Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

MOTHER/ANDROID (2021)

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In MOTHER/ANDROID (2021), a pregnant woman and her partner struggle to survive the android apocalypse. Critics and fans alike seemed to dislike this movie, based on Rotten Tomatoes ratings, but, well, I liked it. Though it doesn’t really add anything new to the apocalyptic genre and the drama at the climax didn’t hit me the way it was supposed to, there is a pleasure in a simple story well told, and this is one such story.

It’s the future, which looks like ours except many people now have android servants. The story basically begins with Georgia (Chloë Grace Moretz, usually not my favorite actor but she does a terrific job here) telling Sam (a calmly understated Algee Smith) that she is pregnant on Christmas Eve. When they go to a party, things don’t look good for the couple, who bicker over whether she should have a drink. Unfortunately, a catastrophic event is about to eclipse their issues: a mysterious signal blasts the country, triggering all androids to kill humans. Whether the signal freed them to do what they wanted or ordered them to kill, we don’t know, but the effect is the same. We’re all screwed.

Fast forward nine months, and a very pregnant Georgia is still with Sam, traveling in remote areas trying to figure out a way out of the country. They learn that there are boats in Boston still evacuating refugees and decide to take the risk of crossing no-man’s land to get there.

This movie offers everything I like about the apocalyptic genre: characters I care about, the blitzkrieg panic of the shit hitting the fan, some apocalyptic money shots, a scary monster-as-machine adversary, a simple point A to point B mission, and plenty of tough choices along the way between options that range from really sucking to only mostly sucking. I also particularly enjoyed that this wasn’t a story where everyone is dead except for our heroes and a few crazed survivors; America is still fighting, only it’s slowly losing. Oh, and the acting is solid.

On the downside, there could have been a little more action, it would have been nice to find out the real reason the androids revolted, and the ending didn’t hit me in the feels the way the filmmakers wanted it to. Georgia doesn’t seem to have much of a character arc where she changes or overcomes some flaw or misbelief, giving the film a kind of “well, that happened” feeling at the end. Overall, again, this movie didn’t really add much new to the apocalyptic genre.

All that being said, if you’re a fan of apoc films like me, I think you’ll find plenty to appreciate in MOTHER/ANDROID. It’s a simple story well told, that’s it. Overall, I liked it.

STATION ELEVEN

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Based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel, STATION ELEVEN (HBO) is a miniseries about a group of connected people experiencing the end of the world due to a superflu and the efforts to carry on and rebuild civilization in the aftermath. Beautifully directed, well acted, and emotionally powerful, the effort fell a bit short for me in coherence and believable character motivation, resulting in a show that seemed to say, “Don’t think too hard, just feel.”

I’d read the novel and found it very well written and rich in nostalgia and feeling even if I wasn’t sure what it was all for or trying to do other than say we’re all connected and don’t want to be alone. The story just sort of ends without really tying it all together other than in a very general theme. So I was curious about what direction a screen adaptation might take.

During a presentation of Shakespeare’s KING LEAR in Chicago, a famous movie actor playing the star role dies of a heart attack just before the world begins to fall apart in a mass die-off due to a new superflu that mutates, becoming highly contagious and lethal. What we see is a group of people all connected to this actor and a graphic novel his estranged ex Miranda created, titled STATION ELEVEN, as they live their lives before the flu, suffer the end of the world, and survive in the aftermath.

There is no single main character, though if one were to be chosen, it would fall on Kirsten, who at the age of eight served as the actor’s understudy for KING LEAR, survived with two brothers, and years later is a performer in an acting and musical group known as The Traveling Symphony, which tours settlements each year performing Shakespeare. Trouble arrives when a settlement calling itself the Museum of Civilization wants them to come perform, while a mysterious group of children led by a man called The Prophet seemingly wants to destroy all vestiges of the old so the world can renew itself with a clean slate.

It starts off like a literary and apocalyptic dream, quite beautifully directed with numerous artistic touches and plenty of attention for detail such as an apocalyptic Chicago. The show writers made some directions that went off the novel that I thought were fairly worthwhile, fleshing things out and tying the people together more closely while more deeply exploring the ideas of Shakespeare’s HAMLET, about a young man angry at his absent father and resorting to destruction to make his own mark. (With the exception of a young Kirsten, the young do not come off well in all this, deranged and angry and lashing out at being denied an inheritance their elders know but they themselves don’t even understand.) Unfortunately, the way it comes together in the last act felt forced for me as I puzzled over character motivations and became uncertain even about the story’s coherence. As a result, a lot of the soaring emotional impact the show intended to deliver in the last act was kind of lost on me.

Overall, I liked STATION ELEVEN–loved it, actually–for its better qualities. I just wish its conclusion realized its ambition by coming together with greater clarity.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION by Robert Evans

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In AFTER THE REVOLUTION, Robert Evans imagines a fractured America in 2070, presenting a dystopian vision of never-ending disunity and political competition. This read was a lot of fun.

In the distant future, meta humans created by the U.S. military have overthrown the government, but instead of a glorious new beginning for America, their addiction to violence and receding to isolation left the country a hot mess. America is now fractured into various states, many of them varying shades of bad, ranging from Christian fundamentalist theocracies to libertarian states virtually run by corporations.

Three people are on an intersection course that will decide the fate of a war. Manny lives in a Texan republic in an ongoing war against a neighboring theocratic state. He works as a fixer for foreign journalists so he can save up enough money to escape America entirely, only to face losing everything as the war heats up. Sasha wants to sneak into the theocratic state to live a pure life, only to find herself horrified by its brutality. And Roland, a meta human veteran, wants back the memories he lost due to some past trauma.

Some reviewers called this one prescient, though it’s hardly that. There isn’t anything here most people in today’s polarized America would even consider politically offensive. It is, however, a damn good read. The dystopian and civil war elements will feel familiar, while Evans spices it with enough future technology and oddness to give it both a sense of humor and greater depth. Thematically, there are no easy answers other than revolution that breaks a country but doesn’t replace it with something better will make it worse.

Overall, AFTER THE REVOLUTION is engagingly written and a lot of fun to follow, acting for me as a nice summer escape from rather than a mirror for the turbulent times we live in.

THE LAST STORM by Tim Lebbon

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Tim Lebbon’s THE LAST STORM depicts an America dying from climate change, focusing on a young woman who can either save or destroy it. I liked this one a lot, but as it’s Lebbon, that’s not surprising. He’s a craftsman with a knack for telling new and engaging apocalyptic stories.

It’s the future, and desertification and super storms caused by a warming planet are slowly destroying America. In this hostile land, Ash, a young woman, sets out to build a device she instinctively knows how to create and how to use as a gift passed down through her family. She is a rain maker.

Unfortunately, given the state of mind of the person calling down the rain, water isn’t the only thing that gets through. Creatures may come as well, hungry and monstrous. As she travels in search of the parts she needs for her apparatus, her parents, who well know the cost of rain making, pursue and try to save her and the world from herself. And a young man sets out on a similar path, hoping for revenge.

As with novels like THE SILENCE, Lebbon is a solid craftsman, matching likeable characters to a titillating apocalyptic premise with supreme stakes. The lore of the rain makers–what they can do, the apparatus they use, and so on–is great, the characters are all terrific, and the action is great. There is a satisfying blue-collar workmanship about how Lebbon writes; his stories read like workhorses. Probably my only criticism is the same as with THE SILENCE, which is the villain. In both, Lebbon decided to add a villain to enhance the dimensionality of the conflict, but as a reader I didn’t feel they were necessary. In THE LAST STORM, the parents who wants to save their daughter from herself are in themselves a terrific antagonist for Ash. And of course, the creature element in both stories makes a perfect villain.

Overall, I ended up liking this one a lot, which again wasn’t surprising given the author. Recommended if you’re looking for something new in apocalyptic fiction.

THE SADNESS (2022)

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Fresh from Taiwan, THE SADNESS (2022) is a nasty, viscerally disturbing horror film that is somehow fitting for the COVID pandemic era.

Jim and Kat are young lovers who separate in the morning, Kat to take the train to work and Jim to grab coffee and start his own day. In the background, we become aware of a new virus dubbed Alvin, which scientists are saying is dangerously mutating, though the COVID weary public, sick of lock downs and infected in a way themselves with viral disinformation, is having none of it. As usual, the annoying scientists are right; Alvin is mutating, and those infected become compelled to inflict pain.

If you’re thinking this sounds like the graphic novel CROSSED by Garth Ennis, which isn’t so much read as inviting stomach-turning visual assault, you’re right; CROSSED is an inspiration for the film, just as it was for THE RETREAT, my zombie series written with Stephen Knight and Joe McKinney (it was also inspired by THE ANABASIS by Xenophon). And man, does it deliver: blood and gore and hacking and stabbing indulged to the max, spiced with moments of graphic torture and sexual assault held back just short of indulgent.

It’s ugly stuff, brutal and nasty, and man, it sets up one hell of an apocalypse. The grinning sadists who form the “zombies” in this story are pretty darn freaky and frightening. The combination of blood, tension, and cruelty is viscerally upsetting. The filmmakers handled all of it right in my view, punching you in the face without celebrating the punch, if you will. They adeptly set up long scenes of steadily escalating tension as characters react with terror and paralysis until the zombies arrive to play. The fairly cynical story runs right up to the point of nihilism, as our protagonists try to help people only to get burned, average people lash out in ignorance and fear and cowardice, and even the expert we meet is villainous.

It all ends on a note of hope, though it’s vague and also not very emotionally satisfying. The problem is in the lack of character arcs. In TRAIN TO BUSAN, for example, a detached dad learns the value and responsibility of fatherhood during a zombie apocalypse. In THE SADNESS, nothing is really learned or gained, making the story entirely about the world ending in slaughter and perhaps a thematic message that when it comes to public health maybe we should listen to public health experts. As a result, I wasn’t as invested as I would have liked in the protagonists, whose story simply ends, and it would have been interesting to see more of the best of human nature in contrast with the infected’s worst.

Despite this, I like this one quite a bit as something new in zombie land, a serious gut punch.

MAD GOD (2022)

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The magnum opus of veteran animator Phil Tippet, MAD GOD (2022) is a surreal stop-motion animation horror trip that’s beautiful and puzzling, rolling out like an artist’s scream, a filmmaker’s dream project that amazes you that it somehow got produced.

Currently watchable on Shudder, the film begins with the Assassin descending onto a ruined, mutant, horrible world on what may be a suicide mission under orders from the Last Human. He passes through bizarre landscapes populated by tortured souls, monstrosities, terrible machines, and endless war, and runs afoul of the Surgeon, producing a chain of events leading to the Alchemist creating a new universe that only falls into the same state of decay. A form of decay that never quite dies, one that becomes a malignant ecology of its own.

If that doesn’t make sense, that’s okay. Most of the fun of this creative wonder is simply in beholding. The rest is up to interpretation, if you’re up for it: themes about humanity being prone to its own self destruction, religious allegory about every renewal leading to corruption. Visually, the film is nothing short of astounding in what it achieved technically and aesthetically. MAD GOD rolls out like something Hieronymus Bosch, the painter of the famous landscape of Hell, might have produced if he had the means to produce stop motion animation and a budget.

Otherwise, there’s the emotional impact, which infiltrates more than punches. MAD GOD is nihilistic, sad, horrible. Everything dies, everything is self-absorbed, everything fights everything else to get what it wants, everything beautiful eventually falls into ruin.

Definitely check it out if you’re into–I’m not sure. Something beautifully bleak, horribly interesting, engagingly savage.