Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

FURIOSA (2024)

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In FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (2024), we get a prequel to the FURY ROAD film that I’d be very surprised if anyone actually demanded but honestly stands out for me as the best in the franchise since THE ROAD WARRIOR. I liked this movie a lot, far better than FURY ROAD, with the biggest downer being that aside from a glimpse or two, Mad Max isn’t in it.

In this film, we get the backstory for Furiosa, one of Immortan Joe’s Praetorians, who played a significant role in FURY ROAD. As a child, she lives in the “Green Place,” but it’s been discovered by raiders, and when she tries to interfere with them leaving to tell others this sanctuary’s location, she winds up captured by the Horde led by the warlord Dementus (played balls to the wall by Chris Hemsworth) and growing up in the wasteland. From there, she becomes increasingly mixed up in the political machinations between three players–Dementus, who captures the sole working oil refinery, Immortan Joe, who controls the Citadel with its food and water supply, and the Bullet Farm, which manufactures ammunition. All she wants to do is escape back to the Green Place, but the wasteland has other plans for her, setting her on a path not of escape but revenge.

Anya Taylor-Joy does a great job in the role that was previously well-played by Charlize Theron in FURY ROAD, embodying the role with a fierce sense of determination and making the action scenes look believable instead of staged. In my view, Hemsworth steals the show as Dementus, though, who is a great character, a product of the wasteland, a man who wishes things could be different and better but knows this can never be–that he in fact must help make it worse. Part charlatan and part emperor with no clothes, he is a pure agent of chaos, undermining and attacking his rivals because it’s all he knows how to do, and he appears to thrive on things falling apart, as if determined to make the world as horrible as his internal landscape.

Anyway, the characters are good, the politics simple and fun, the action scenes the usual riveting ROAD WARRIOR fare. There are a few moments that particularly stretch suspension of disbelief, such as Furiosa freeing herself from a tough situation and getting her robot arm, but whatever, it’s a Mad Max movie. Overall, I found FURIOSA a great addition to the Mad Max world and again one of the best in the franchise, though, I’d love to see something this fun with Mad Max back as the main.

GOODBYE EARTH

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Based on the novel by Kotaro Isaka, GOODBYE EARTH, a South Korean dystopian TV series (Netflix), is a real trip. Audiences seemed to hate it based on Rotten Tomatoes ratings, but I found a lot to like, and while the plot meandered, I fell for the charming characters.

In this series, an asteroid is heading toward Earth in 200 days, and Woongcheon, a city in South Korea, is reeling from the turmoil that followed its discovery and failure to destroy it in space. Making matters worse, South Korea is predicted to be ground zero for the asteroid impact, guaranteeing no one will survive. The government and the elites bailed, resulting in an attempted coup and horrific loss of life. Convicts also escaped the jails and went on a rampage, killing and kidnapping children.

In the aftermath of this, the people left behind in Woongcheon struggle with shortages, unavailability of transport out of the country, scams, criminals operating openly, and corruption. The story has an ensemble cast but primarily follows Jin Se-kyeong, a former teacher haunted by the loss of many of her students; her fiance Dr. Ha Yung-sang, a scientist who was stuck in the US during the disruption and who is considered valuable by the elites for rebuilding civilization after the impact; Captain Kang In-a, an army officer leading a defanged support unit trying to maintain order; and Father Woo Sung-jae, a priest forced to take over his parish and hold it together after the main priest vanishes. Their relationships in the community lead us into the lives of many other characters who try to find meaning, joy, and sometimes escape, knowing their days are numbered.

This is one weird show. I was struck by the obvious inspiration it took from HBO’s THE LEFTOVERS, about the people left behind when 2% of Earth’s population suddenly disappear. Struggling to find meaning in such an inexplicable event filled with loss and grief, humanity loses its mind, resorting to cults, oddball religions, and violence. Similarly, the people of Woongcheon experience a lot of the same wild reactions to the looming apocalypse, and ask a lot of the same questions about whether life has any meaning if it ends.

As for the plot, it is all over the place. Storylines come and go. The ending is fairly ambiguous. It’s a frequently titillating and beautiful-looking but ultimately hot mess of a story. I fell for the characters, however, including the many secondary characters, and I enjoyed the frequent interruptions of the disjointed plot where we see them simply living their lives and sharing loving, comedic, or odd moments with each other. This is where the show really shined for me, in the simple humanity and its inherent bravery when juxtaposed with impending doom.

Overall, I like GOODBYE EARTH. Would I recommend it? Cautiously, I guess. There’s a lot to like, but those looking for conventional plotting and a brisk pace may be frustrated.

FALLOUT

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Streaming on Amazon Prime, FALLOUT translates the popular post-apocalyptic game into one of the most fun TV series I’ve ever watched.

The show roughly follows the game: Far in the future, people live in underground vaults, hoping to repopulate the earth and rebuild civilization following a devastating nuclear exchange concluding an endless resource war between the superpowers. After her father goes missing, a young woman named Lucy (Ella Purnell) ventures into the wasteland to find him, armed with some tech but mostly pluck, can-do attitude, and a strong moral center from her upbringing in the vault. Along the way, she encounters a square of the Brotherhood of Steel, a remnant of the old U.S. military, and a ghoul bounty hunter, each with their own storylines and goals.

I’m a gamer but not really a GAMER. I was familiar with the FALLOUT games but never played them. From what I hear, the show is fairly faithful to the game’s iconic world building and RPG storyline, while enhancing it.

The world of FALLOUT is crazy fun, a cross between the retro-futuristic fifties/Atomic Age that saw the Bomb drop with post-apoc tropes familiar from MAD MAX and A BOY AND HIS DOG. The show does a great job making the world of FALLOUT appear lived-in with its own weird logic that simply expects you to accept it and keep up. The various factions in the show each have their own weird customs and culture, my favorite probably being the crazy-cool knights of the Brotherhood. Otherwise, the show keeps its secrets well, doling out answers bit by bit, and they are worth the wait. By the end, we learn the real story of how the world ended, and what the purpose of the Vaults actually is.

In short, it’s a blast. My first impression was this is going to be a silly ride through the apocalypse, but as the characters and story developed, FALLOUT proved surprisingly and satisfyingly deep, layered, textured, and crazy fun. The story, pacing, acting, dialogue, and world-building are all spot on. Highly recommended.

The game has three sequels, and the last episode teases which one will be taken on next. I can’t wait.

CIVIL WAR (2024)

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My overall view of CIVIL WAR (2024) is basically that it’s really good civil war porn. Otherwise, it’s highly YMMV. Let me explain.

In the movie, four journalists are covering a future American civil war that has an unlikely alliance of Texas and California fighting alongside Florida against the U.S. government. The president (Nick Offerman) is described as a “fascist” who disbanded the FBI and bombed civilians. Otherwise, the causes of the war are mysterious. As the Western Forces close in on Washington, DC, the journalists, currently in New York, decide to go to DC to try to interview the president, who notoriously hates the press.

These include exhausted and bitter veteran Lee (Kirsten Dunst), adrenaline junkie Joel (Wagner Moura), old crusty newspaperman Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and novice reporter Jesse (Cailee Spaeny). Along the way, they travel through various set pieces typical of civil conflict–distrustful locals, unreal inflation for basic necessities like fuel, burning buildings, mass graves, lynchings, militiamen who regard their enemy as inhuman, execution of war prisoners, and ever-present gunfire on the horizon as the front line grows steadily closer.

I was pretty excited about the movie. I’d written a novel about a second American civil war called OUR WAR that freaked out a lot of people, so I’d done a lot of homework on the topic. What would an actual civil war look like? It’s a fascinating if very grim subject. Alex Garland wrote and directed, and I’d enjoyed his 28 DAYS LATER and SUNSHINE.

The result for me was a serious mixed bag.

What I liked: The war set-pieces are fairly realistic, the depiction of the horrors of civil war are chilling, and the depiction of war reporters was pretty spot on, reminiscent of movies like THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY and WELCOME TO SARAJEVO. Telling the story through their nominally objective lens was a good approach (though it has a cost, which I’ll get into). The movie takes its time with little weird moments, with possibly the most chilling being a militiaman (Jesse Plemons) responding to Joel telling him he’s an American by asking, “Okay. But what kind of American are you?” In a civil war, that is the big question, and unfortunately there is no right answer that will guarantee you go on living.

What I didn’t like: Garland made a movie about a civil war but left out anything about its causes, probably because he didn’t want to offend anyone. For example, there is a reference to an “Antifa massacre,” but it’s unclear if Antifa massacred people or were massacred. Very clever, but as a result I didn’t feel invested in any of it. Was I supposed to be happy or sad about the war’s outcome? No idea. The reporters offer an objective lens, but an objective lens to what? They have few opinions of their own, and we never get to know any of the combatants or why they’re doing all this.

CIVIL WAR is supposed to be a cautionary tale, but this takes the artistic balls to address the issues of polarization and radicalism head on. The result is less cautionary tale and more civil war porn–mass graves, lynchings, and so on–without exploring the hatred and resulting dehumanization that would cause them. It just feels like it doesn’t have real integrity but instead the writer thinking, “Hey, a mass grave would be cool.” This even extends to the deaths of certain characters. One is dramatically mourned, the other is left on the floor, because that’s what the movie needed at that time.

Those criticisms aside, overall I liked the movie quite a bit and in fact found it riveting. Not as a cautionary tale but for its direction and crazy action. It was a fun watch, but that was a bit of the problem. A movie that wants to take the idea of a second American civil war seriously shouldn’t be all that fun.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023)

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In LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023), based on the novel by Rumaan Alam, a family of New Yorkers vacationing in Long Island find themselves facing increasing isolation and stress as a blackout strikes the region and potentially may be something much bigger. Good acting, a steadily building atmosphere of dread, and the teased-out mystery of what’s happening kept me watching, but its ending fell pretty flat for me.

The movie begins with a New York couple planning a weekend getaway with their teens on nearby Long Island. Amanda (Julia Roberts) is sick of people and wants to escape having to deal with them. Her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) is a college professor who goes with the flow. Their vacation is increasingly marred by oddities suggesting something is happening, and then a man and his daughter arrive at the house saying there’s a blackout in New York and claiming to be the home’s owners. It very quickly becomes clear that not only is something big happening, the old world they know may be over.

At the heart of this is a moral argument over whether people are essentially bad or good. Nothing shows us what people are really made of like a crisis. As a fan of apoc fiction and film, I came into this already well acquainted with the trope that the second law and order break down, nihilist biker gangs start roaming the countryside raping and killing. As a student of human nature (as most writers are), I never found that believable. People are tribal as a rule, and in a crisis they tribalize even further, usually down to the family level, and yeah they’ll fight over gas and food and toilet paper if there isn’t enough to go around, but if they can pull together, they’ll do it. We may be selfish and self-centered animals, but we didn’t make it to the top of the food chain as a species by being that way, we did it through collaboration. The key is reciprocity. I do good for you, you do good for me. The social contract. That’s how you compete and win in the game of life.

These themes are explored, refreshing to see handled in such a balanced way in an apoc film even if they’re hardly revelatory. What really carried the film for me was how grounded it felt. The isolation, the lack of information, the growing panic and terror of realizing that things may not get better. The characters pull this off, supported in no small part by the solid cast. They feel real, and their reactions feel real, which drew me in and kept me gripped. I cared what happened to them.

Where the movie falls short is in three areas. First is the apparent omnipotence of the antagonist and what GH, the homeowner (Mahershala Ali), speculates is the master plan. It’s way too sophisticated when a simple blackout would be more than enough to cause absolute chaos, as it would sow panic and disrupt access to food, water, and services like healthcare. Second is a lot of weird signs and events are handled for shock instead of realism, including how the characters react to them. As one example, an emergency alert takes over the air waves to basically say “things are bad,” but then offers no information, no instructions or anything, which is what the emergency alert system is actually for. Then you have New Yorkers old enough to have lived through 9/11 (I’m one of them) subsequently go to bed instead of obsessing over trying to figure out what’s going on, just to keep the audience in the dark. Nope. My last criticism would be how it all ended. We see a solid thematic conclusion but otherwise an abrupt and unsatisfying end to the story. Making me wonder if this might have made one hell of a miniseries instead of a movie.

Overall, I liked LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND a lot. It felt grounded enough and had strong enough characters for me to overlook how unrealistic some of the plot points felt, and for an apoc film, it handled its story and themes very well. I may not have fully appreciated where I ended up at the end of it, but I enjoyed the ride. That made it a good watch for me.

SWEET HOME, Season 2

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After a sizable pause, Korean monster apoc series SWEET HOME returned to Netflix in 2023. While the second season lacked the grounded intimacy and surprise of the first season, I wasn’t at all disappointed by the shift in tone.

In season 1, a monster apocalypse starts in Korea as seen through the lens of people living in an apartment building. The residents are charming and have big personalities that instantly hook you (as I’ve found in many Korean apoc movies and shows–unlike much of American action cinema, the Koreans are not afraid to be earnest and put it out there to the level of melodrama). When some of the residents begin to turn into bizarre monsters, they have to find a way to secure their building and find ways to survive as the world appears to end right outside.

Season 2 picks up pretty much where the first season left off. Now we see what’s going on outside the apartment building from brutal research into a cure to horrifying decisions made by the government to stem the spread of monsterization to the chaos in the military and safety shelters. Things spiral out of control until a jump in time shows us what appears to be stasis–survivors inside, monsters outside, a tenuous balance which the surviving characters and some new faces must navigate. The season doesn’t end quite tidily, leaving plenty for a future season, but fortunately a season 3 is on the way in summer 2024 (both seasons were shot back to back, apparently).

This is zombie fiction at its best, though with monsters. If you know my INFECTION series, you would probably guess I’d dig this. I loved the overall craziness of it, the uncertainty, how living in terror can derange human thinking and decision-making. And the monsters and apocalyptic setting are awesome, even if the CGI is a little rough at times.

On the downside, the show lost a lot of its clarity. Once it jumps ahead in time, there seems to be no clear overall objective. Instead, characters run into each other while on personal missions that seem to change on a dime. Sometimes, they make decisions that don’t make sense. Plot seems to take the lead over character this season, while the plot seems confused. Even the themes started to get confused, where we’re shown “maybe humans are the real monsters,” which based on what we can see the answer is no, they can be bad, they can react poorly to crisis, they can act first and think later if they’re afraid, but the monsters in this story are definitely the actual monsters that want to kill and eat people.

Despite these misgivings, I had a lot of fun with it. What started for me with great uncertainty–is this going to be a campy comedy? just weird fun?–quickly turned into a seriously dark, emotional, serious take on the chaos and horror of a monster apocalypse. I’m looking forward to season 3.