Robert wrote to film-philosophy:
R> I do think however that _Waterworld_, _Reign of Fire_ and _The
R> Postman_ more or less take their lead directly form the success of
R> the _Mad Max_ movies.
I'm sorry, but that just seems silly, given the massive temporal lag
between _Mad Max II_ and all of those films. I'd say at least two of
them more likely took their lead from (a) the personal taste of Kevin
Costner and (b) Kevin Costner's amazing ability to convince other people
to let him waste their money. As for _Reign of Fire_, I'm sure the
3-months-in-the-future "millenium" -- and the more recent revival of the
thematically related "satanic messiah" subgenre in films like the
_Prophecy_ series) had much more to do with the film's release than any
18-year-old film, which doesn't share anything with it in terms of plot
or setting; if Hollywood really made its decisions based on what was
popular two decades in the past, the history of commercial cinema would
be very, very different. (And really, I suspect that the % distribution
of "post-apocalyptic" films, on a decade-by-decade basis, has been
pretty flat since the late 40s.)
Obvious things I forgot: 1975's _A Boy and His Dog_ (L.Q. Jones, from a
story by Harlan Ellison); I'm inclined to include _This Island Earth_
from 1955 ... the apocalypse is displaced onto the alien's planet
Metaluna, but its depiction is very similar indeed to what you'd have
seen in a contemporary SF pulp (and *do* try to see it without the
morons from MST3K talking over it ... it's the most "adult" SF film of
the 50s); Romero's zombie trilogy, taken as a whole; and Sogo Ishii's
takeoff on _Mad Max (I)_, _Crazy Thunder Road_ (1980); and yes of
course, _La Jetee_ and its idiot bastard son.
--
Jim Flannery [log in to unmask]
Because they've created such a deep structure now, you can't
get in. And we don't want to get in, we're on the outside.
But we're not on the outside looking in, we're on the outside
looking out. -- John Zorn
np: Richard H. Kirk, _Time High Fiction_
nr: Edward Carey, _Observatory Mansions_
|