Runester

Well, through an unexpected fortunate event, I got yesterday off from work! Cool! Among all of the running around and errands, I got to go see this movie. Here’s my review.

First, this was a good movie. I want to get that out of the way up front. It was interesting enough to hold my attention and scary enough to get me to jump in my seat. The cinimatography was unusual and kind of cool. I’d recommend this movie to anybody interested in a 21st century take on the Zombie Apocalypse theme.

I had only one irritation with it. At one point, the main characters are in a military compound (of sorts) and the Colonial is talking about the need for his men to have women. “Without women, we’re just nine men waiting to die. We have no future.” What bothered me, was this was seen as weird, threatening, and of course … he was “crazy.” No one even bothered to debate the idea or it’s merits!

If you believe the whole world is infected and only a tiny handful of non-infected humans survived (as the main characters believe from nearly the beginning of the movie) then the idea of forming a community and having children does not seem that odd or outlandish. The primary problem, was that the women (in this case) were unwilling participants. Anyway, the entire idea is treated as thoroughly insane and much hilarity ensues (NOT).

One of the things I really liked was the dark undercurrent of violence, real, human violence. What I mean is, the world was not shown to be an idealic place until the evil zombie’s showed up … it was shown to be a violent, terrible place that just got worse. The movie opens with video monitors showing riots and wars (including the horrendous practice of putting burning tires around the necks of “traitors”) …. and we then learn that this horrible video montage is not the work of the virus but part of some experiment on a chimpanzee that has been wired up.

Apparently the movie is telling us something about our own violent nature. [Go figure!]

At one point, an infected soldier, looking for a little girl misses her because she is hiding behind a mirror. Instead of the symbolism you’d expect (i.e. an infected rager hiding behind a mirror and jumping out at a non-infected ‘normal’ person) we see something else, and perhaps more subtle. Here, the raging, animal of a human is looking at himself in the mirror but behind the mirror is a frightened child. Now, that’s pretty darn symbolic!

The movie is really more zombie then Outbreak because, even though it uses a virus to spread the madness … it doen’t deal with the science at all. The virus is spread through bodily fluids (saliva & blood) and has a incubation period of 20 to 60 seconds. Yeah, that’s right … seconds. Apparently it’s also 100% contagious and 100% lethal. None of this is even remotely like a real disease. Ebola is pretty horrible, but it has a incubation period from 2 to 21 days and is only 80% to 90%. I’ve read somewhere that HIV/AIDS has an incubation period measured in years … and the mortality is 90% to 98%. So, the worst diseases I could think of aren’t nearly as fast nor lethal as this super-virus in the movie. That’s why I think it is just a plot device for introducing viral zombies.