T2K / Post-Apocalyptic Movies
 

I suggest a thread dedicated to post-apcalyptic Movies...

- I just found this one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnation_Alley_(film)) after reading up on cockroaches for food in HQs T2K campaign....yes it's really going bad in his campaign now....my character has soon eaten up all his luxury food......so alternative food sources must be researched...

Can't give a review since I have to download it when I get home.

Other Alternatives : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_films

Awesome film. Giant blue scorpions really are scary :)

damnation alley
 

not my favourite post apoc flick - but passable .I didnt like the way they depicted the whole PLANET as being destroyed -but there were some interesting -and very cheesy - dangers out there ,cavemen rednecks who were rapist/cannibals,killer bugs and dangerous storms etc .

I recommend the Jericho series of course ,even if it ends weakly.
Also the slasher "Tooth and Nail" is alright .

"Les Temps du Loup" is a really good one -but oh so depressing...

I liked the series Jeramiah.

I'd second that...I found Jeremiah an excellent source of ideas for a T2K campaign.

I might as well get the usual suggestions out of the way as well;

Threads
By Dawns Early Light
The Day After
The War Game
Red Dawn
The Postman
The Dead Letters

Think that covers a lot of the ones that normally come up in this sort of list, and of course The Road is coming out soon.

I'll suggest a few:

Malevil (The movie by "Christian de Chalonge" and the book by "Robert Merle").

Delicatessen and the City of lost Children by Jean-Pierre Jenet

Virus (Fukkatsu no Hi) by Kenji Fukasaku (free of right on the Web).

Titan A.E. (Science fiction but I love the drawing).

Surpervolcano (BBC). Not really a post-appoc movie but I find the idea to be an interesting alternative to a regular T2K. By the way they forgot something in that movie. From what I know most ICBM bases are fairly close to the area. Wouldn't such an important erruption have a chance to trigger the missiles.:D

Grave of the fireflies (Hotaru no Haka). Again not entirelly a post-apoc movie but two kids in the ravaged japan of 1945 (after the bombing of Kobe). If you are depressed and want to watch it, don't forget to lock your weapons away before (IMO).

Nausicaa of the valley of the wind by Hayao Miyazaki (Yes I love Japanese animated movies).

Cloverfield. That's a monster movie but it's impressive.

28 days later (I haven't seen the other)

The last fight (I don't know if its the proper title, french title is "Le dernier combat") by Luc Besson. A mute black and white movie released in 1983. The action is taking plance after a nuclear war.

Radioactive Dreams: A very campy post-apoc movie that ends with a dance routine. Enjoyable, but only really useful for the most loosely-run T2K campaigns.

Traveller: A pulp post-apoc book series of the mid-1980's. Got really weird toward the end of the series, including the main character making a trip through the seven layers of Hell in an effort to recover his dead girlfriend.

"On the Beaches" could be worth a look to see how society self destructs in the face of inevidable death.

A search of "post holocaust" and "movies" brings up a hell of a lot of hits.
One which might be of interest is http://movies.msn.com/movies/2007win...ostapocalypse/

The Road Warrior is one of my all time personal favs. I also really dug Children of Men. The firefight at the end just screamed T2K.

If you haven't read The Road, do so before the film comes out.

The two that would actually be best for T2K in terms of the actual war would be By Dawn's Early Light and Red Dawn. Lots of ideas for T2K in both flicks.

"Children of Men" is one of the best movies I've seen in these last years.

Have to agree with that - Children of Men was awesome. The final gun fight was an impressive scene, as was the 'marauder' ambush when they were driving to the resistance base. Good soundtrack as well - I love the Franco Battiato (spelling?) cover of Ruby Tuesday.

Another camp post apoc classic is Hell Comes To Frogtown starring wrestler 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper as the titular Sam Hell. Absolute gem :)

I haven't seen it but I can't imagine that it can compare with his work in the sci-fi thriller They Live.;)

Waltz With Bashir
 

Not exactly a post-apoc flick, but I just watched the animated film Waltz with Bashir about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in '82. It was quite good. It follows a man trying to recover his memories of serving in the invasion. He interviews various vets trying to jog his own memory. What follows is a series of vignettes, some tragic, some brutal, some comic, and some surreal. All of this leads up to the last 18 minutes of the film which examines the Sabra and Shatilla [sic] refugee camp massacres. It's an unusual but powerful war film. I recommend it.

They are re-making Red Dawn with a 2010 release date by the way (and i quote Wikipedia) :

'Two top executives at MGM, Harry Sloan and Mary Parent, announced that a remake of Red Dawn is in the early stages of pre-production in May 2008 at the Festival de Cannes. This was announced along with a big-budget rebuild of RoboCop, which director Darren Aronofsky among others has recently been in to discuss. The remake of Red Dawn is slated to be directed by Dan Bradley, who has previously worked as a second unit director and stunt coordinator on films such as The Bourne Ultimatum, Spiderman 3 and the Quantum of Solace. MGM has announced that Red Dawn will be remade "keeping in mind the post-9/11 world that we're in". In a further announcement the same month, Dan Bradley has been confirmed as the director with Carl Ellsworth, screenwriter of Red Eye and Disturbia writing the updated screenplay. Ellsworth will be working from a story written by Jeremy Passmore. Vincent Newman (A Man Apart) is also acting in a producer capacity. Australian Chris Hemsworth has been cast in a lead role.

Ellsworth has said:

"The tone is going to be very intense, very much keeping in mind the post-9/11 world that we’re in. As ‘Red Dawn’ scared the heck out of people in 1984, we feel that the world is kind of already filled with a lot of paranoia and unease, so why not scare the hell out of people again? It was later revealed that the Chinese would be the invaders and they would be aided by the Russians later on."

Joining Hemsworth are Josh Peck, Adrianne Palicki with a possible setting of Spokane, Washington. Tony Gilroy, who wrote The Bourne Trilogy and Micheal Clayton will do a rewrite of script.'

Lots of good suggerstions but..
 

how about you post a link to IMDB (www.imdb.com) and perhaps your own rating from one to ten. It would be a lot easier for others to find/buy the movies in question.

I was really excited about this until I realized, that now I would be one of the guys in the camp and not one of the Wolverines.

"Boys! Avenge me! Aveeeeenge me!!!" (just practicing ;) )

Resident Evil 2 where they are trapped in the city.

And I can't believe no one has mentioned the classics of classics...

Planet of the Apes


And don't forget Charleton Heston in Omega Man.

These last years, words like “remake”, “prequel/sequel” and “based on” make me shudder... Specially when referring to something I’ve previously enjoyed.The worst thing is that, although suspecting an imminent disaster, my friends and I always end up in the queue of the theater ticket office, smiling and shrugging our shoulders...ready for the disaster, but with a tiny and insignificant spark of hope. Of course, at the end of the movie, nobody will admit the previous existence of this spark...



Ahhh...Now I’m starting to feel the tragedy floating around me... I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. ...

You might be interested that I have my take on the Landmaster detailed out in T2K 2.2 terms here:
http://www.pmulcahy.com/best_stuff_t...never_were.htm

Me and my Basic Training buddies were really hacked off about the release date on that one -- we most likely weren't going to see each other in a long time, if ever, and it was opening only two weeks after we finished Basic!

Remakes and sequels almost never match the original. And no movie I've ever seen has matched the book version. Who's better at special effects, after all -- the wizards in Hollywood or your own mind?

I was very, very happy with the Lord of the Rings films - my biggest gripe was that the Dunedain had beards in the film (high-born Dunedain can't grow beards due as they have some elvish blood).

There was a moive i saw along time ago, it was on TV, and had been cut up pretty bad. It had a group in an underground facility that had survived a nuclear war (they didn't say how they survived the war, but i think they had cryogenically been frozen). But they sent out numerious recon teams to find help, and the movie had one of the last recon team going out. one had a combined crossbow and they traveled in a buggy like vehicle. when i saw it i thought it was a Morrow Project movie... Has anyone else seen it?

a good read - and a lot of clasics
 

Great link General!
Mmmmm... i didn't remember "Strange days". I enjoied it very much!!

Just saw Defiance, starring Daniel Craig (James Bond) and Liev Shrieber. It's about Jewish refugees and partisans in Belorussia in WWII. I was disappointed. The battle sequences were poorly done and some of the acting was pretty shmalzy (is that Yiddish?).

On the plus side, it did give some me some ideas of how to deal with refugees and partisans in T2K.

By dawn’s early light
 

Following some of the suggestions of my fellow posters, I saw “By dawn’s early light” this last week. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099197/ I liked it. As some good film of this genre, it causes you to move uncomfortably on your seat while the domino effect of the preplotted defensive responses seems to carry unrelentingly the humankind to the abyss of a total nuclear exchange... The human behaviour always being the only unknown factor in the equation.

It’s difficult to assess the weight of individual decisions in the activation and deactivation of the mechanisms of a nuclear response. The Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine can seem logical over an strategic map. A scientific mechanism to keep the scales in an unstable balance point, once two powerful players discover themselves armed to the teeth for the fear to the other. But an accident, a third force in the shadows, terrorism or the misjudgement of the facts by some link in the chain can easily displace the scales. It’s human. And only a human reaction of someone with enough courage and sense to emerge at least one moment from the programmed response could avoid the disaster or, at least, save as many lives as possible once the blind and logical mechanism is activated...

Well, thanks for the reference. A good movie.

Has anyone seen "Terminator:Salvation"?

I missed it at the cinema, so will probably pick it up when it comes out on DVD, but I wondered if anyone had any opinions on it?

Also, if you like your post apocalyptic landscape with relatively few survivors, there's "I Am Legend" with Will Smith (yes, I know it's a remake!) ;)

I Am Legend is the best of all the versions of that book...but I couldn't watch when Samantha (his dog) died after being bitten by plague-infested dogs. I'm a dog lover.

Terminator: Salvation annoyed the hell out of me. So many plot holes, so many instances where real world science were ignored. Could have been so good and had sme great moments but all in all - what a waste.

I much preferred The Omega Man to I Am Legend. Some of the things Will Smith's character did were just ridiculous. I didn't really appreciate the theological/metaphysical stuff in I Am Legend either.

I got the same problem - can't stand seeing animals (especially dogs) in pain or worse....humans on the other hand no problem....

I didn't like that scene either. But it was entirely the fault of Will Smith's character. For him to have survived all that time, doing so well, and then to suddenly start kooking out? It frustrated the hell out of me. What US Army officer of any branch who lived through all of that would leave his sidearm in the car? After that scene I was looking forward to him dying. He deserved it. Should have been called "I Am Loser"

I read “I’m a legend” this past year…Well, I enjoyed the book and after seeing the trailer of the film I decided that my memories about the novel were too nice to tempt my luck with the movie and Will Smith. In my opinion, “Based on” it’s quite a loose expression, especially if you liked the original book.

Targan, I think I had the same expectation you had with “Salvation” and, sadly, with the same final result. I always had found that the most exciting and stunning moments from the first “Terminator” are those short scenes of the future struggle between the humankind and the machines. When I knew about salvation I thought that finally, someone would exploit the plots suggested by those scenes, taking profit of the late technology in special effects… Again, technology is not enough, after all. (…mmmm…It seems a slogan for the Russian Army :rolleyes: )

"The war game" (1965)
 

Bon dia!

Rebumping this thread after watching “The War Game (1965)”, a docudrama suggested by TiggerCCW_UK in a previous post.

Link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58NmAzQzRjk

In a few words, like “Threads”, the movie left me the same feeling: a grim, nightmarish and disturbing after taste. It’s a good sample of how to horrify the audience without the need of spectacular and expensive special effects. In my opinion, a recommended and interesting production.

Having seen three movies based upon the book "I Am Legend", I must respectfully disagree that the Will Smith movie is the best adaptation.
While it's better than "The Omega Man", it's far too concerned with silly and in some cases utterly stupid, action scenes to portray the story well although I will give some credit to Will Smith in that the scenes where he starts to lose his sanity are well done.
In my opinion, the best version was the Vincent Price movie "The Last Man On Earth". While it suffers a little from having been made cheaply (filmed in Italy rather than the US and filmed in B&W rather than colour even though it was made in the early 1960s) it remains far closer to the book than any of the later movies. It remains a drama, like the book, rather than trying to be a horror/action flick like the later movies.

Uhhhh...me, too! I have to agree with SSC's choice for the best adaptation--both I Am Legend and Omega Man changed the resolution, Omega Man somewhat, but IAL completely lost the whole point of the story--the Changed are now civilization and the "hero" is a monster in their estimation and must be destroyed.

While talking to some work colleagues this afternoon about the movies made from the "I Am Legend" book, one of them mentioned a movie I hadn't heard of before. With a little checking I found a review that proved quite interesting. Here's what the reviewer had to say in his first paragraph

"A black man, the last man on Earth, fends for himself in Manhattan after a global plague wipes out the rest of humanity. His loneliness overwhelms him. He slowly slips into insanity, speaking to mannequins he's set up throughout the city to approximate some form of normalcy. Every day at noon, he pleads into a short-wave radio, announcing his location, and his intention to broadcast indefinitely, hoping to get a response. Then he finds out he's not alone. That's the premise behind I Am Legend (2007), right? Wrong, but who could blame one for seeing the similarities?"

The movie is called "The World, the Flesh and the Devil", starring Harry Bellafonte and made in 1959
http://www.cinemaviewfinder.com/2009...nth-world.html
While this movie wasn't an adaptation of "I Am Legend", the movie of that name might be something of an adaptation of "The World, the Flesh and the Devil". Who can say but I thought it was interesting that the two movies share a lot of similarities - almost to the point of the Will Smith movie being a copy of some scenes.

THREADS.

And by the way, don't bother paying to see "The Book of Eli"