Ad Astra - Apocalypse Now in Space

 

When Ad Astra came out years ago, I was dismissive. I remember liking the moon sequence, but being underwhelmed aside from that. I don’t know what the fuck was wrong with me. Randomly rewatching it a few weeks ago, I was blown away by it. The fact that it was basically James Gray’s version of Apocalypse Now in space finally clicked with me (Apocalypse Now is one of my favorite films of all time). That alone made me want to write about this movie, even though the film wasn’t exactly relevant. Until recently. First, Robert Duvall passed away, which adds to Apocalypse Now comparison. And when Gray was at Cannes this year, he brought up that he would love to make a director’s cut of Ad Astra, which would be twelve minutes shorter and a very different movie. So after watching the film five times (one of which with the director’s commentary), I felt it was time to write about my latest cinematic obsession.

Apocalypse Now…in Space!

Ad Astra owes a lot to Apocalypse Now, which James Gray admits to in his commentary (more on that commentary later), though he speaks just as much about the source novel for that film, Heart of Darkness. The comparison is easy enough if you’ve seen both films. A soldier is sent on a secret mission to take out a commanding officer who went too far, literally and figuratively, and has lost control. In Apocalypse, the setting is Vietnam, with Col. Kurtz deep in the jungle, acting like a mad king. The soldier, Captain Willard, is on a purely military mission, though his own journey to Kurtz makes him question everything. 

Ad Astra is a much more personal story with astronaut Roy McBride on a mission to stop his father, Cliff McBride, whose brutal attempts to keep his own mission alive have caused dangerous power surges that are wreaking havoc on the entire universe. Unlike in Apocalypse, Roy is ordered to stand down early on due to the personal nature of it all. But Roy defies orders and makes his way to his father. 

This is the biggest difference. Both films delve into what the mission is doing to the protagonist, but Apocalypse Now is much more existential and more concerned with pointing out the absurdity and insanity of war, especially the Vietnam War. Ad Astra isn’t too interested in making statements about space travel in general aside from some commentary about attempting to make the moon just like Earth, which is missing the point of space exploration. Instead, it’s much more about the inner turmoil of Roy. His missing father has dominated his life, resulting in a failed relationship and a constant numbness that makes him oddly suitable for life in space. 

Willard is a man so conditioned by war that it’s become the only thing he can relate to, and Roy has become conditioned by space travel in much the same way.

By the end of Apocalypse Now, Willard seems like a shell of a man. The war and mission has gutted him, but at least he survives. It’s fairly nihilistic. Ad Astra, on the other hand, shows that Roy has had a breakthrough in the end. He is able to rebuild his relationship now that he’s confronted his father. The numbness is gone, and he can finally live a life that is truly his own. It’s a surprising and refreshingly uplifting ending. 

Beyond that admittedly important difference, there are a lot of one to one comparisons between the two films. There’s the basic man on a mission to stop a lone madman, but the debriefing scene is similar, as well, with multiple people being very vague with Roy as they talk about the mission. I think of John Ortiz as the Jerry Zeismer of Ad Astra. (I’ll include a picture below to explain that idiotically specific comparison.) Ortiz talks more than Jerry, but he still exudes the same oddly congenial tone while discussing secretive shit and a mission that ultimately ends with Roy’s father being killed.

Roy’s trip to the moon covers two segments of Apocalypse: the USO show and the attack on the village. When Roy first gets to the moon, we see the Americanification of it with plenty of vendors (there’s even an Applebee’s!) and kids taking pictures with people in alien costumes all while the moon is essentially a warzone. It’s this insane element of “normal” life in an abnormal world. The “Ride of the Valkyries” moment isn’t so much an exact comparison aside from both being the heaviest action set pieces of both films. Though both moments solely exist because the main character is hitching a ride with them. And both moments are arguably the most memorable sequences in both films.

The sequence with the animal research ship is the dead giveaway that this is a version of Apocalypse. It covers multiple comparison points. The crazed primate is the tiger from Apocalypse. Both moments accentuate the truth of “Never get off the boat.” The other moment it mimics is the stopping of the fishing boat. In both moments, the protagonist argues with the captain of the ship to not stop, but gives in. The dark moment when Willard kills the wounded fishermen is also covered with Roy trying to patch up the clearly dead captain with duct tape (“We’d cut ‘em in half with a machine gun and give ‘em a band-aid.”). Although Roy is much more compassionate in this regard than Willard.

The Mars segment is similar to the bridge in Apocalypse Now in that both sequences feel the most, well, apocalyptic. There’s the strange coloring of Mars and the bunker aesthetics of it all, and the continuing surges have everyone feeling a bit crazed.

And finally there’s the Kurtz / Tommy Lee Jones parallels. Both have gone too far, literally and figuratively. Jones is alone, having killed every crew member who eventually wanted to abandon their hopeless mission of finding intelligent human life. He was the only one willing to give up his life on Earth in this pursuit. Kurtz also gave up on everything to create his small kingdom, and he killed anyone who challenged him (“You’re lookin’ at the heads.”). Both men also accepted, and even asked for their deaths. By encountering the soldier tasked with killing them, Kurtz and Jones both have a realization that the only thing that will stop them is death. Once again, Jones’s death is a kind of wake up call for Roy, freeing him from this life. Kurtz’s death frees Willard literally, but there isn’t much hope with his end.

Aside from the specific plot points, there are plenty of other similar aspects. The narration is the big one, though I find the Ad Astra narration largely unnecessary. A lot of it is just stating stuff the film has already conveyed. Not to mention, the Donald Sutherland character allows for Roy to get a lot of his thoughts out there, negating the need for voice-over, at least for that segment. The narration in Apocalypse is vital and often entertaining, by comparison. 

Both protagonists are death-bringers. Lance technically survives in Apocalypse, but that dude is never going to be the same. And Roy gets everyone killed everywhere he goes. The Cepheus crew seem to be nearly suicidal when they attack him. It’s just another aspect to amp up how lonely these characters are.

Most importantly, both movies are beautiful, thought-provoking, and entertaining. It took me a while, but I finally realized how great Ad Astra is, and I now consider it a worthy companion to Apocalypse Now.

The Lack of Duvall

One glaring omission from this comparison is Robert Duvall’s Kilgore. There isn’t a similar character in Ad Astra, and that’s for the best. Duvall shows up and takes over that film for twenty minutes. He’s an example of a type of soldier in that war. A force of nature that the war can’t touch. He’s annoying, hilarious, and somehow still likeable despite his invincible status and love of war. 

There’s simply no way to recapture such a character and performance in any film. And with Ad Astra, such a character would derail the film rather than add to it. Willard is the main character of Apocalypse, but that movie is just as interested in the absurdity of war as it is with his inner turmoil. Ad Astra is all about Roy’s journey, and any side quest with a crazy space man would feel out of place.

And Duvall has no equal, so why bother?

Director’s Cut?

James Gray has spoken about this multiple times, but I’m starting to cool on this prospect. At first, I liked the idea of him doing a director’s cut because it could mean that the narration would be cut back or excised entirely, which I might like. But after listening to his commentary and seeing some behind-the-scenes stuff, I’m not sure what the changes would be.

I still want him to make his cut of the film, especially since its creation doesn’t negate the theatrical cut that I already love. I’m not sure what happened with the film being “taken away” from Gray, but he was involved with the blu-ray special features, so I’m not sure how true that is. I guess his commentary and everything is just him playing ball? So I’m not sure how much stock I can put into anything he said on that. I am interested in his claim that he would make a shorter movie, especially since Ad Astra isn’t that long, especially by space epic standards. Anyway, I checked out all the blu-ray shit, so I’m still going to write a little bit about it.

In the commentary, Gray claims the narration is “essential,” and that he was part of the decision to add it. He also claims plenty of people worked on it, including Charlie Kaufman. The treatment of the narration, and whether it would survive at all, is the most interesting part of the prospect of a director’s cut for me. He also talks about how any movie is like a wild horse that eventually gets away from you, so maybe that’s his diplomatic way of saying the studio took the film away from him in editing.

The deleted scenes don’t offer much. One features a brief flash forward with Pitt and Liv Tyler with a young child. That’s not ground-breaking, since the ending implies they get back together already. 

In one of the behind-the-scenes featurettes, it looks like Gray filmed a rave scene on Mars with people half-naked and whatnot. Maybe Gray shouldn’t get a shot at that director’s cut.

Seriously, though, the possibility of a director’s cut is the final comparison to Apocalypse Now, which has three total cuts. I usually prefer director’s cuts, but I’ve always been a much bigger fan of the theatrical cut of Apocalypse Now, and I think that would end up being the case with Ad Astra, as well. Especially if Gray wants to include a half hour scene with Pitt hanging out at a French space station having dinner and discussing politics. 

Echoes in Eternity, Part I - "Troy"

SPOILERS ahead.

Three podcasts dictate a lot of my viewing habits these days: How Did This Get Made?, The Rewatchables, and Knowing You Know Nothing. Typically, I tend to only write about movies I watch for Knowing because I actually take part in the episode. But if a movie I watch for the other two inspires something, I go with it. In this case, The Rewatchables did an episode of Gladiator, so I decided to rewatch that and write about it. It also made me want to watch other epic films I owned, especially when I thought of a unifying theme among them. In Gladiator, Maximus tells his men before battle, “What we do in life, echoes in eternity.” This line reminded me of themes in Troy and Alexander, as well. I’ve watched all three recently, and I decided to write about them in chronological order (by their setting, not by their release date). The main reason for this is that each film after Troy makes reference to myths and being remembered and whatnot (especially Alexander). There’s also the rabbit hole of director’s and extended cuts I get to go down, too. So with that written, here’s the beginning of the “Echoes in Eternity” Trilogy.

Echoes in Eternity, Part I

Troy is based on a myth (there is debate about whether or not a war really happened, but even if it did, Homer likely dramatized the hell out of it), so it’s ripe with speeches and comments about being remembered and living a life of glory. In fact, one could argue that the film hits you over the head with the theme a few too many times. But myths tend to be simplistic, so I forgive Troy. 

The focus of the film is on Achilles, who is pretty much a dick for the first two-thirds of the film. He only wants to fight in the war so he will be remembered as a great warrior and hero. He’s told early on by his mother that he can go and fight and live on as a legend, or he can stay home and make a life for himself but only his family will remember him. Obviously he chooses glory on the battlefield. I’ll get more into the glory vs. family argument in the next section. For now, I want to focus on this idea of having to fight to be remembered.

While looting and whatnot is shown as a motivation for the soldiers in Troy, they are mainly sold on the idea of fighting as a way to earn glory and have their name live on beyond death. Achilles yells before a battle, “Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!” But Achilles is already famous. His name will achieve immortality, but most of his fellow soldiers will be forgotten; they fight for the chance that their names will be remembered.

Not to go off on too much of a tangent here, but it’s kind of a metaphor for capitalism. Here’s a system that can potentially allow you to become insanely wealthy, but odds are you’ll scrape by and eventually die unnoticed. But we all keep grasping for that slight chance. 

Troy posits that even just trying at least means something. When a boy tells Achilles that he “wouldn’t want to fight” Boagrius, Achilles responds, “That is why no one will remember your name.” The dickishness of that statement aside, it says a lot about the mentality towards war in the film. It’s not about fighting for a noble cause or even fighting for a country; it’s about being willing to fight. It’s a timeless motivation that stands to this day. Look at most ads for military service, and you’ll find a message along the lines of, “Very few are willing or able to take on this challenge.” It’s a great motivator, and I find it to be true. What they don’t do is promise you the chance to become an immortal hero known forever. That bit about being a soldier seems to have been left behind once, you know, following orders became the most important part of the training.

Perhaps immortality is lacking in recruitment ads, but it’s still a part of the soldier experience. With Memorial Day fresh on my mind coupled with Veterans Day, there are yearly holidays meant to honor those who have fought and/or died. The difference is that individual notice is left to the family of the service member. In a way, both family and glory are covered in modern times. As a soldier who fought and/or died, you are commemorated as a whole by the country at large, but it’s your family that remembers your name and story. This seems like a much better way to look at military service, especially since military service is typically entered by people who want to do their part, not by people just wanting recognition. Of course, Achilles would disagree with this (at least the Achilles from the beginning of the movie), although Hector would embrace this.

Family vs. Glory 

Hector is really the hero of Troy, even if more time is spent with Achilles. He fights for his homeland, not for glory. He has a family he wants to protect, and war is thrust upon him rather than sought out. He is living proof that you don’t have to choose between a family life or glory; both are possible, even if most films argue against it.

This made me think of a recent film I wrote about: The Truman Show. In that film, the possibility of Truman having a child with his fake wife seems like the potential nail in his coffin. If he has a kid, then no way will he ever escape the prison of the show and be allowed to live a real life. In film, and often in life, starting a family is seen as the death of any individual goals for the parents, and that’s truly unfortunate. 

Yes, having kids changes things, and if you have normal human emotions, your family becomes more important than yourself. But this does not mean that individual growth and achievement die. As a parent, my family is my main concern, but I still find time to write and learn new things. I’m not trying to be remembered for all time or anything, but I’ve put out enough material that people will likely still stumble across my articles after I’m dead. It’s not Achilles-level fame, but I have produced work that will survive me. But I don’t care; this is something I do for fun. If I was single and childless, nothing would be different in regards to my film writing. So why do movies like this make it seem like a family will hold a person back?

Achilles is told by his mother that a family will bring him happiness, but once a couple generations are gone, his memory will die, too. He must choose to go to war and be remembered or have a family and be forgotten. But why? For mythical reasons, I get it, but why is it not possible for Achilles to simply have a family that he can return to after war? Odysseus has this, so why can’t Achilles?

For the purposes of the film, it’s for character development. Achilles finally learns that a family that cares for you is more important than fame after death. Tragically, he realizes this too late. It takes Achilles’s interactions with Hector, then Priam, to understand that a life with Briseis will bring him happiness. But deciding to be with her is what leads to his death. Choosing to have a family gets him killed. Why? The myth and the film make it seem like only lonely, dead people are remembered for the ages. It’s bleak, but perhaps it’s a good lesson for people to learn: if your sole focus is your lasting name, then prepare for death and misery. For Achilles, he simply realized his error too late. His name is remembered, but as Hector might ask, so what?

Hector tells Achilles when they first meet that eventually they’ll all be dust, so what’s the point of fighting for the glory of it? This is a common theme regarding people who strive to make a lasting impact on this world (“Ozymandias” comes to mind). Try as hard as you like, but eventually all will be forgotten. I wish this film took that a bit further because, some day, it’s possible that everything will be forgotten. I don’t bring this up to bum people out. I see this as even more reason to enjoy those around you. Who gives a fuck if they tell stories about you for a couple thousand years? Will knowing that you’ll be remembered by strangers long after your death fill the void that you’re missing by being alone?

Striving to be remembered by people I will never meet seems so stupid to me. Perhaps this is why no one in the future will remember my name, but at least the people I love know it now.

Troy, the Director's Cut: Now with Baby-Throwing!

Due to the amount of money movies like this cost, creative control is usually taken away from the director in the interest of getting a short, action-packed, PG-13 rated film into the theaters as fast as possible. If a director is lucky, they’ll be given the chance to finish the movie later for a home video release. The best example of this is Kingdom of Heaven, the director’s cut of which is a wholly different, and exponentially better film. Now it’s almost a requirement that a movie like Troy receives the extended or director’s cut treatment. 

There isn’t a Kingdom-level change to Troy with Wolfgang Peterson’s director’s cut, but it is a much better movie. It’s longer, which allows the war to sink in with the audience and characters, but more importantly, it’s much more brutal than the theatrical cut.

Normally, I just like gory action movies more than bloodless ones. I want a bit of realism with the action, but it’s more than just adding “Oh, shit!” moments like legs being hacked or heads being smashed. It’s about war being presented in a miserable light. 

Hector talks to Paris about he knows nothing about war and death, and in the theatrical cut, the audience doesn’t either. With the director’s cut, we learn how horrific war can be. The action scenes are visceral and stay with you much longer than before. And one new element is deeply disturbing.

If you didn’t hate most of the Greeks already, the sack of Troy should push you over the edge in this new cut. It’s bad enough to see defenseless people of all kinds killed, but rarely does a film show what happens to babies during such a situation. There are multiple babies ripped from their mother’s arms and thrown. It’s shocking to see. It’s rare for a war movie to have much of an effect on me these days, but Troy did. These newly brutal scenes make Hector’s dialogue mean something this time around. Not only does Paris learn what Hector meant; the audience does, too, thanks to this director’s cut.

Why Do I Own This?

I bought this when it first came out because I was a fan of the theatrical cut. When I saw the director's cut as part of a 3-pack (along with 300 and the final cut of Alexander), I bought it again. I'm just a fan of epics.

Random Thoughts

“Boagrius!” 

I was in college when this came out, and my Humanities professor was against this movie for the Brad Pitt casting alone. He claimed that Pitt was way too small for the role. I don’t hold the source material so sacred, but I get it. It’s hard not to slightly hate Pitt for being so cocky in the movie. If he was a foot taller and bulked out (you know, like Boagrius), I would feel differently. Still, I’m okay with Pitt in this movie, but overall it’s not a fitting role for him. I found Eric Bana as Hector much more suitably cast.

Eric Bana’s reaction to Orlando Bloom claiming he’ll die fighting is fucking perfect. I can best describe it as incredulous disgust.

It’s strange how much crossover there is with this cast and Braveheart (Brian Cox, James Cosmo, Brendan Gleeson). All these Scottish dudes suddenly became Greek and Trojan.

Orlando Bloom acting like a little tough guy is the funniest part of this movie. I wish Eric Bana would slap him around a bit and shut him up.

“Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!” I’ve never liked Pitt’s line delivery. I think it’s because he is just too laid back most of the time, both in real life and as a character. I can’t believe the dude who’s always snacking in Ocean’s 11 when he talks about gaining immortality through battle.

Pitt making Garrett Hedlund stay back with the boat is a bit of a metaphor for Hedlund’s career. It seemed like he was meant to be the next Pitt at some point in his career, then...it just didn’t happen. He never left the boat.

Ajax’s little announcement when he lands on the beach is a bit silly, but when you’re that badass with a warhammer, I guess you can say stupid shit sometimes.

Eudoros’s complete shock at Achilles’s defiling of the temple is a really great piece of silent acting. Pitt’s chest thumping followed by, “Huh?” as a taunt is a little less effective. 

I wish they would have made a version of The Odyssey with Sean Bean. Not sure how exactly it could be done in the same vein as this movie with how they portray the gods as invisible or nonexistent, but I would have liked to have seen what they came up with. 

Apparently the director’s cut is much more interested in nudity, as well. There are a lot more butts and boobs in this movie. The brutal war stuff is more effective, but the nudity helps, too.

"It is no insult to say a dead man is dead."

Agamemnon is definitely in the running for shittiest cinematic king. "I didn't touch the girl! But I did hand her off to a pack of horny, ill-tempered soldiers."

The odd thing about this movie is that I kind of hate everyone involved except for Eric Bana and Sean Bean. It's weird to watch a war movie told more from the perspective of a villain (the Greeks, and Achilles, at least until he grows a heart after talking to Priam) rather than the hero (Hector).

"I want to taste what Achilles tasted." Agamemnon really wants to be eskimo brothers with Achilles. Weird…

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"World War Z" - Zombie Movies in the Time of Coronavirus.

 SPOILERS ahead.

I’ve been using movies and writing about movies as a distraction during this pandemic, but my wife and I did decide to watch World War Z because of it. Most people went with Contagion or Outbreak for their pandemic-related stress watch, but we’re zombie people. As it turns out, World War Z is the perfect movie for this situation, as the zombie outbreak is viewed from a disease control point of view rather than just survival. That is what I liked about it the first time I saw it, and that is what I appreciated most about it during my pandemic rewatch. I love zombie movies, but I do find the acceptance of the outbreak to be a bit annoying at times. Even Romero’s films that did deal with studying the zombies (Day) or how they evolved (Land) were not concerned with how it started or how, or if, it could be cured. There’s nothing wrong with that, and Romero’s films are still my favorite, but it is refreshing to see a movie take the unsettlingly realistic approach that World War Z takes, even if it does deviate from its source material in major ways. For me and my wife personally, this rewatch also made us think about a much more terrifying aspect of a zombie outbreak: dealing with the situation with children.

Everything Changes When You Have Kids, Even How You React to Zombie Movies.

Becoming a parent has changed me in many ways, especially how I watch movies. For the most part, it just makes me cry during movies much more often. Watching a zombie movie is different, though. Of course the idea of trying to protect my children during a zombie apocalypse adds to the terror of the genre, but with World War Z it occurred to me that the true nightmare of it all would be forgetting to pack a blankie.

In World War Z, Brad Pitt and his family are stuck in traffic when the outbreak hits. On top of the general chaos of the situation, they can’t find their youngest daughter’s blankie, and they don’t have albuterol for their older daughter’s asthma. Now this is the kind of terrible shit I can identify with. 

Anyone with a child, but especially people with two or more, can identify with what an ordeal it is to simply leave the house. As parents of a baby and a toddler, there’s a fifty/fifty chance we will forget something when we leave home. The hope is that it’s something minor like an extra toy or a burp cloth and not something detrimental like formula or a beloved blanket. When Pitt’s daughter screamed for her blanket, my wife and I exchanged knowing glances: this would totally happen to us in this situation. I could picture my daughter screaming for a blanket as society crumbled around her with perfect clarity. What’s scarier is the fact that I know I would be much more concerned with finding her blanket than I would be with the collapse of civilization around me. Parenting really does a number on a person when it comes to concern for getting a child to shut up being more important than your overall compassion for your fellow man. 

Jokes aside, keeping your children not only alive but also calm would be a monumental task in such a situation. How could I possibly keep my three-year-old daughter calm in this scenario? Even once we got out of the city and things were half-assed calm, we would still have to deal with the barrage of inevitable and unanswerable questions. “Why that man bite that lady? Daddy why you run over that woman? Are monsters gonna eat us? Where their mommies and daddies? Where’s Nana and Pop Pop?” Not to mention dealing the typical declarations of, “I scared” and “I hungry.” 

Tough questions would be one thing, medicine would be another. Thankfully, my children don’t require any daily meds, but it is pretty common for them to need a prescription or an over the counter medicine. Usually, we have plenty on hand, so that doesn’t concern me too much. But one element of World War Z creeped us out: albuterol. Pitt and family have to stop at a store that is being looted to look for albuterol for their asthmatic daughter. When we watched this movie, the pandemic panic had just begun, so empty store shelves were certainly on our mind. But what was truly eerie is that I had to go out and get a prescription for albuterol that same day.

At the mention of albuterol I had a premonition. If a zombie outbreak ever occurred, it wouldn’t be the zombies that got me. I would probably get gunned down by a looter at CVS. With my dying breath, I would try to tell the looter, “I just wanted albuterol. You can have all the fun and addictive stuff. Why the fuck isn’t this stuff over the counter, anyway? (Death rattle.)”

The Best and the Worst Time to Watch This Movie.

Most of us are trying to watch things to distract us from the current situation, which explains the popularity of shows like Love Is Blind and Tiger King at the moment. But there’s also a desire to watch movies and shows that mirror the current situation. I can’t speak to anyone else’s reason for watching such material, but for me it’s twofold. First, I want to see how accurate the film is at predicting the world’s reaction. Second, I want to be able to say, “Hey, at least it’s not as bad as this...yet.” 

As for the accuracy of World War Z, it feels very realistic, mainly because both the zombie outbreak of the film and the coronavirus of our unfortunate reality strike relatively quickly. On top of that, both viruses are new enough that doctors still need to study them to find a cure or treatment. Much like Brad Pitt, we’re learning about this thing as it happens.

World War Z takes its title literally when it comes to learning about the virus. Pitt travels the globe trying to track down the source and learn how other countries are handling the outbreak. Just like the real virus, the origins are Asian, but aside from that hard facts about it are hard to come by. Stories and rumors are aplenty while hard facts take much longer to prove. In the film, it’s revealed that North Korea is surviving it because the teeth of the entire population were removed, giving them no way to transmit the virus. Whether or not this is true is never proven, but it’s similar to conspiracy theories people have about information from countries like North Korea regarding the coronavirus, with many people claiming that, at best, they aren’t reporting true numbers in their country and, at worst, they’re just killing everyone with symptoms. 

Pitt ends up in Israel for a bit because they seem to have been more prepared than most. This is similar to us looking to other countries with smaller outbreaks and asking, “What are they doing that we’re not?” And Israel’s quick building of a massive wall immediately reminded me of the image of countless machines in China hastily building virus hospitals in a matter of days. 

It’s revealed that walls and any other physical barriers won’t stop the virus; only medicine and science can do that. In that case, World War Z is uplifting as they figure out a way to combat the virus pretty quickly. Unfortunately for us, developing a safe treatment for a new virus can take over a year even when all hands are on deck, and it’s given top priority. In that way, World War Z made me feel worse about our situation because no quick fix is going to be revealed. 

But what made me feel the worst about everything was that grocery store near the beginning. People lost their fucking minds, but there were zombies! We hear that we need to stay inside as much as possible and that some basketball games are canceled, and we buy up everything like it’s the zombie apocalypse, and their weakness is reveled to be toilet paper. Sure, our stores aren’t as bad as the one in World War Z, but there is plenty of footage out there of people fighting over resources in stores and of people buying way more than they could possibly ever need while leaving nothing for others.

What’s most terrifying is that I understand what people are doing. We didn’t buy a garage full of toilet paper or a freezer full of meat or a cart full of eggs (why?!), but we did want to stock up on formula for our baby. We didn’t go nuts, but we got enough for a few months. I didn’t fight anyone for any of it, and I didn’t take the whole supply from a store. But I started to wonder what I was capable of if there was a shortage. Would I buy ten containers while others who needed it too looked on? Would I physically fight someone for a container? I hate to admit it, but in the right scenario, I think I would (though I’d probably get my ass kicked in the fight scenario). My mentality is that my kid is going to eat before yours. That said, we’ve remained calm and only bought what we might need for a few months. It would take extreme circumstances for me to take something that someone else also needed. Unfortunately for humanity, a lot of people get to that point preemptively. And it only takes one moron buying ten jumbo boxes of diapers to make sane people think, “Oh shit, I wasn’t going to buy that much, but I better now because it’s all going to be gone soon.” And the psycho domino effect ensues.

Overall, I felt better about our current situation after watching World War Z, but it did make me ruminate on the selfish survival instincts humans have and how having children amplifies those instincts. The film mostly made me thankful because if the proposition of staying home as a preventative measure prompted the behavior we’ve seen so far, how would all these crazy people react if something truly fucked up like a zombie apocalypse happened? I hope, for my children’s sake, we never find out.

Why Do I Own This?

I own a lot of zombie movies, so that’s the main reason why. If this movie came out today, I probably would not buy it. I would only buy it if they did a “Snyder Cut” situation where they go back and finish the original Russia ending and release that, but that will never happen.

Random Thoughts

"Mother Nature is a serial killer."

North Korea gets it! No teeth, no bite.

I like the main theme used for the film. It just feels like zombie music to me for some reason.

Could it be that Brad Pitt is just bad luck? Because everywhere he goes turns to shit.

Israel falls because of music. It's a reverse Mars Attacks! situation.

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