I don’t play PC games these days. There have been periods when I did. In ancient times there was Doom, many levels of which I passed through. Then there were Call of Duty and Age of Empires, with lengthy periods in between. Some movies are modeled closely upon the so-called “first-person shooter” genre, which was the only type that interested me. One such was the movie version of Doom starring “The Rock.” Another I think is the Resident Evil series. These bored me. I watched limited spans of both.
I am a great devotee of the zombie/apocalypse genre in film. I owned original VHS tapes of Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead. (The first two were the superior ones.) I disdain some of the newer zombie movies where the dead can run faster than Usain Bolt. Zombies are supposed to shamble or stagger. Otherwise you could never survive them. I would credit a few exceptions . . . the 28 Days films and World War Z. Fast zombies or not, they’re just too good.
Fallout has the name of a video game that interested me because its landscape was taken from the D.C. area. I’d be able to recognize where I was. The company is based in Bethesda, not far from where I used to live. At any rate I never got the game. I checked out a few other zombie-killing games but none of them caught on.
As it turns out, the Amazon TV series Fallout does not flow like a first-person shooter game. It boasts a rich storyline and backstory, and not all that much shooting. So too with the excellent HBO series, “The Last of Us,” also based on but not much resembling a video game.
What’s interesting in the apocalypse movies is how people manage to overcome suspicion and paranoia and succeed in cooperating. In the same vein, there are communities that are able to sustain themselves. In The Walking Dead series, which I followed from its inception, finding hamlets of survival by the protagonists became repetitive, as all of these turned out to be hiding some awful, perverse secret.
Originally the writing in TWD was pretty good, but it went downhill eventually. (The end of the very first episode was stunning. So too the ‘Whisperers’ arc.) Most of all, the landscape against which it took place was a total wasteland, until the final season or two. Nowhere had anybody managed to put anything together. It was just one fucked-up little enclave after another.
The Fallout world is much more interesting. There is class struggle, for one thing. There are warring tribes of fundamentally different makeups with very different living spaces. There are a few creatures here and there to spice things up. (In TWD all the zombies are the same, until the very latter seasons where a few novel ones crop up, but they figure little in the stories.) TWD is really just a series of chases. Hero walks into that dark house (Why??), whoops out jumps a zombie. Hero improbably survives. Tedious.
The TWD brains are trying to make it a little more interesting in the spinoffs. One of them pulls off the absurd feat of dropping Motorcycle Darryl, who has become a redneck hillbilly idol, in France of all places. Another puts two of the leads from TWD in Manhattan, battling an insane local warlord. These are barely interesting enough to follow, but I do anyway.
A good apocalypse film rests on a plausible, if fantastic backstory. A nuclear holocaust, an incurable fungus or virus that turns humans into monsters (or both). Again, what’s interesting is not all the chase scenes but how humanity copes, or doesn’t. A better story is one where there is some hope, unlike, say The Road, which is very well-made but the bleakest story imaginable.
Coming soon is a different kind of apocalypse, in the movie “Civil War.” I rarely go to the movies (I will be making an exception for Dune 2), so I will wait for it to hit my TV. But I will definitely be tuning in.
For me, Night of the Living Dead is the mother of all zombie apocalypse movies. I loved The Road and The Last of Us, and World War Z, and also followed The Walking Dead in toto. What fascinates me is the way protocols are developed for the problem you have to solve on encountering strangers: do they intend to eat me?
Fast Zombies
Are like flying sharks
Or lab built improvements on T rex
The juvenile audacity of hollywood