Review: Panic in the Year Zero

I was in a mood not too long ago to see some black and white SF B movies. With various reference books and documentaries that examined these movies, I came up with a list of ones I wanted to see (and either hadn’t ever or hadn’t since childhood's rainy Saturday afternoons of creature feature).

The first movie I cared about finding was a post-apocalyptic thriller, Panic in the Year Zero, starring and directed by Ray Milland. The nuclear war comes (at 1962 levels, so it’s a survivable one). An L.A. family is on a camping trip when the war happens literally in their rearview mirror. The dad, Milland, quickly understands how society will collapse, and his job is to keep the four in the family alive through that phase and until society begins to rebuild itself. He behaves aggressively to accomplish this goal.

The movie is good, despite being 55 years old. It’s the a brutal sort of post-apocalyptic story that hadn’t been, so far as I know, depicted in movies before that. There were movies about mutant monsters and sole survivors, but nothing really like this. The Road, or The Walking Dead, or my own series Gray or most books you read in this genre are in the tradition of this movie. This has a bleak view of humanity. It talks directly of matters of right and wrong and expedience. When we do evil to accomplish an end, can we still call ourselves good people after we’ve done it? It’s a debate Milland’s character and his wife, played by Jean Hagen, have.

I spent a bit more money on this one title to get this version, which has a decent film commentary that talks about the film’s place in history and the various ways in which many of the supporting actors died within years of its release of alcohol-related illness. He also talks about the ahead-of-his-times prepper strategies the Milland character uses.

Frankie Avalon plays the son and does a great job--many of the reviews you’ll find online say “I didn’t know he could act,” but in fact here he proves he can, including when he has no dialog.

A strange aside: it at first seemed bizarre to me that everyone fleeing L.A. is white in the film, and I thought it was just because the film was made in 1962 and therefore unconsciously prejudiced, but then I looked up census figures to see and LA in fact was 94% white in 1960. (I was shocked.) So it was simply accurate. I learn something new literally every day because of the internet.

I know a number of my fans love all things post-apocalyptic, and if you haven’t seen this movie yet, hunt for it. Maybe your local library even has it! If not, the DVD I linked is well worth it.

Movie Review: Pompeii

I'm impressed.

As those of you who have been reading my books for two years know, I'm a stickler for researching the scientific understanding of whatever I write about. Cenozoic mammals, earthquakes, epidemic diseases, crush injuries, whatever: I read a lot about them before I draft a novel. I often read too much--that is, more than I need. I bore my friends with "Did you know" type of monologues as I am researching. I wedge as much of that information into my novels as I can without stopping the action and boring you.

And I wish that Hollywood films, which reach a hundred thousand times as many people as my novels do, about these topics were also accurate.

They usually aren't.

But I can applaud the filmmakers of Pompeii. They did a number of things right. Pyroclastics -- bombs and ash and a nuee ardente -- are what this volcano produces and are what killed people (and will again. It's an active, dangerous volcano). They showed that you can't outrun a pyroclastic cloud pouring down a mountain. While making the eruption Hollywood exciting, they also made this fan of science happy.

The love story is perfectly adequate for such a movie. It's difficult to entirely avoid cheesiness in writing such a story. (a-hem) And Kit Harington's abs--man, that took some work. Fist-bump, dude. The disaster is really the star of the movie. A- from me.

Pandemic movie reviews

After I drafted my own novel about a pandemic, I re-watched some movies about pandemics.

Outbreak (1995). I always liked this one, but after reading another 3000+ pages on the topic in researching my own novel, I was impressed at how much they got right. (The worst inaccuracy was how the time frame was compressed. You don’t isolate a new virus or come up with a treatment or vaccine that quickly, sorry to say.)

If you don’t know the plot, it’s this: The US Army has saved a killer virus and developed a treatment for it and is hiding it for use as a bioweapon some day. But it re-emerges from nature, as such diseases will, and it enters the human population, and now we’re in trouble, particularly the residents of a small California town. Bad guy general, good guy military doctors working for USAMRIID, conflict as they work at cross-purposes, and a love story provides the B plot. It stars some big-name actors.

There was a maudlin and unlikely scene with a little girl and monkey that should have been edited out, but the helicopter chase in this one is so freakin’ cool! (And I’m not the world’s biggest fan of chase scenes, but when someone does it well, I say so.) I was engaged, rooting for the heroes, and not troubled by the inaccuracies, which I understood were necessary to make it a fast-paced thriller.

For me, an A- grade.

Contagion (2011)

I sympathize with the screenwriter and filmmaker. It’s darned hard to tell any disaster story from a single point of view. So much happens, and not any one person can experience all of it. As a writer, I’m always torn between following one character (which I think appeals most to readers) and following several (which tells a more accurate story). This film jumps from a sick family to an EIS worker on the ground to her boss embroiled in politics to an irresponsible blogger, to China where the disease originated, to runs on the stores and riots and roadblocks, and because of all of this, it ends up being something of a mess. In offering too many people to root for, they leave us no one person to root for.

Again, the accuracy is impressive. They clearly had consultants from the CDC helping them through this one, and they made no factual mistakes I noticed. (They based the start of the epidemic largely on the emergence of SARS.)

But despite this, the multiple points of view and lack of a story through-line didn’t thrill me. Still, if you want to get scared about the inevitable coming pandemic, watch it for its accuracy. It should scare you.

Grade: C

Plague City: SARS in Toronto. (2005) A Canadian made-for-TV movie, historical, about SARS. Again, very accurate research here.

This movie does better than Contagion at picking a point of view character. We get to know a nurse in a big hospital and stay largely with her. It does move to other scenes where she couldn’t possibly have been; to tell the full story it must. Our emotional connection is mostly with the nurse, and if you don’t yet appreciate the risks health care workers take in an epidemic, watching this should help you get there.

It also does a good job of touching on economics and politics, and how priorities in those areas are totally opposed to the priorities of actually containing an epidemic. Greed will end up killing more people than it should when the day arrives, and I think it’s good to think about it in advance, so that we might perhaps make more rational decisions when the day comes. (And the day will come.)

It’s a made-for-TV movie, with no superstar actors and low production values, but it’s quite good. Free for now at Amazon Prime Video, if you have that. B+

I do a good deal of complaining about inaccuracy and lack of scientific research in big-budget disaster movies, but it seems that people making pandemic movies do a far better job than people making earthquake or volcano movies. But being accurate and telling a good story is a challenge, as well I know, and we’re lucky there are a couple movies that do both.

What are your favorite disaster movies?

From wikipedia

I'm a sucker for natural disaster movies, even the bad ones. I do prefer if the science is right, and I grudgingly accept "mostly right." Tell me an interesting story, with characters I like, too. Some of my favorites are:

Dante's Peak. While some portrayals of the eruption were wrong, and other bits were understandably changed for the movie (if you portrayed ash realistically, it'd be a movie with voices coming out of impenetrable gray stuff, which would be a waste of attractive actors), the special effects were way cool for the time--and they still hold up.

Supervolcano, BBC. A two-part show about a Yellowstone supereruption (which you shouldn't spend a second worrying about--you're far more likely to be eaten by a lion or killed by a cow in your lifetime). It has all the science right, it bothers to explain a good deal of it without slowing down the action, and it portrays officials as trying to do their best/their jobs, which I think is what would happen in a major disaster. I wish Hollywood usually did half so well with sticking to the facts as the British filmmakers did here.

The Great Los Angeles Earthquake. Another made-for-TV movie. Again, they have a lot of the science right. I dislike the one-dimensional bad guy character (played by "the Paper Chase guy," as we MSTies call him), but the time frame, what an earthquake is like, what can go wrong, and the aftermath is much like I'd expect it to be IRL. There'd be even more looting in an urban area, I suspect, but the confusion and horror, I believed. And remember, to relatives in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, that's what'd happen to a prepared city! If another big New Madrid quake happens (as it did in my novel Quake), you guys are in serious trouble.

Deep Impact. As with other Hollywood films, I force myself to be happy when they get half of the science right. Here, they probably didn't even hit 50% (by the time an asteroid was visible with a tiny backyard scope, everyone on the planet would know about it, and if you explode one, the mass isn't changed, so you're still going to get superheating of atmosphere, so li'l Frodo and his wife there would have been flash fried at the end, and American politicians don't get to decide what celestial objects are named--international scientists do, via well-established convention--and so on). But hey, I liked it anyway.

In my opinion, there hasn't been a great weather disaster movie yet. I wish someone would make one. There are plenty of real-life weather disasters to choose from.

And I'll add three human-caused disaster movies I like:

The Day After. Yet another TV movie (Made for TV movies get a bad rap--and probably deservedly so--but with disaster stories, TV seems to do better than film). Nuclear holocaust. Shocking upon first viewing, back when. Spoiler: things don't turn out very well.

Testamant. A nuclear disaster film without any explosions. Follows residents of one small town as radiation sickness takes them out one by one. Elegiac, touching, and very well acted.

Virus. (復活の日 Fukkatsu no hi) Japanese 1980 film, partly in English. Multiple disasters lead to an end-of-world scenario. Unknown/under-appreciated in the US. Find the long version, if you can.

Tell me yours! (even if it is Sharknado.)