It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

I went to see 28 Weeks Later and I give it two dismembered thumbs up. Not really a big fan of the disorienting strobe light shaky-cam effect they used since it made it a little tough to make out some of the carnage. But still, zombie flicks are kind of like pizza in that even a bad zombie movie is still pretty good.

In fact, my love of boardwalks is perhaps only matched by my love of shambling pustule filled living dead chowing down on human flesh. Well ok, so that’s not entirely true. I’ve pondered this quite a bit and I think the real reason is that zombie flicks form a subgenre of my true favorite: The End Of The World scenario. The scenes that stick with me longest are not the ones involving chainsaws, shotguns, helicopter blades, or disembowelment but rather those eerie and unsettling shots where the protagonist walks through a deserted metropolitan area with cars abandoned in the middle of the road and rotting food still on the tables at restaurants. I can still remember that great scene in 28 Days Later where Cillian Murphy walks over a completely deserted Tower Bridge in broad daylight (not quite sure how they managed to shoot that). There’s also the ever-popular grocery shopping scene where the produce is of course long rotted but there is still plenty of junk food and other assorted canned goods for the motley band of survivors to choose from.

In particular, I like works that focus on the initial catastrophic event and then the immediate aftermath. There is another type of post-apocalyptic story that takes place quite a bit after the initial Day 0 event (the Mad Max movies for example) but I don’t like these quite as much. The major appeal of the former is that the recognizable remnants of modern civilization are still there but clearly the new Dark Ages are on their way soon. What does one do once those canned goods run out anyway? And no electricity ever again, oy. Then there is the emergence of true human nature in the absence of society. Are people inherently good or evil?

Disclaimer: While I enjoy reading books or watching movies about such a scenario, I certainly do not wish for something like this to happen in real life. In a world where only the strong survive, I am most definitely not going to fall into that camp.