Everything happening in Japan is giving me the creeps! Yesterday, when I was coming back from work, I was listening to the radio for more details on the catastrophic events going on since March 11th (which is a very important date in Spanish recent history, since this same day in 2004 we suffered our worst terrorist attack ever) and experts began to talk about technical data that got me completely lost. Thus, my mind started to work by itself, making strange associations of ideas, and my train of thought went on as follows:
a global economic crisis + a natural disaster + a nuclear crisis + the Mayan end of the world so very near in 2012 + Apocalypse + me driving = the Mad Max movies
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I won´t be writing a serious analysis on the nuclear issue but a very trivial review of the different glimpses of post-apocalyptic life I have seen in movies, and I will begin with the spark that inspired the idea for this post:
1- The Mad Max Trilogy.
These were the movies that made Australian Mel Gibson famous worldwide. Our friend Mel plays an Australian highway cop who has his family killed by a bunch of evil punk bikers who are out of control in a near future after a nuclear holocaust where your life´s not worth a gallon of gasoline. He will not stop until vengeance is done. Hell, he iwas so cool he even had a dingo as his pet dog...
This saga ended in 1984 with Mad Max - Beyond the Thunderdome. In my opinion this movie ruined the franchise, because good old Max went soft: he agrees to help a tribe of orphan boys to find a mythic city, ruled by Tina Turner, only to find that this city is not what they had expected. Max goes soft, he doesn´t kill as many punks as in the earlier movies, maybe another sign that punk was almost dead because they were no longer the "threat" that society had seen eight years before. Anyway, the only thing I remember about this movie, apart from the Thunderdome itself - which works as a sort of Roman Colysseum, with its own gladiators - is that the city´s source of energy was the methane gas coming out from pigs´ shit (!!!).
For me, the best one of all these movies was the second one, without any limit anymore, it goes right into what we want to see. Max gets to a camp under siege by another of these bands of evil wandering punks who want to take their gasoline they keep in a tanker of their own. The movie takes the most from the Australian desert in order to make this savage and devastated world a believable one. Australian roads are camera friendly and mix exceedingly well with all kinds of rotten and customized cars. Also noteworthy are two characters, the first one being the punks´boss, with scary sado-masochist gladiator looks wrapped up in black leather:
And the feral kid, who was nasty as hell. He couldn´t even speak but he had an awsome weapon, a stainless steel boomerang that cuts the fingers of some loser´s hand. Pure poetry of the screen...
2- Escape from New York. The plot, as seen in IMDB.com:
In 1997, (the future) when the US President crashes into Manhattan, now a giant maximum security prison, a convicted bank robber is sent in for a rescue.
Call me Snake... - wonder why they call him "Snake"...?
Manhattan´s been turned into a prison-island, crowded with criminal punks again (of course, this is 1981) and Kurt Russell is in his own element with friend John Carpenter at the peak of his career. They would film together such classics as The Thing and one of the best adventure films for teenagers ever made in the 1980´s, Big Trouble in Little China. Frankly, after watchin the Mad Max trilogy and Escape from NY one thinks that an apocalyptic future is not apocalyptic at all without evil punks around...
3- Maybe the one movie coming to one´s mind after watching Japanese cities under water is Waterworld, the movie that almost ended up Kevin Costner´s Hollywood career and financially ruined him. It is set in a near future (again) where the polar icecaps have melted due climatic change and all lands have gone under water. Humanity now lives in ships. Costner is a mutant who can breathe under water and he ends up protecting a girl with a map that leads to the legendary Dry Lands - a new version of the biblical Promised Land of the Jews.
The movie was heavily criticised back then, mainly due to the enormous amount of money Kevin Costner spent on it. The expensive set built near the Hawaiian archipelago was sank a couple of times by typhoons (this was one of the last movies pre-digital effects). It was a huge failure at the box office and I must admit I didn´t go to the theatres to watch it mainly beacuse of the bad reviews. However, it is not such a bad film if you watch it just as it is, purely an adventure movie.
4- I´m ending this post with one of the myths of science fiction movies: Planet of the Apes (the original one). At first, the movie makes us believe that Taylor and his crew land in another planet where apes have evolved and made humans their slaves. But as the movie progresses, we are given several clues that infer that they were in Earth the whole time, but in a very far future. The final scene is one of the best endings in film history:
But it is also worth to remember the Broadway version aired in a Simpsons episode:
However, one of the most striking features in the movie is the allegory of interracial love depicted as the special relationship between Taylor and Zira. At first, Taylor is sexually attracted by a specimen of his own species, the sexy Nova with her Rachel Welch caveman bikini, but he wants something more, Zira´s intellect. A perfect solution would be a brain transplant of Zira´s mind into Nova´s body, but you can´t have it all... or can you?:
Never was zoophilia depicted in such a clean and tender way as in this movie...
When I later on learned how conservative Charlton Heston was, I sometimes think he´d rather kiss a monkey than kissing an Afroamerican or a Latin woman...
Our friend Charlton also starred in another typically post-apocalyptic movie called The Omega Man. It was an adaptation of a novel called I Am Legend, which was recently adapted again starring Will Smith, with a main change from both the novel and the original movie: in the first movie the enemies of the last man alive were a society of underground mutants who couldn´t stand sunlight and wanted to exterminate all humans, but in the new one the foes were vampires (yes, vampires again). But not these new vampires so meek who just want to go to high school and nail some human teenager, no, real fearsome , savage vampires.
Well, We just came to the end of this post ( a very long one I think). Please remember to leave a comment and also become followers, I feel so very much alone in the followers list up there!
a global economic crisis + a natural disaster + a nuclear crisis + the Mayan end of the world so very near in 2012 + Apocalypse + me driving = the Mad Max movies
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I won´t be writing a serious analysis on the nuclear issue but a very trivial review of the different glimpses of post-apocalyptic life I have seen in movies, and I will begin with the spark that inspired the idea for this post:
1- The Mad Max Trilogy.
These were the movies that made Australian Mel Gibson famous worldwide. Our friend Mel plays an Australian highway cop who has his family killed by a bunch of evil punk bikers who are out of control in a near future after a nuclear holocaust where your life´s not worth a gallon of gasoline. He will not stop until vengeance is done. Hell, he iwas so cool he even had a dingo as his pet dog...
This saga ended in 1984 with Mad Max - Beyond the Thunderdome. In my opinion this movie ruined the franchise, because good old Max went soft: he agrees to help a tribe of orphan boys to find a mythic city, ruled by Tina Turner, only to find that this city is not what they had expected. Max goes soft, he doesn´t kill as many punks as in the earlier movies, maybe another sign that punk was almost dead because they were no longer the "threat" that society had seen eight years before. Anyway, the only thing I remember about this movie, apart from the Thunderdome itself - which works as a sort of Roman Colysseum, with its own gladiators - is that the city´s source of energy was the methane gas coming out from pigs´ shit (!!!).
For me, the best one of all these movies was the second one, without any limit anymore, it goes right into what we want to see. Max gets to a camp under siege by another of these bands of evil wandering punks who want to take their gasoline they keep in a tanker of their own. The movie takes the most from the Australian desert in order to make this savage and devastated world a believable one. Australian roads are camera friendly and mix exceedingly well with all kinds of rotten and customized cars. Also noteworthy are two characters, the first one being the punks´boss, with scary sado-masochist gladiator looks wrapped up in black leather:
And the feral kid, who was nasty as hell. He couldn´t even speak but he had an awsome weapon, a stainless steel boomerang that cuts the fingers of some loser´s hand. Pure poetry of the screen...
2- Escape from New York. The plot, as seen in IMDB.com:
In 1997, (the future) when the US President crashes into Manhattan, now a giant maximum security prison, a convicted bank robber is sent in for a rescue.
Call me Snake... - wonder why they call him "Snake"...?
Manhattan´s been turned into a prison-island, crowded with criminal punks again (of course, this is 1981) and Kurt Russell is in his own element with friend John Carpenter at the peak of his career. They would film together such classics as The Thing and one of the best adventure films for teenagers ever made in the 1980´s, Big Trouble in Little China. Frankly, after watchin the Mad Max trilogy and Escape from NY one thinks that an apocalyptic future is not apocalyptic at all without evil punks around...
3- Maybe the one movie coming to one´s mind after watching Japanese cities under water is Waterworld, the movie that almost ended up Kevin Costner´s Hollywood career and financially ruined him. It is set in a near future (again) where the polar icecaps have melted due climatic change and all lands have gone under water. Humanity now lives in ships. Costner is a mutant who can breathe under water and he ends up protecting a girl with a map that leads to the legendary Dry Lands - a new version of the biblical Promised Land of the Jews.
The movie was heavily criticised back then, mainly due to the enormous amount of money Kevin Costner spent on it. The expensive set built near the Hawaiian archipelago was sank a couple of times by typhoons (this was one of the last movies pre-digital effects). It was a huge failure at the box office and I must admit I didn´t go to the theatres to watch it mainly beacuse of the bad reviews. However, it is not such a bad film if you watch it just as it is, purely an adventure movie.
4- I´m ending this post with one of the myths of science fiction movies: Planet of the Apes (the original one). At first, the movie makes us believe that Taylor and his crew land in another planet where apes have evolved and made humans their slaves. But as the movie progresses, we are given several clues that infer that they were in Earth the whole time, but in a very far future. The final scene is one of the best endings in film history:
But it is also worth to remember the Broadway version aired in a Simpsons episode:
However, one of the most striking features in the movie is the allegory of interracial love depicted as the special relationship between Taylor and Zira. At first, Taylor is sexually attracted by a specimen of his own species, the sexy Nova with her Rachel Welch caveman bikini, but he wants something more, Zira´s intellect. A perfect solution would be a brain transplant of Zira´s mind into Nova´s body, but you can´t have it all... or can you?:
Never was zoophilia depicted in such a clean and tender way as in this movie...
When I later on learned how conservative Charlton Heston was, I sometimes think he´d rather kiss a monkey than kissing an Afroamerican or a Latin woman...
Our friend Charlton also starred in another typically post-apocalyptic movie called The Omega Man. It was an adaptation of a novel called I Am Legend, which was recently adapted again starring Will Smith, with a main change from both the novel and the original movie: in the first movie the enemies of the last man alive were a society of underground mutants who couldn´t stand sunlight and wanted to exterminate all humans, but in the new one the foes were vampires (yes, vampires again). But not these new vampires so meek who just want to go to high school and nail some human teenager, no, real fearsome , savage vampires.
Well, We just came to the end of this post ( a very long one I think). Please remember to leave a comment and also become followers, I feel so very much alone in the followers list up there!
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