lost past. She's living in a new world now, and her first act in this world is, appropriately, to re-shape her appearance to a more practical, less glamorous one.  Her second act is to destroy the symbols of the old world's leisure and convenience: the fully powered, air-conditioned modern home.

An absolutely riveting premiere, "The Fourth Horseman" has some nice visual touches beyond these, including a drastic pullback from Abby -- right up into the sky -- as she begs God not to let her be the only survivor.   The episode also gains significant frisson and impact from its deliberate comparison of this 1975 pandemic to the 1918 Influenza, which killed 50-to-100 million people worldwide (some 3% of the population). 

Over 500 million people were infected in what has been termed "the greatest medical holocaust in history."  Hard to believe I'm writing about something that occurred less than a hundred years ago, isn't it?

Terry Nation's implication with this comparison is obvious and important.  Something like this deadly plague has happened before (in 1918) and it could easily happen again, on even more catastrophic scale. 

Indeed, this bugaboo is very much with us today.  Remember in 2011, and the widespread fear of the H1N1 Swine Flu?  Or all the talk the year previous that about avian flu? And what was it this year...Ebola?

The fear, of course, is that with modern air transport, a person could do precisely what a clumsy scientist does in the opening credits of Survivors: bring a fatal disease from country to country before anyone is even aware there is a problem.

Later episodes of Survivors, such as "Genesis," find Abby preaching the cause of "re-learning" old skills to the other ragtag survivors of the plague.  She also clashes with men and women who see opportunity in doomsday, including a governmental official who fancies himself a Feudal Baron, and an aristocratic woman who wants to hoard goods because cash has no value, and people will work for her in exchange for food.  It is her goal to get a piece of the pie, and live in comfort...and goddamn the other unfortunates.

Survivors was remade by the BBC in 2008 -- following up on the contemporary fears of SARS and other viruses -- and was recently cancelled following a second season.  I have not seen the new series, but I can wholeheartedly recommend the original 1970s series to fans of post-apocalyptic science fiction.  

The original Survivors is bleak, devoid of Hollywood bullshit, and intensely frightening.  The writing is superb, and Terry Nation artfully utilizes the end of the world  scenario to raise questions about human nature, and issues such as law enforcement, allocation of resources and other post-apocalyptic, existentialist obsessions.