Craig DiLouie |

400 DAYS (2015)

September 15, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

400 DAYS is one weird movie. Four astronauts go into an underground facility for 400 days to test human psychological responses to deep space flight. During their stay, they stick with routines, rub each other the wrong way, and try to get through it as best they can. After some time, however, a massive thud is heard overhead, and they lose contact with the man playing the part of ground control. Later, they hear a tapping on the hatch and learn that while they were underground, the apocalypse occurred. Or did it?

The movie is both fascinating and frustrating. The four astronauts don’t act like astronauts, the apocalypse doesn’t make sense, the crew are given shots that are supposed to be immune boosters but might something else, people they see in the town are the same as were at the press conference, the town wasn’t there when they went in the hole, the list goes on. By the end, you may find yourself questioning if what happened above ground was real or part of the test, whether it didn’t happen at all but was in their heads down in the bunker, or even if it all might have happened in one person’s head. The intrigue kept me watching through the frustration, as I wanted answers, but the movie ends with the same balance of frustration and intrigue. I found myself Googling “400 DAYS ending explained” and reading theories for an hour.

So overall, it’s a tough one to recommend, but it did get me on one level, and I did find it an intriguing watch. If you see it, be sure to share your theory on what the heck was going on.

IT COMES AT NIGHT (2017)

September 13, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults, IT COMES AT NIGHT (2017) shows that it’s possible to make very exciting apocalyptic and horror films on a small budget. All you need is a good story and the ability to tell it well. I highly recommend this indie horror gem.

A plague has wiped out billions, the cities have been abandoned, and people are isolated and focused on survival. Paul, Sarah, and their son Travis live in a remote house in the woods, getting by through being careful. They meet Will and his family and decided to take them in, but the ever-present threat of infection looms.

The film is a delight to discover. The actors all do a great job conveying the full spectrum of humanity in a crisis. The characters behave the way we’d expect them to and most of their decisions are very well reasoned, producing authenticity, believability, and genuine conflict. The tug of war between doing the right thing and self preservation was fascinating to watch. The antagonist is the disease outside and the constant threat that the tenuous alliance between these families could fracture into violence.

The atmosphere and pacing are extremely tense. The director wrings a huge amount of power from a single location. Without electricity, the house is very dark at night, lit only by LED lanterns, making it feel claustrophobic. During the day, the forest surrounding the house feels similarly foreboding, as it may conceal infection or raiders. The story never flags, pounding its way to the end while building and periodically defusing tension. The ending is gripping.

But there lies the one thing I didn’t like about the film, which was its denouement in which much is lost but nothing is really answered. None of the possibilities work for how the events roll out, suggesting the plague itself may be an entity, such as the mystery guest in the MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. It also explains the title, IT COMES AT NIGHT, which otherwise in my view doesn’t make sense for the film, suggesting a monster element that just isn’t there. The director explained he wanted the film to have an ambiguous ending, but if you’re going to get me to invest in a story, you owe me more than a mess of elements that defy explanation. INCEPTION had a wonderfully ambiguous ending, but it made sense and fit the film.

So, yeah, the ending was frustrating for me, but wow, what a fantastic ride to get there. IT COMES AT NIGHT is now in my top 5 list of must-see apocalyptic films. Highly recommended.

WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL by David Williams

September 5, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

David Williams’ WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL is an apocalyptic story about an Amish community struggling to survive after a solar storm fries the world’s electronics. I liked it for its freshness and fair degree of realism, but with some big reservations.

Being a fan of apocalyptic fiction, I always thought the Amish would be ideal survivors after a world-changing disaster. They live largely without technology right down to getting around using horse and buggy. They’re farmers and live close to the land. WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL convinced me they’d have all the skills to survive but would be ultimately doomed to die.

First, the story. We’re introduced to Jacob and his wife Hannah, son Jacob, and daughter Sadie. They’re farmers and craftsmen living in an Amish community outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They call themselves “plain folk,” speak a mixture of English and Dutch, and call the rest of America “the English.” Epileptic seizures and strange visions plague Sadie, who keeps saying the angels will come and the English will fall. When a solar storm fries the world’s electronics, billions of people must now survive without electricity.

The Amish are well positioned both to help and survive, but too many people live in the cities, there’s too little food, and the recovery efforts are too slow. The military imposes martial law, but even the military starts to break down. It isn’t long before starving refugees begin to raid the farms looking for food.

Enter the strong Amish faith and pacifism. This faith permeates every paragraph and chapter of the book, which is presented as Jacob’s journal (and had me skimming at times due to repetition). While his Christian faith is a great source of relief and strength in times of trouble, it also demands pacifism even in the face of certain murder. The family faces difficulties but overall very little hardship. By the end of WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL, and that ending comes a little abruptly, only one bad thing has happened to them, from which they are promptly rescued by a non-Amish. But it’s obvious at the end they’re all going to die because they can’t defend themselves nor can they even allow others to defend them.

But enter religion again. From what I could tell from Jacob’s narrative, the Amish believe in divine providence, which includes God answering prayers by intervening in the physical world. This is reinforced by Sadie’s visions being not mental illness but possibly communication from God. (I found her a cloying character with little to do in the book other than be patronizingly mysterious and prophetic. In fact, all of Jacob’s family are poorly developed characters who come across as two-dimensional.) So as the reader, for you to believe the book has a happy ending, you have to accept that God is okay with billions dying but that he’s looking out for a select few. Well, most of these people, anyway, as many Amish in America are already killed by the end of the book.

So I ended the read feeling a bit torn about it. I liked it. Actually, I liked it a lot. It’s well written. The way surrounding cities react to the crisis sounded realistic and worked for me. Jacob is an interesting and sympathetic narrator. I particularly enjoyed the look inside a typical Amish community and how they lived, which is laid out in the novel’s slow-burn setup. I loved the connection between a solar storm/EMP-like event and how the Amish would be ideally positioned to survive it. But for me the book just couldn’t connect the dots and make it work toward an ultimately satisfying conclusion.

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA by George Orwell

August 31, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, the brilliant novelist George Orwell recounts his experiences while serving in a militia during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939.

Orwell, a socialist, visited Spain in December 1936. His goal was to write about the fight against the fascist rebellion led by General Franco in the hopes of stirring working class opinion in the UK and France. He immediately enlisted. By chance, he fought with militias formed by the POUM, an anti-Stalinist socialist party. Anarchist parties had taken over Barcelona before he arrived, transforming the city into the closest thing he’d ever seen to ideal socialism in practice. The workers ran the factories, they patrolled neighborhoods as citizen police, class differentiation had virtually disappeared, and their militias had fought the fascist uprising to a standstill.

In Orwell’s clear prose, he describes his experiences in training and at the Aragon front, where nothing much was happening due to a lack of equipment on both sides of the conflict. After 115 days at the front, including some action at Huesca, he returned to Barcelona to find it a very different city. The Communists, which were supported by the USSR, had begun to dominate over the POUM and the Anarchists, slowly propagandizing against them and stripping away their powers. The Communists subverted the revolution that was in full swing, believing in centralized authority and industrial management along the Stalinist model. As a result, they allied with liberals and moderates to promote reforming the police, building a professional army, and bringing back class, believing this was the only way to win against Franco. While Orwell rejected the politics behind the lines, only caring about the fight against fascism, these politics resulted in a mini civil war in Barcelona. Backed by the professional army and police, the Communists suppressed the POUM and Anarchists, resulting in wholesale arrests and executions backed by kangaroo courts and censorship.

In the end, instead of fighting fascists, Orwell, who’d been wounded after his brief return to the front, found himself and his wife fleeing for their lives. While he wasn’t a POUM member, he’d fought for them, and though he’d been medically discharged, hew as guilty of the crime of having fought for them in the past.

Orwell hated totalitarianism in all forms, communist and fascist. He left Spain still committed to socialism, drawing inspiration from Barcelona in the first months of the war, but had become a dedicated enemy of Stalinist communism. His beliefs and experiences led to his writing ANIMAL FARM and 1984, which remain solid classics in dystopian literature.

Overall, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA is one the best firsthand accounts of the Spanish Civil War, produced by one of the twentieth century’s most important voices.

TUCKER AND DALE VERSUS EVIL (2011)

August 29, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

TUCKER AND DALE VERSUS EVIL (2010) tells the story of two good old boys visiting a remote cabin they bought as a vacation home. Along the way, they bump into a group of college kids on a camping trip and give them the creeps. What follows is a comedy of errors as Tucker (the always funny Alan Tudyk) and Dale rescue one of the girls in the group from drowning, resulting in her friends believing she’s been kidnapped by homicidal hillbillies. The terrified college kids pluck up their courage to fight back, with hilariously horrible results.

This was a fun movie that turns a basic horror trope on its head with plentiful gore, some laughs, and two pretty endearing central characters. Tucker and Dale do their best to fix the situation but end up increasingly terrorized by the college kids who all believe they’re doing the right thing. The simple conceit at the center of the film provides a surprising amount of mileage, as endearing characters and one fun, gory slaughter after another sustain the film to the end. Light, fun stuff, I appreciated the conceit and liked the execution.

TROPIC OF KANSAS by Christopher Brown

August 28, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

Christopher Brown’s TROPIC OF KANSAS (Harper Voyager, 2017) is a fun dystopian read about an alternate United States broken down by income inequality, environmental depletion, and various factions warring against a police state.

In this alternate USA, the Iranians slaughtered the hostages in Tehran and Ronald Reagan was assassinated in the early ’80s, resulting in Alexander Haig becoming President and endless war in Iran and the Americas. After him, the next President tried to dismantle the resulting police state but was overthrown on false charges, resulting in a civil war. The American heartland is now a DMZ called the Tropic of Kansas, policed by right wing militias, and now a brooding ground for rebellion, desperadoes, and experiments in self government.

Two protagonists emerge in this world as agents of its change. Sig, an orphan of political dissidents, who roams the Tropic one step ahead of the authorities until connecting with the people who will help him fight back. And Tania, his foster sister, a government agent assigned to find him, and who accesses a government secret that may change everything. Revolution is coming, but can it be won?

With endorsements from the likes of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Cory Doctorow, I thought I couldn’t do wrong with this one, and I did in fact enjoy it. It’s a fun read with a thriller pace. The world building is terrific, and I loved that aspect of it the most. Sig and Tania are likable enough protagonists, though Sig in particular often seems invincible while at the same time unreadable as to what he really wants and why. He just bounces around from group to group and immediately gets into trouble with each, providing a tour of the Tropic of Kansas that leads to a lawless New Orleans. Tania’s far more interesting with excellent tracking skills, clear motivation, and a coherent story line that holds together the entire book.

In my view, the novel never really achieves the promised gravitas nor a meta take on modern times like say the film CHILDREN OF MEN did. Thematically, it hits on the struggle of freedom against tyranny, but hits it so lightly it seems the story winds its way to revolution rather than the revolution being a cathartic and righteous resolution to the story. What TROPIC OF KANSAS does deliver is a really fun, somewhat madcap ride through dystopia and revolution in a fully realized, intriguing world. Brown really went to town on it, providing a terrifically detailed vision.

I love that post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction is making a comeback with Big 5 publishers and hope to see even more of it. TROPIC OF KANSAS stands out for me as one of the good ones.