Like it or not, Disney ‘s ‘Frozen’ deserves the animated-film Oscar
Update March 2: Frozen got the Oscar, Let It Go got the best song Oscar, but Disney’s short film, Get a Horse, didn’t. That Oscar went to Mr. Hublot. Nice to see an outsider get this one.
A Disney animated film is up for an Oscar, no surprise, but no film from Pixar is, which is … shocking.
I know many people disdain Disney animated films as products of the big fantasy factory that shovels out carefully calculated products geared first, to make lots of money and second, earn a bunch of awards. Plus, they perpetuate the “girls should be princesses” trope, or they’re full of sappy songs, or they’re wrecking the source material. All perhaps true in one form or another in the past, but this year the studio released a film that pushes back against some of those tropes.
Frozen will deserve the win beyond being just a Disney film. It’s already won the best-film Annie from the International Animated Film Society (IAFS), which is animators giving other animators awards.
At first glance, the Disney “princess” factor is in full play here with not one but two princesses, daughters of the king and queen of Arendale. Princess Elsa possesses the talent to create ice and snow at the wave of her hand, while her sister, Anna, doesn’t (why one has it and the other doesn’t is never explained; it’s one of those things you just have to go with). When they are girls, Elsa accidentally injures Anna seriously enough to require some odd rock-borne magic from the chief of trolls to save her life.
To prevent this from happening again to Anna or anyone else, the king and queen lock Elsa away with instructions to suppress her power, to never use it again, to never let anyone else see it, to deny its existence. (Fill in your favorite metaphor here.) The king and queen go on a journey, but their ship sinks. Elsa, the oldest, becomes queen, but on her coronation day, she refuses to approve Anna’s marriage to handsome Hans. In the ensuing argument, Elsa’s power is unleashed and she flees, leaving Arendale locked in a permanent winter. Anna, believing she was the cause of Elsa’s anger, chases her to try get her to come home, but that leads to more disaster, which plays out to the point where Elsa is about to be executed by a usurper to the throne.
Two princesses? Throw in a comedy relief from a talking snowman and an clever deer sidekick, some songs, and we’re off again rolling merrily along on the Disney marketing juggernaut. Another brilliant success for the giant corporation swallowing everyone’s childhood.
Except—there are things going on here that keep the film from being Just Another Disney Cartoon. There are lessons to be learned, especially about throwing yourself at the first handsome prince you see. And that favorite “true love will save you” theme Disney loves to milk again and again gets a different interpretation here. Both of these add a dimension to Frozen that moves the film from the usual Disney offering into something more complex—and much more satisfying. Even the sappy songs get a remake. The Oscar-nominated song Let It Go is not just a princess pining for her prince to show up and carry her off to a “happily ever after” ending but a bold statement about acceptance of self against all opprobrium.
Is any of this due to the influence of Pixar? Pixar was cleaning Disney’s clock with the Toy Story series, Monsters, Inc., Wall-E, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, Cars—films that were winning Oscars almost every year. So, to handle the competition, Disney bought Pixar. Two Pixar executives, John Lassiter and Ed Cantwell, became Disney animation executives and brought some of the Pixar operating procedures along, and it seems to be paying off. The last few Disney animated films have been big improvements over earlier ones that didn’t do so good (Atlantis, Treasure Planet). Tangled showed the seeds of this change when Rapunzel, known for her long, long, blond hair, sacrificed it all for her “true love.” The film was sassy, funny, a bit subversive, and had one of the best horses in animated films.
Then came Wreck-It Ralph, which should have won the Oscar for best animated feature for 2012. Yes, Vanellope von Schweetz can be irritating, but the film has heart and soul. It lost to Brave because Brave was a Pixar film and Pixar films are always better than Disney, right? Not this time. Brave was gorgeous to look at, but it was flawed in story and character. It just did not rise to the usual Pixar heights. Normally, we’d expect the same kind of situation this year, but (horrors!) Pixar’s 2013 film, Monsters University, wasn’t even nominated. (It did not deserve to be. A pleasant film, but it didn’t break any new ground like its predecessor did.) And then we find out that Pixar isn’t going to have a film at all in 2014.
Does this mean Disney is sucking the life out of Pixar? Has Disney decided that the best way to deal with the upstart is to hollow it out and transfer the creativity to it? Will Pixar be relegated to making more hum-drum sequels to Cars and Monsters, Inc.? I prefer to believe Pixar delayed its next film because it wanted to ensure the film lives up to its standards. Pixar does has a couple of interesting-sounding films in its release schedule, so I’m not ready to give up on them completely. But I am concerned.
These three films—Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen—represent yet another renaissance for Disney studios, the first since the Little Mermaid–Beauty and the Beast–Lion King–Aladdin tetralogy of the late ’80s, early ’90s. For a while, the quality was slipping (except for the really subversive Lilo & Stitch) until these came along. I just hope the creators are careful and don’t slavishly imitate these in their future films. Signs of a formula are evident already: Frozen‘s princesses as children bear a resemblance to Vanellope of Wreck-It Ralph; as adults, they resemble Rapunzel of Tangled; Olaf, the talking snowman of Frozen, resembles in both design and sound King Candy in Wreck-It Ralph; the handsome prince of Frozen shares the same DNA with the handsome thief of Tangled; Sven, the reindeer of Frozen, has a lot in common with Maximus, the horse in Tangled. And though no one stopped and sang in Wreck-It Ralph, Tangled and Frozen are harbingers of the return of songs to Disney animation movies. That’s OK, mostly, but it can be overdone.
Frozen has been in development for a long time. James B. Stewart, in his 2005 book, Disney War, about the Michael Eisner years at the studio, describes a creative meeting of animators he was allowed to attend with Eisner on June 11, 2003. Among the films discussed was one based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale The Snow Queen, something that had been in the works long before then. That’s now Frozen, the gender-neutral name given because studio execs are convinced boys won’t go see a film about girls. That’s why the tale of Rapunzel was called Tangled. It’s all reportedly based on the not-so-good showing of The Princess and the Frog, but I doubt giving that film a neutral name (Day of the Frog? The Magic Frog? The Frog and I? The Frog Dairies? Beauty and the Frog-beast? The Little Frog-maid? The Frog King? Froggie Goes a-Courtin’?) would have attracted that many more boys.
(As last year, a Disney short cartoon is also nominated. When Get a Horse, which precedes Frozen in the theaters, starts, you think you’re going to see an old black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoon resuscitated from the vaults, but then characters start falling out of the cartoon as if they were landing in the theater. When this happens, the characters are in color and rendered by computer much more realistically [as much as a talking mice standing erect wearing shorts or skirts can be]. Kudos to the directors, Lauren MacMullen and Dorothy McKim, for making an engaging little blast from the past. The problem is, it will probably get the Oscar simply because it’s a Disney film. I just wish some of the independent and student animators would get more recognition in this category.)
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If Frozen has any competition, it’s going to be The Wind Rises, perhaps Hayao Miyazaki’s last film (he’s said this before). Miyazaki is the genius behind Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle and many other Studio Ghibli films. The film might be handicapped by its subject matter, the man who developed the warplane known as the Zero, which was one of the weapons that allowed the Japanese Empire to conquer so much territory in World War II.
Why that topic? It indulges Miyazaki’s love of flying, something that works its way into almost every Miyazaki film. Plus, it’s a story about holding onto one’s beliefs and persevering despite setbacks and roadblocks, another favorite Miyazaki theme.
This is all based on what I’ve read about The Wind Rises because I haven’t seen the film. It doesn’t open here until Feb. 28, two days before the Oscar show. Miyazaki won the writing award Annie from IAFS (though he wasn’t there to collect it) which is why this film could rain on Frozen‘s parade.
(One of three lifetime achievement awards IAFS handed out this year went to Katsuhiro Otumo, who directed Akira, the film that kickstarted (to coin a phrase) the anime boom in the United States. His films are what we think of when we say “Japanese anime” [see Steamboy and Metropolis, where he was the screenwriter], This year, Possessions, one of the four films in Short Peace, an anthology of Japanese short films Otumo helped produce, received an Oscar nomination for animated short film. Otomo’s contribution, Combustible, was shortlisted but not nominated.)
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The Croods (Dreamworks Animation) makes no attempt to copy a Disney princess. The teen-aged Eeep isn’t a tiny-waisted, perfectly coiffured, shy and delicate thing, she’s a rough-and-tumble stone-age girl with a yen for adventure. She’s stocky, has a low forehead, freckles and a wide face. She’s engaging, though, showing that with little effort, not all women have to look like models to succeed. The design of the characters won an Annie, which was a nice recognition for this film.
The story essentially is about the clash of Neanderthals and more “modern” humans, such as the Cro-Magnons. This isn’t stated, but the brutish, timid nature of Eep’s family is contrasted against the new guy, Guy (clever, huh?), who has a forehead, narrower features and knows how to make shoes, build fires and can lead them to the Land That Won’t Blow Up. We get very little of Guy’s background, why he’s alone and where the rest of his tribe is. (There’d better be some others, otherwise Eep’s brother, Thunk, is left forever without a mate because the Croods seem to be the only survivors of their people. This certainly makes it easier [and less expensive] for the producers, but it does leave a lot of holes in the story that viewers might ask themselves at the end.)
The best word I can find for The Croods as a film is amiable. It doesn’t break new ground, the characters for the most part are enjoyable to watch and the story of a family trying to cope with huge changes in environment, immigration and acceptance of outsiders. Sometimes the slapstick gets a little much, but it stays on track for the most part. There are several entertaining moments, such as the one spoiled by the trailer when Eep gets her first pair of shoes. That moment is funny, but it comes in a larger scene where it turns out that in order to make it to the new land, the family, which to this point didn’t worry about their feet much, finds that protecting them suddenly is a matter of survival.
At the end, though, The Croods does what Disney films do all the time and that is shy away from the sad ending. This might be because of some execs and staffers once worked for Disney, but also keep in the mind Steven Spielberg is a partner in Dreamworks and Spielberg has an aversion to sad endings. In The Croods, the father, Grug, who has evolved from a man who protects his family from any kind of change to a man who reluctantly accepts it and then does whatever he can to ensure the family’s survival, is facing death by volcano. We get a few minutes of the family grieving, but then father appears almost miraculously unhurt. It undermines the story, because the last scenes are of the family gamboling in their new home, with the unanswered question are they the only humans on the planet? And from this bunch the rest us evolved?
Oh, the humanity.
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Despicable Me 2 (Illumination/Universal) is about change, too, with the continuation of the development of Gru from evil villain to loving father. In the first Despicable Me, because he was pretty well into his life of villainy, it was an easy arc to follow as he fell in love with the three orphan girls he’d originally adopted as part of an evil plot and his willingness to throw it all over for their sake. Now that that’s been established, any follow-up is going to lose that edge.
So it is with DM2. Gru seems to be happy with his lot as a dad, taking good care of his charges. Having him fall back to his evil ways and ignoring the girls is right out as a plot line, so something else has to explain why he would get back into the game. So we have him being recruited against his will by the Anti-Villain League or something to help thwart the nefarious plans of some other bad guy (who, it turns out, also is a father but what the relationship with his son is and what happens to him at the end isn’t really explored except for a gratuitous scene to make him hateful).
This means most of the film is taken up with Gru as Dad. Gru must go underground, but here “underground” is a shopping mall, giving an excuse to include the girls. And have one fall for a boy, giving Gru’s father-instincts something to work against.
The film is given over to Gru’s new life, sometimes too much so. Yes, the girls do have a father now, but they also need a mother. So a new character whose only purpose is to eventually become that mother is introduced. Fortunately, Lucy Wilde is a fairly eclectic figure, confident, competent and ditzy all at the same time. This appeal prevents her from becoming just a one-note character. And, of course, the girls fall in love with her and she with them, so there will be no evil-stepmother stuff here.
And, of course, there are the minions. What a marketing masterstroke! Disney must be jealous. Little fuzzy creatures with their own language whose main job seems to be just being utterly silly. In DM1, they were assistants in the evil plots; in DM2, they’re assistants in cleaning house, watching the kids and producing the inedible jelly that Gru chose as his means to become a legitimate businessman. But the bad guy comes up with a way to turn the cute yellow guys into awful purple evil minions who can chomp on anything (and who must have super-duper digestive systems). But Dr. Nefario, who had left Gru’s employ over the bad guy-good guy thing, saves the day when he realizes what the jelly really can do.
DM2 is pleasant enough; no real challenges here. It has excellent visuals, especially when thousands of purple minions are climbing the building trying to get Gru. And there are some genuinely funny moments and lines in here, showing that writers, animators and other creators aren’t just phoning it in despite this being a sequel. Among the many pieces of old songs you’ll hear are original works by Pharrell Williams, who adds a distinctly different flavor to the usual animated soundtrack. Disney could take a lesson here.
A pleasant enough film, but does it have a chance to beat Frozen or The Wind Rises? No. If it does, though, like The Croods, it’ll be one of those big upsets a lot of people like to see in the Oscar races.
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The fifth nominee is Ernest & Celestine (GKIDS), which I haven’t seen. It’s available only on Region 2 DVD (which is pretty much everywhere else but the United States), though Amazon says the Region 1 DVD will be released in June. UPDATE 23 Feb.: The film opens March 14 in New York and Los Angeles (that coastal thing again) then expand to the rest of the country with an English-language soundtrack.
The film looks like a traditional hand-drawn animated film, but these days, it’s hard to tell. The story is about the relationship between a bear and a mouse in a world where bears live on the surface and mice in the underground tunnels and both hate each other. It looks good and it’s been getting high praise from the film festivals it has played in.
If it doesn’t win, and it’s unlikely to, the nomination at least brings attention to it, the same way it did for The Triplets of Belleville (2003) and The Secret of Kells (2008). Both certainly differ from the American style of animated films, but both are outstanding examples of animation possibilities. (But they were foreign, you see, and Americans generally don’t like foreign films, and so they would have been overlooked without the nominations.) The producers of Ernest & Celestine are the same ones who produced both of those films, so we can probably surmise that the quality of the film will be good.
And who knows? Lightning might strike. And it wouldn’t upset me that much, either.
The summer the buildings fell, the cities crumbled and civilization turned to dust
In the last four weeks, I watched as city after city was destroyed, buildings collapsing like Lego blocks at a day-care center. Nations collapsed, infrastructure wiped out, millions of people killed, millions more injured, probably billions more left starving and homeless.
“Probably” because we don’t know for sure; the human toll isn’t mentioned much. Not a big concern, evidently.
The damage is horrendous, spectacular, awesome; damage that just boggles the mind. Is there anything left? Well, the planet itself is sitting there just waiting to be smushed like an overripe plum. That will happen soon, no doubt about it.
I’m not fooling anybody, right? Y’all know I’m talking about movies. Particularly the four “tentpole” movies this summer. They all have one thing in common: utter destruction. The people who made these are gleefully destroying cities — mostly American, but a few foreign metropolises (metropili?) tossed in, too for good measure. Is there a message here? Are they saying that American, Western, civilization is doomed, and we’d better be prepared for the apocalypse that will either rain from the skies, roar out of the oceans or start with the bite of an infected neighbor?
Or are these guys just having fun?
Guys, yeah; the four directors — J.J. Abrams, Star Trek: Into Darkness; Zack Snyder, Man Of Steel; Guillermo del Toro, Pacific Rim; Marc Forster, World War Z — are all guys, and so are the screenwriters. Little boys playing with their toys, toys that cost millions to use. Where before the destruction of Tokyo once could have been done by dressing a guy in a rubber suit and having him stomp around on a cheap model of the city, now the work is done on computers (with an occasional miniature or large model thrown in). But the cost is on the scale of the virtual destruction: horrendous and spectacular. Meaning we consumers better march in droves down the box office and show our support for these magic-makers. (Heh, good luck with that, Lone Ranger.)
You wouldn’t think — at least I wouldn’t; maybe I’m just a drudge — to see this kind of thing in Star Trek. As one character in Start Trek: Into Darkness points out, the Enterprise was built for exploration, not war. Same with the Star Trek franchise. Alas, everything is dark, nowdays: Batman, Superman, Sherlock Holmes, Alice in once-but-no-more Wonderland. Now that the ST series has turned into action movies of mostly bad-guy-seeks-revenge-against-James Kirk and/or Mr. Spock (even at the cost of his own planet), exploration has been pushed to the back burner. So, where to go for a nasty villain? Why Khan, of course. (And no, Bandersnatch Cumberbund Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t Khan. Only the Shakespeare & Melville-quoting Ricardo Montalban has the proper [if over the top] gravitas.) And what does the remade Khan in the remade Star Trek do? Drop a starship on San Francisco. The apocalypse from an avenging angel.
Let’s pause for a moment among the carnage to ponder a few questions STID poses for us. How could a renegade admiral build a giant super-starship off Saturn (or Jupiter, I forget which) without anyone noticing either A, a giant starship hangar hanging around the solar system; or B, the drain on Starfleet resources in building said super-starship? How could Mr. Scott could approach said giant super-starship-construction complex in a shuttle without being detected? And how he was able to integrate into the crew without being unmasked? And most important, where the hell did Bones McCoy get that tribble?
Ahem, sorry. The producers, director and writers don’t want us to concern ourselves over such tribbles–uh, quibbles, instead just look in awe at that epic Vulcan-to-uberman fight on top of a speeding shuttle (or whatever it was) between the re-booted Spock and the ersatz Khan. Cool, huh? (No.)
Kirk does suggest, at the end of the movie, that the Enterprise will be going ahead with its 5-year mission to explore strange new things, etc., etc. Better get going, boys, ’cause I have a feeling your mission will be side-tracked by another crazy person ready to take out whole planets — maybe even a solar system or two — gunning for Kirk or Spock or Kirk and Spock.
I suppose someone will eventually ask who’d win a man-to-man fight: Khan or Superman. The answer has no meaning, of course, but corporations are building whole franchises on such ponderings. Take Superman, for example. Here, yet again, is another rewrite of his myth. (Boy, did Siegel and Shuster hit a nerve or what?). Only this time he’s more conflicted, darker, not so goody-goody anymore. Yes, that’s what we need in this world, a darker, moodier, conflicted superman.
Man of Steel (notice the clever way they never mention the name “Superman,” knowing we’ll all be fooled) spends a lot of time on Krypton, Kal-El’s birth planet. It’s an ugly world, with genetically engineered people doing only what they’re programmed to do. Kal-El is different, of course; the movie starts with his mom, Lara Lor-Van, Mrs. Jor-El giving birth to him the natural way. And that’s pretty much it for her. Thanks, Mom, for the birth scene, and a little bit of sad mom-love as Dad prepares to send the tyke off to Earth, now go die in a fireball. Dad, of course, will pop up now and then in virtual form to give his son advice.
Clark Kent (as he is known on Earth) does get to explore a bit more into what it would be like to grow up knowing he’s practically a god. He tries to fit in, but he looks like a nerd, so he’s treated like one (of course; he wouldn’t be heroic if he were, say, the quarterback on the football team). Don’t give in to your anger, (huh ‑ I swear I’ve heard that somewhere else), says adoptive Dad even as young Clark puts a dent into an iron fence post. Turning bullies into red mush would not be polite, you see.
As a young man Clark goes out in the world to find himself. The film switches to an episode of The Deadliest Catch as he’s confronted with a choice of exposing himself (with flames, no less) or letting men die on a collapsing oil rig. Everywhere he goes he’s faced with the same sort of dilemma and word starts getting around. An enterprising reporter named — oh, come on; who do you think? — starts tracking him down, threatening to expose him even more. The theme of taking odd jobs between his farm days and his super days was explored in It’s Superman! by Tom De Haven (2005). De Haven’s wandering Man of Steel does a stint as a Hollywood stunt man, which makes so much freaking sense you wonder why they left it out of this movie. Well, because then they’d have to pay De Haven royalties, wouldn’t they? He doesn’t get any credits in this movie, but I believe his mark is there.
General Zod, the bad guy here, is the apocalypse personified. He and his prison-busting Kryptonite cohorts plan to remake the Earth into a new Krypton. That it means the death of every human is no matter. Humans are soft, weak creatures. Time to replace them with strong, disciplined beings a step up on the evolutionary chain. Despite the best efforts of the American military, only Superman can stop them. If he’d just get over his angst and stand up like a man.
A big stickler in any Superman movie is his costume. It’s easy to portray it in comics; a few brush strokes can cover up the weird parts. Man of Steel gives him one that looks like the rubber mats you put on the floor; it must’ve been hot as heck for the actor. (And he wears his undershorts inside for the first time in Superman history.) But the movie also makes a point about the downside of capes when Zod grabs it, spins Superman around and around before letting go and sending the Man of Steel smashing through several buildings.
Now let’s talk about this smashing buildings stuff. By the end of Man of Steel, I was exhausted just watching the destruction of the city and watching building after building fall. Even the Daily Planet building is destroyed. In all this carnage, you have to ask, what happened to all the people? The buildings are empty as the combatants tear through them, the falling buildings land on streets devoid of bodies and no one inside is screaming as the structure comes apart around them. Only one person is trapped in rubble, but she’s part of the cast, so she’s rescued. If 9/11/01 taught us anything, it’s that collapsing buildings cause a lot of casualties. At the end of the movie, the Daily Planet staff is back in its newsroom as if nothing had happened. Amazing how these cities get rebuilt so fast.
OK, OK, it’s a comic-book movie. But sometimes when you ignore reality, when you ignore all of the consequences of what you have happen even in your fictional story, it all becomes just background noise. Not worth watching, not worth reading.
(Addendum, July 23: Buzzfeed.com had someone calculate the casualties and property damage. The result, as I expected, is horrendous.)
Coastal cities around the world are being ravaged by monsters from the sea. By now, we’re pretty sure the seas aren’t teeming with giant lizards or dinosaurs, radioactive or not, so where can they be coming from? Why, a portal in the bottom of the ocean. This means they’re aliens despite the attempt to put a home-grown spin on them. They come stomping out of the ocean like they did in the old Japanese monster flicks. And, as we all know, the standard military response just isn’t enough. Something else is needed. Something better, bigger, more powerful, more awesome. What can save us?
Giant robots. Yeah, that’s the trick.
That’s Pacific Rim in a nutshell. Oh, there are the stories of the pilots of the giant walking war machines, and stories about the people who design and maintain the robots (which in this case should be called “waldoes,” right, Robert Heinlein?), stories about the scientists trying to figure out what is going on, stories about idiot politicians who decide that giant walls are enough to hold back the horde. (“Hello? China here. Bad idea. Is anyone listening?”) But the main thing is the robot-versus-monster fights. Epic fights. Yes, cities are destroyed, but with such style, such panache. I mean, come on, when a giant robot picks up a cargo ship and uses it as a club, you’ve just got to sit back and let it roll over you.
There is a plot here. It’s the apocalypse, after all, and we need to keep that in mind. The monsters had come before, you see, but the atmosphere was not to their liking. So they waited as we humans pumped carbon dioxide and all sorts of other nasty things into the atmosphere. Now they’ve come to stay. Western culture to blame, right, so we’ll just stomp it into powder. But the nations of Earth cannot stand idly by and watch the destruction (though in real life several would like to see the United States get its ass kicked), so they band together to fight the invaders. A bit of fantasy there, eh? We can’t even agree to band together to cut carbon emissions.
But, just to be a stuck-in-the-mud, how many people are killed by these battles? We see people taking shelter (not always the safest place), but even so, it has to be at least in the thousands in each battle, but like STID and Man of Steel before it, the figures are just glossed over. Also, filmmakers still under-estimate both the power of nuclear-weapons blasts and the after-effects. Nice visuals, but remember how Indiana Jones survived a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator? That’s the level of physics we’re at here.
Pacific Rim does get one thing right: if there is profit in monster bones, parts or poop, someone will cash in. Greed — there’s your unifying force of humanity.
I don’t like zombies, movies about zombies, TV shows about zombies, comic books about zombies. I do not like zombies period. So I thought I could go without seeing World War Z because it is a zombie movie. However, a colleague urged me to see it, so I said, “all right,” girded my loins and went. I can’t say the surprise was pleasant — not for this movie — but more, say, intriguing.
Oddly, this film is the most human of the four. (But make no mistake — it is the most brutal of the bunch.) The central character doesn’t have super-powers, nor does he have access to super-powered technology. Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is a normal man with normal powers (despite the odd haircut). He’s just a guy trying to save his family.
The film does suffer from what I call the Only One Man Syndrome: only one man in the entire world can see the solution to the problem, only one man in the entire world can save humanity despite medical, scientific and research teams all over the world trying desperately to find the solution. Nope, all the scientific teamwork in the world is no match for this one man’s intellect.
That aside, the movie starts off innocently enough, a family headed to their respective destinations only to get stuck in traffic. Things slowly fall apart as the virus spreads and Lane finds himself in a desperate situation trying to save his family from people going berserk. Unlike the standard zombie film, though, the victims don’t just shamble around muttering “Brains, brains,” they hurl themselves at the uninfected, bite them, and move on. Lane times it and discovers it takes about 12 seconds for the infection to take over the human body. He works for the U.N. (the U.N. was in Pacific Rim, too; are Hollywood movie-makers trying to tell us something?), and his expertise is needed to lead a team in the search for a cure. He starts out with an expert in viruses and a squad of SEALS, but quickly he’s the only one left (see? the Only One Man Syndrome at work). He does save an Israeli soldier from the plague so she joins him.
A rogue CIA agent (are there any other kind?) tells him the Israeli saw it coming and quickly built walls to seal the plague-carriers out. Walls again. In Pacific Rim, they were ineffective from the get go; in WWZ, they’re more effective … for a while. They have as much success at keeping the zombie plague out as did the high walls around castles in Medieval Europe had in keeping the Black Plague out. Well, who in Israel could foresee zombies piling up their own bodies until they top the walls? There’s another message from your movie-makers: Walls might make good neighbors but are porous to weapons of the apocalypse.
Zombies don’t make physical sense, but they sure are popular. They can be seen as undead beings just wanting to eat like everyone else, or they can play the role of metaphor. What scares you the most? What’s happening in the world that makes you so damn sure the real apocalypse is coming? Pick your plague: zombies = plague-infected people, zombies = gay people, zombies = atheists, zombies = fundamentalists, zombies = immigrants; zombies = liberals, zombies = conservatives, zombies = teen-agers, zombies = adults, zombies = poor people, zombies = old people, zombies = people of color, zombies = white people … the list goes on and on. So when we see zombies stack themselves against a wall and go over the top to infect the “pure” people within, that’s the apocalypse. And it’s what makes them so popular.
So, there’s your message of the four films: be prepared for the apocalypse. It’s a popular subject these days; it seems everyone’s convinced it’s around the corner. More apocalyptic films are in the pipeline, several have come and gone already. So is Hollywood telling us Western civilization is doomed? The amount of destruction in the films seems to say yes. On the other hand, maybe it’s just some people having fun pretending to destroy everything.
But I’ll tell you, it sure gets wearisome.
Terry England 