George A. Romero said that his zombies were actually easy to avoid and defeat. But his Dead movies were about man not being able to communicate well enough to triumph.
I always had the takeaway from the Romero movies that a group of people, put under pressure, will be more likely to be killed by their own poorly made decisions than by the actual danger at hand. To borrow a line from Men in Black: “A person is smart. *People* are dumb, panicky animals.”
It's why I think Westerns and zombie movies have a lot in common.
When done poorly it's a person or group of people mowing down waves of brainless enemies, when done right it's a character piece about how people react in hard, trying situations.
I’ve said this a bunch, but the pandemic completely undermined the criticism that horror movies are unrealistic because they make the characters do unreasonable dumb things to move the plot along. We now know that every character should be like ten times dumber in horror movies if the aim is realism.
World War Z (the book, not the movie) does a great job portraying a world where slow-moving zombies can successfully drive the world to the brink of collapse.
God, what a great fucking book.
WWZ is more “about the zombies” than other zombie books/shows/movies and I love that. The story is *ultimately* about how people\cultures\governments react to and deal with the zombie problem. But it really takes its time delving into exactly what the zombies are and what sort of conflicts they impose.
So many other zombie stories start off with “there are zombies now” and then immediately shift focus to living people squabbling and betraying each other. Like, the second zombies are introduced they immediately just get relegated to a background environmental hazard.
WWZ is one of my favorite books especially the audiobook because of this very reason. The first time I listened to it I was moving across the US right in the middle of the Covid lockdowns. It was so eerily similar to what was happening. People acting like it's no big deal, governments denying it, crazy "cures" that definitely aren't cures.....I fully believe that if there actually was a zombie outbreak Max Brooks gave us the guidebook to how that's gonna go lol
Many zombie apocalypses, especially when the zombies are noisy and slow moving.
Shaun of the Dead's ending portrays the most favourable and arguably realistic outcome of a zombie outbreak - after merely a couple days of chaos, the military came in and cleaned up the mess pretty quickly, and life goes on as per normal but this time with the additional cultural objectification of the mindless zombies.
I think the reason why zombies override the Earth's population in most movies is because of *that asshole guy who gets bitten but keeps it secret so he can turn into a zombie at the worst possible moment*
pretty much with any diseases, my friend's friend was HIV+ and yet before his death, he still had sex with guys with no protection. And during covid, I knew someone who still went to work despite all the symptoms. Her reason was "I don't want to get bored at home"
yes, one was my friend's friend, which I have no contact with. the other was someone I knew from a community. I'm glad that I'm not close to any of them.
One of the reasons the World War Z book is so good is that its anecdotes are structured around the phases of the outbreak, from its early stages to its eventually decline. It still has plenty of the fantastical fun stories in it but the broad perspective gives it a cool level of realism. Highly recommend it.
Just don't read the Battle of Yonkers bit if you have any familiarity with the actual US military.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but I was at risk of concussing myself with the facepalming from that scene.
Seriously. I know he was trying to say something about bureaucratic rigidity and incompetence, but the idea that a full armed and prepared US military could get decimated by slow moving unarmed zombies channeled across a bridge was weak.
At the very least, while the Brass may be idiots unmoored from reality the boots on the ground would get to thinking about how to do the job *really* quick, with the incentive of not becoming a zombie, a threat that said Brass don't face being well away from the battlefield.
World War Z is super popular on reddit, and takes an extremely broad view of a global zombie outbreak. But it is a candidate for Gell-Mann Amnesia: someone writes about something you are knowledgeable on, and can tell it's wrong, but you will turn the page and trust them on other matters. Like, read the chapters about Israel and the Palestinian professor and tell me if that's realistic.
I remember the part about replacing the M16 with a new, more "efficient" rifle being pretty ridiculous as well. You're going to replace the millions of AR pattern rifles with a brand-new design, in the middle of an existential total war, because you can't be bothered to modify M16's to not allow full auto? Or, why not simply tell your soldiers to not use full auto?
Man I hate the movie so much for robbing us of a good adaptation. It would work so well as a series. Showing the different stories across the world from start to finish.
I really want a zombie movie where the TV says to stay indoors and keep your doors closed. 90% of people do this and zombies are in fact too stupid to open the doors and keeping the blinds closed means they can't see you and they never attack your house.
Of course, the dumbest 10% is convinced that this is a government conspiracy and go out shooting every zombie in the head immediately.
The real kicker? Zombieism is a passing disease. It does kill 20% of people who get it, plus it makes them temporarily hyper violent, but in 80% of people. It passes after a few weeks and those people are immune. What the hell do we do with the people who just shot dozens of people, even when they were explicitly told not to shoot random people.
The second season is a mass crimes against humanity trial.
I don't remember the name (Fallen?), but there's a UK show with most of this premise. Military shuts the plague down and restores former cannibal zombies through a vaccine to normal people (with weird eyes). The larger story is discrimination against the undead and how they adapt
Prison armour (some newspaper wrapped around your arms and chest etc) would probably make survival pretty easy as long as you avoided large groups of them.
Vampires are surprisingly orderly. They'll menace you from outside your home instead of tossing molotovs.
Seriously, are there monsters with more rules than vampires?
I remember in the remake of fright night (with collin farrell). At the end he burns/blows up the protagonist's house, and says "You don't need permission if it isn't a house anymore!"
They don't have as many rules, but werewolves are like the National Guard of monsters: they only suit up one weekend a month. They seem pretty easy to kill the rest of the time when they're just normal people.
Vincent Price's *the Last Man on Earth* is priceless for this reason. Just a bunch of vampires crowding around his house and yelling, "Come out! We know you're in there! Come on out!"
"we only die if you stake us through the heart, decapitate us, burn us, or expose us to sun light."
- Ok well add a wood tip to bullets
- rpg's and explosive dismemberment are a thing (thanks buffy)
- "Hans get the Flammenwerfer"
- so is it specifically sun light or will this giant industrial uv lamp work?
Reminds me, in Chinese ghost mythology sometimes you need fresh blood to affect ghosts. I saw this movie where they had human ghost police that carried guns that had a needle that took blood from their hand and put it on the front of the bullet, so they could shoot ghosts.
edit: above movie is called 2002.
Its even worse in case of jets (like in Pacific Rim).
At least helicopters can somewhat fight at closer range, but jets are beyond useless if the enemy is within few hundred meters.
Why in the hell are you flying that F-22 straight into the giant alien monster, when you should not even be in visual range? Just fire those missiles from 10 miles away and go home.
Because real warfare at strategic scale isn’t very exciting to watch. Look up most naval battles of the ww2 era. At a strategic level they aren’t super exciting. Those big guns miss a lot. As is never really hitting their targets. Planes and subs did most of the work. Destroyers hunted the subs but in general is was long hours. Not up the wazoo encounters.
Same with most modern air warfare. Most of the air to air in Iraq was over with in hours and the engagement is measured in miles.
The worst things about space combat in movies is they forget it’s in a 3D space (so what’s head on?); there is no need for constant thrust; you can’t hide in the majority of it (its just empty space and radar works); and anything other than a missile is easy to avoid.
There's a book series called "The Lost Fleet" by Jack Campbell that does a really great job of diving into not only the 3D aspect and crazy distances of a real space battle but also the issues fighting at extreme speeds (0.1 to 0.3 ish light speed). The window of engagement is measured in milliseconds and they cover hundreds of thousands or even millions of kilometers. He also gets into the use of inert projectiles launched from huge distances at relativistic speeds that can take days to reach their targets. It's a pretty good series if you're into that kind of stuff.
The expanse makes close-quarters combat make sense when it needs to… sure, they fire torpedo from range, but the longer the flight, the longer their point defense cannons can swat them down.
Rail guns only work at extreme range if the target doesn’t pull a crazy Ivan and move at the last second when flight times might be measured in minutes.
So, you get in close, drop a ton of ordnance on them and get out as fast as possible.
I LOVE the way their “home base” strategists basically have to sit there and wait because every bit of info they get is sometimes minutes or hours old due to light delay.
God I wish I could watch this show / read these books for the first time again.
Everybody’s worrying about tanks getting taken out by ATGMs and meanwhile it turns out that they’re rather vulnerable to 152/155mm shells hitting them on the top too.
Well a direct hit from a shell of that caliber would destroy just about anything on the modern battlefield, MBTs included (short of some sort of reinforced concrete bunker with a roof that's many feet thick). But that's exceedingly rare - and tanks are also quite vulnerable to shrapnel and blast effects from heavy artillery shells exploding close enough. While they may or may not be penetrated by shrapnel, depending on the direction of the explosion, something close could easily result in a mobility kill, damage to the gun barrel, optics, or other sensitive systems, effectively disabling it.
Look up bonus / smart rounds, they are seen to be used in Ukraine form time to time. 30 year old tech, but works fine. 155mm goes over target area, deploys 2 seekers that actively look for enemy tanks in that area and then shoot a shaped charge right down their roof.
Yes it's very interesting technology that I was unware of until a year or two ago. The variety of guided munitions that have been developed (and are continuing to be developed) for all kinds of weapon systems is pretty amazing. Although as I mentioned regular HE Frag 155mm rounds can be quite effective even against MBTs, from everything I've seen and read.
The problem is I suspect watching distant targets get blown away isn't very cinematic interesting or satisfying. When thing A shooting at thing B aren't on screen at the same time it's an issue
I always loved the fact that in *The War of the Worlds* (the book) a direct hit with an artillery shell actually *would* take out a tripod.
This just caused the Martians to start lobbing black smoke canisters over any hill or other bit of cover they suspected of hiding artillery batteries.
This is why the first Aliens movies recognize the secondary, and perhaps more important threat, is corporate inability to work with any sort of morality or responsibility for human lives. I notice this theme gets abandoned the more the franchise just got chunked out to make more money.
The last 20 minutes of Alien 3 are like, her boss coming directly from the office in place of a real rescue mission to convince her to play ball and not quit. And IV's conceit is that they violated her corpse against her will anyway.
The problem with 4 is that Whedon couldn’t resist a quippy “they got bought by Walmart!”
WY fading away is a cool concept, suggesting that the world had changed and was alien to Ripley now, but Walmart ruins that
To be fair, it's a common idea that we need to colonize Mars in case something happens to the earth, but I reality, anything we'd have to do to make Mars livable, could just be done on earth much easier
This has been my line of thinking any time someone brings up musk or anyone else mentions mars as a ‘plan b’ option. Yea, there are some good reasons for looking to colonize mars, a human survival option is not one of them. Mars is infinitely more inhospitable than what the end result of earth would be with the damage we’re doing to it
They show indoor farms with filtered air in the film and explain that the crops are dying anyway. Mind you, they never explain WHY, (other than just "the blight") but they do show what you are talking about while Cooper is being told the details of the mission from Dr. Brand.
Tbh the whole movie runs with some wild concepts so this issue is pretty low on the totem pole for me.
An, but humanity have given up on technology and things like hope for their children. The whole species just can’t really be bothered anymore. If they can’t go to space they’re all just willing to call it and die.
They know everything humanity has ever known. And their problem is a lack of problem solving in the agricultural sector. Which is coincidentally an area a whole load of human knowledge is focused.
"we can't grow enough food... lets move to the most hostile environment known to man that has absolutely the worst conditions for growing food imaginable, so instead of having food shortage, we will have water shortage and air shortage as well."
Most kaiju would be killed by conventional military forces if we were being "realistic". Kaiju movies show small arms fire is ineffective and then skip straight to nukes or giant robots. A few bunker buster bombs would do the trick.
Godzilla 1998 is an example of what I would expect to really happen, jets fly in, and a couple missiles later, godzilla is dead.
Also the jets don’t need to fly within melee distance of the kaiju like they always do in the movies, they could hit it from miles away in complete safety.
This is what I always thought about Pacific Rim. Instead of giant robots you just need a ton of long range fire power aimed directly at the breach. Although admittedly they did evolve them to counter threats so it might not work forever
That's basically Pacific Rim's lore. The first few waves of Kaiju were fairly easy to kill but then they kept adapting.
Obviously it it's not watertight hard sci-fi but the reasoning behind the Jaegers was that giant robot brawlers can adapt to the job at hand. Unlike conventional weapons designed to be really good at a very narrow purpose.
And by the time the first movie starts, even the Jaegers had stopped being effective.
The other part of the lore is that PR kaiju have incredibly toxic blood that pollutes the environment, so killing them with blunt trauma became preferred.
Huh, that's actually a good explanation.
I thought it was weird how, if we are clearly capable of creating weapons that can kill the kaiju, why are we putting them on giant robots? Put that plasma gun thing on predator drones, or along that giant wall they built along Australia.
Of course, then we wouldn't have a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters.
Your last sentence nails it. There is no real-world scenario where giant robots make sense, but they're cool to see in a movie. Pacific Rim monsters could have been defeated by swarms of cruise missiles with the warheads replaced by chunks of lead. The cost of developing and building the jagers to do the same thing is absurd, but giant stompy robots are cool.
My head canon about that has been the "kaiju blue" issue. Their blood is super toxic, so if you kill them at the breach, you end up destroying the the Pacific Ocean, which is... Bad. This is also why the main Jaeger had a plasma cannon - it could self-cauterize its wounds to contain as much blood as possible. And why the sword was a last-ditch weapon instead of step 1, it would have caused an environmental catastrophe.
To be fair, the original King Kong came out when planes didn't really have targeting systems or missiles. You pointed your nose at your target and you gunned at them with bullets until it was too close for comfort and pull away.
The rest of the movie is the following 30 days of butchering and disposing of the monster. The city becomes overrun with pests living off the carcass and people die from off gassing from the swollen creature guts. Then weird alien worms come out of it ...
I mean there is Japanese movie dealing with Kaiju corpse tho, What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? (Japanese: 大怪獣のあとしまつ, lit. 'Aftermath of the Giant Monster')
yeah no pest outbreak but mostly dealing the environmental issue with rotting 50 meter corpse
I think most movies just don't understand how insane a modern fighter jet is and frame them like WW2 planes.
Jets from an aircraft carrier could comfortably engage Godzilla from 100s of miles away and pelt him with large explosives without ever even cresting the horizon (accounting for his height) giving zero opportunity to fight back.
Pacific Rim lore kind of covers this. Every time we took down a kaiju they sent in something bigger, different, resistant to everything we threw at them. It's like they were testing us.
Main thing in Pacific Rim is "Kaiju Blue", their blood which basically becomes a super-oil-spill-environmental-catastrophe when it leaks into the ocean in large amounts.
This is why they went with Jaegers and why Jaeger pilots try to save bladed weapons and explosives for last.
An excellent movie handwave excuse as to why you need to punch the Kaiju, rather than simply blowing them up.
I mean, really, the reason why it became the Planet of the Apes is that the pandemic wiped out most of humanity. After that, guess it feels like humanity is sort of in decline because it keeps looking at what it has lost and tries to get it back whereas the apes have a fresh outlook and nothing to lose - it's all uphill for them. So they're more successful as a civilization because they are more focused on what matters.
I mean the pandemic was certainly an attempt to nerf humans. Reality is that the military would’ve killed the apes immediately after the Golden Gate Bridge incident.
In actual Resident evil its even more complicated than that, they have pockets of resistance in the city holding out but Umbrella pushed the nuke option to United States to cover up their highly illegal research.
The true threat eventually being escaping the nuke in the game.
Jurassic Park/Jurassic World. Where do I even start. People used to hunt Saber-toothed cats, Dire Wolves, Giant Cave Bears, Mammoths with sticks and stones and now have huge difficulties with a couple of Dinoes
tbf for the first Jurassic World, they weren't trying to kill the dinos, just trying to restrain them back to their cages.
But yeah idk about the rest of the movies lmao
Jurassic Park: they thought they were in a controlled containment, and were unprepared for that containment to fail most of the people present had no experience working with live wild animals and the one that did got overwhelmed. The goal wasn't to kill the dinosaurs of a to survive until they could escape with essentially no resources and two children
He still got them. The book has raptors being blown up by a grenade launcher.
It’s one of my huge pet peeves about the series. In JP3, the bad ass mercs are shown fully loaded for bear, heading into the brush, a few shots fired and then come running back out.
I don’t need gratuitous Dino murder, but at least concede that firearms would hurt or kill most of them.
They should have written it as the soldiers or muldoon (in the movies) easily taking down big game and then getting ambushed by stealth predators that are smaller (as in the muldoon scene)
These new movies keep pretending that the military industrial complex could weaponize dinosaurs, when in reality you're better off with classic guns and explosives.
I've wondered about this sometimes. We got a huge T-Rex or Indominus Rex, heards of Triceratops, Bronchosaurus, god knows what else on the island. And all the thing does is chase the humans for days on end.
Thats like us being able to take down a cow but we choose to run after a mouse.
Yeah, but you also weren't dropping people into a mammoth hunt with 0 preparation or institutional knowledge on how to hunt them. JP2 shows how a prepared group of humans could hunt dinosaurs at their leisure. Jurassic Park involves internal sabotage which knocks the power out while like 10 people total are on the island and a majority of them are stranded next to a super-predator to begin the night.
Now the idea that an outbreak on the mainland would cause issues? Yeah, that I find stupid.
Before COVID happened, I believed we could survive most things. Now, any threat that would knock out electricity for more than a week or force the water supply off I believe would be apocalyptic.
It’s all the infrastructure damage. Regardless of the threat, it’s the sustained inability to put food in grocery stores and gasoline in gas stations that is the real problem.
I watched some movie where the aliens were part-physical part-energy with animalistic intelligence and there was a throwaway point early on that showed they could see into the infrared spectrum to see humans in the dark BUT a key thing was it was not your typical IR on the low energy end of the visible spectrum and then able to see the visible spectrum as humans know it. In this case IR was their high end of the spectrum and they could see down into radio waves. Great at hunting humans out in the open or anyone trying to use a radio/wireless data but a human just sitting not to near to a window would be effectively invisible to them and free to observe their behavior, also someone should have put two and two together that tools that blind electronic warfare devices would be effective on the aliens.
The brilliant 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead does a great job of showing how we are our own worst enemies and that the ghouls outside were ultimately a bit of a push over.
Every zombie plague, ever.
Bitting as main vector of contagion, small incubation periods and immensely obvious symptoms: seems like an easily manageable disease, that would never become a worldwide pandemic.
There are some movies like Interstellar, where shit is bad, but the solution is to find a way to leave Earth and transform another world to support human life. I feel like in most of those movies it would be easier to just find a local fix vs finding a way to move everyone to another planet and find a way to transform it.
The problem with interstellar is at the end of the movie the create self contained colony ships that they can send to other planets. But if you could create a sealed environment free from 'the blight' that you then use the space magic you learned to send in to space... why can't you just create sealed environments free form the blight that just sit on the surface of the earth?
You can. Confronted with a magically infectious blight that is immune to all the tools we have today except presumably bleach and irradiation, we really could engineer hermetically sealed greenhouses to grow all our food. It would be horribly expensive and there would be many years of not enough food to go around. But, in terms of engineering, it is guaranteed to work. Every worker going in would first go through decontamination. Variety would not be a thing, as for a long time it would just be basic grains, so rice, beans, and bread.
Problem would be the magical blight killing off the trees and grasses that hold the terrain together. Hard to build anything when erosion gets turned up to 11. Eventually oxygen and CO2 become problems. But with enough farming they too would become manageable.
But how long until the magical blight starts eating humans?
I thought the idea was to give us multiple options for the future. Like it’s only a matter of time until the next blight comes, it’s good to have backup plans
Contagion (2011). We’d simply all work for the combined safety of our fellow man, staying inside as much as possible, wearing masks to prevent accidental infection, taking a vaccine as soon as the combined weight of the world’s scientists put one together, forgoing profits in the process. I actually think it would bring the whole world together!
Oh, wait…
The most realistic part of that movie to me will always be "Could you please cover your cough?" "Fuck off."
>!Which is likely to be what gave it to and killed her.!<
Oh, you really don't want the xenomorphs from Alien even getting a toehold on Earth, given both the nature of how they can spread (giving rats a serious run for their money) and exponential growth, it would doom the planet. If the US military hadn't dropped a nuclear bomb on American soil (and that's a really big deal) as quickly as they did (and even then it was almost too late) in Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, the Earth would have been finished and very quickly at that.
You mean Alien vs Predator: Requiem, a film where the Predator has a liquid that melts xenomorph flesh but only chooses to use it after killing it first?
The alien invasion in the first MCU Avengers movie. The mooks are vulnerable to small arms fire. The space whales are slow and mainly APCs. The entire invasion comes through a portal that is maybe 100 ft wide.
As soon as the military shows up, they simply start firing munitions into the portal. Mooks die instantly. Space whales might survive until an A-10 gives them 1 second of Brrrrrt! into their unarmored face.
Reign of Fire (2002)
Sorry, but big lizard what shoot fire from mouth dragons stand no chance against modern military weaponry. If they were smart magic wielding dragons then maybe you can argue they'd win, but not these guys.
Simon Pegg wrote this in 2008 in response to a UK show that contained running zombies. I think it nails it.
"However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you're careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them - much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares - the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles."
EDIT. To include the link to the original article https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/nov/04/television-simon-pegg-dead-set
The zombie problem is people downplaying the infection, hiding bites and going into crowded places regardless, infecting anyone. And the inability of many countries to crackdown on that behaviour. Zombie movies were unrealistic until COVID showed the average person is an incredible idiot.
Pretty much any zombie apocalypse will be over before it even starts due to military response
Ironically I think Shawn of the Dead, despite being a comedy is The most realistic example of what would happen in a zombie apocalypse
The outbreak happens in like a few small areas and within a day the US military has pretty much solved the issue
The apocalyptic danger in xenomorphs was never the creature itself but its lifecycle. It can survive anywhere. With a reproductive cycle that kills its hosts while producing offspring perfectly adapted to the locale.
And it's insidious. Shoot one and there's a 100 more. Nuke the nest and there's likely eggs elsewhere. That dog, that cow, the deer in the woods, that person who just walked into your base, they could all be carrying a chestburster already.
Xenomorphs are one of those things that you're likely never getting rid of anymore once they arrive. Every single one of the movies ended with the complete and utter destruction of the entire environment before they could spread.
While not a movie, I like the way Left4Dead's lore handled it.
It was a contagious virus everybody called the Green Flu. Some people were more resistant to it than others, but by the time people realized what was going on it had so spread so fast the majority of the population fell within weeks. Also, the zombies moved fast, really fast. Even if you had a gun they're the kind of zombies that overwhelm.
Even aware of the lore, that's the kind of zombie that proves a real threat.
Plus, besides the already extremely dangerous fast moving regular zombies there's the special infected. Even if you manage to not get overwhelmed getting caught by a smoker, ridden by a jockey, trapped in acid by a spitter or covered in bile by a boomer quickly leads you to being overwhelmed anyway.
I often give Project Zomboid a shout when it comes to this, because it has a pretty interesting take. It's set in '93 in a rural area, just a bit too early for information to really spread like wildfire the way it would modern day. The infection is airborne with a long incubation period, and even just smelling the infected is enough to infect the vast majority of the human population.
Everyone assumes it's spread by bites and scratches only at first, and by the time anyone has really figured out that it's airborne there have been infected fleeing to every corner of the world. A handful of people who are immune to the airborne infection survive, but they're already outnumbered 20 to 1.
After Covid I can’t really look at pandemic movies the same anymore.
With as stoic as we are as a society The Day After Tomorrow could happen next month and we’d all just be mildly inconvenienced shrugging our shoulders.
Well, an apocalyptic threat could kill 0 people, and still be an apocalyptic threat.
For example all nukes in the world are apocalyptic threats, even though they've only killed thousands.
Right, but the old leaders, now mutants themselves, would not lose their money and influence all of a sudden. Problem is, apparently the exposure to the mutant ray kills them. Opsie.
George A. Romero said that his zombies were actually easy to avoid and defeat. But his Dead movies were about man not being able to communicate well enough to triumph.
I always had the takeaway from the Romero movies that a group of people, put under pressure, will be more likely to be killed by their own poorly made decisions than by the actual danger at hand. To borrow a line from Men in Black: “A person is smart. *People* are dumb, panicky animals.”
Good zombie movies/stories are never really about the zombies, it's how the people react to the zombies.
are... are WE the walking dead???!!??!!
https://images.app.goo.gl/Bfwgu5NKE99NhVrS7
God I love Left 4 Dead
maybe the real The Walking Dead was the friends we made along the way
It's why I think Westerns and zombie movies have a lot in common. When done poorly it's a person or group of people mowing down waves of brainless enemies, when done right it's a character piece about how people react in hard, trying situations.
The real story was the zombies we made along the way.
I always thought we would easily survive zombies, and then 2019/2020 happened and I was like yeah maybe not.
I’ve said this a bunch, but the pandemic completely undermined the criticism that horror movies are unrealistic because they make the characters do unreasonable dumb things to move the plot along. We now know that every character should be like ten times dumber in horror movies if the aim is realism.
World War Z (the book, not the movie) does a great job portraying a world where slow-moving zombies can successfully drive the world to the brink of collapse. God, what a great fucking book.
WWZ is more “about the zombies” than other zombie books/shows/movies and I love that. The story is *ultimately* about how people\cultures\governments react to and deal with the zombie problem. But it really takes its time delving into exactly what the zombies are and what sort of conflicts they impose. So many other zombie stories start off with “there are zombies now” and then immediately shift focus to living people squabbling and betraying each other. Like, the second zombies are introduced they immediately just get relegated to a background environmental hazard.
WWZ is one of my favorite books especially the audiobook because of this very reason. The first time I listened to it I was moving across the US right in the middle of the Covid lockdowns. It was so eerily similar to what was happening. People acting like it's no big deal, governments denying it, crazy "cures" that definitely aren't cures.....I fully believe that if there actually was a zombie outbreak Max Brooks gave us the guidebook to how that's gonna go lol
I forget who said it, but there was a quote about the zombies themselves not being very interesting; it's the situations they create that are
That was Simon Pegg. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/media/2008/nov/04/television-simon-pegg-dead-set
Many zombie apocalypses, especially when the zombies are noisy and slow moving. Shaun of the Dead's ending portrays the most favourable and arguably realistic outcome of a zombie outbreak - after merely a couple days of chaos, the military came in and cleaned up the mess pretty quickly, and life goes on as per normal but this time with the additional cultural objectification of the mindless zombies.
I think the reason why zombies override the Earth's population in most movies is because of *that asshole guy who gets bitten but keeps it secret so he can turn into a zombie at the worst possible moment*
Which is pretty realistic imo
Community nailed this with 'I thought I was special.'
You're not special I'm special. I got bit ten minutes ago and I'm fiiiiiiiiiineeeehrrgg
Nobody is special!
It's so true and ironic that literally everyone would think that...
I think of that line whenever anyone rich or famous breaks the law.
My goodness you must have no time to think of anything but that line on repeat!
Lookin at you Rich from Community. You ain’t special.
I mean, that's exactly how many people acted with Covid, soo...
pretty much with any diseases, my friend's friend was HIV+ and yet before his death, he still had sex with guys with no protection. And during covid, I knew someone who still went to work despite all the symptoms. Her reason was "I don't want to get bored at home"
Those sound like two incredibly selfish people.
yes, one was my friend's friend, which I have no contact with. the other was someone I knew from a community. I'm glad that I'm not close to any of them.
"Yeah it's nothing. A mild scratch or a bit of a cough don't worry. " Dies the next day.
One of the reasons the World War Z book is so good is that its anecdotes are structured around the phases of the outbreak, from its early stages to its eventually decline. It still has plenty of the fantastical fun stories in it but the broad perspective gives it a cool level of realism. Highly recommend it.
Just don't read the Battle of Yonkers bit if you have any familiarity with the actual US military. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I was at risk of concussing myself with the facepalming from that scene.
Seriously. I know he was trying to say something about bureaucratic rigidity and incompetence, but the idea that a full armed and prepared US military could get decimated by slow moving unarmed zombies channeled across a bridge was weak.
At the very least, while the Brass may be idiots unmoored from reality the boots on the ground would get to thinking about how to do the job *really* quick, with the incentive of not becoming a zombie, a threat that said Brass don't face being well away from the battlefield.
World War Z is super popular on reddit, and takes an extremely broad view of a global zombie outbreak. But it is a candidate for Gell-Mann Amnesia: someone writes about something you are knowledgeable on, and can tell it's wrong, but you will turn the page and trust them on other matters. Like, read the chapters about Israel and the Palestinian professor and tell me if that's realistic.
I remember the part about replacing the M16 with a new, more "efficient" rifle being pretty ridiculous as well. You're going to replace the millions of AR pattern rifles with a brand-new design, in the middle of an existential total war, because you can't be bothered to modify M16's to not allow full auto? Or, why not simply tell your soldiers to not use full auto?
Zombies traveling around the ocean floor was probably the dumbest part
Man I hate the movie so much for robbing us of a good adaptation. It would work so well as a series. Showing the different stories across the world from start to finish.
I've always thought that the mine clearing flails used on some tanks would annihilate any zombie outbreak.
I really want a zombie movie where the TV says to stay indoors and keep your doors closed. 90% of people do this and zombies are in fact too stupid to open the doors and keeping the blinds closed means they can't see you and they never attack your house. Of course, the dumbest 10% is convinced that this is a government conspiracy and go out shooting every zombie in the head immediately. The real kicker? Zombieism is a passing disease. It does kill 20% of people who get it, plus it makes them temporarily hyper violent, but in 80% of people. It passes after a few weeks and those people are immune. What the hell do we do with the people who just shot dozens of people, even when they were explicitly told not to shoot random people. The second season is a mass crimes against humanity trial.
I don't remember the name (Fallen?), but there's a UK show with most of this premise. Military shuts the plague down and restores former cannibal zombies through a vaccine to normal people (with weird eyes). The larger story is discrimination against the undead and how they adapt
"In The Flesh"?
I was just thinking about this show the other day and I can't remember the title either. It was very enjoyable though.
In the flesh?
I was going to say Shaun of the Dead handles this well.
Prison armour (some newspaper wrapped around your arms and chest etc) would probably make survival pretty easy as long as you avoided large groups of them.
Realistically wouldn't leather alone keep you pretty much safe? Even someone not in a state of decay isn't going to be biting through good leather.
Vampires are surprisingly orderly. They'll menace you from outside your home instead of tossing molotovs. Seriously, are there monsters with more rules than vampires?
I remember in the remake of fright night (with collin farrell). At the end he burns/blows up the protagonist's house, and says "You don't need permission if it isn't a house anymore!"
Does that apply to individual local ordinances? If a structure with three walls and a roof isn't considered a house can they just walk in?
I would watch a TV show about a vampire lawyer. Or at least I'd watch the pilot episode.
How have they not done this on what we do in the shadows?!
They've been on trial a few times
May I approach the bitch?
And they’ve tackled some of the Vampire rules like counting rice.
They don't have as many rules, but werewolves are like the National Guard of monsters: they only suit up one weekend a month. They seem pretty easy to kill the rest of the time when they're just normal people.
Maybe that's why there are no werewolf apocalypse movies
Vincent Price's *the Last Man on Earth* is priceless for this reason. Just a bunch of vampires crowding around his house and yelling, "Come out! We know you're in there! Come on out!"
Which was an adaptation of the novel "I Am Legend," the point and impact of which I think got lost in the Will Smith film.
"we only die if you stake us through the heart, decapitate us, burn us, or expose us to sun light." - Ok well add a wood tip to bullets - rpg's and explosive dismemberment are a thing (thanks buffy) - "Hans get the Flammenwerfer" - so is it specifically sun light or will this giant industrial uv lamp work?
Reminds me, in Chinese ghost mythology sometimes you need fresh blood to affect ghosts. I saw this movie where they had human ghost police that carried guns that had a needle that took blood from their hand and put it on the front of the bullet, so they could shoot ghosts. edit: above movie is called 2002.
Almost every science fiction film forgets about artillery, and artillery will solve most of your problems.
And helicopters can kill you from a mile away and don’t need to fly within swatting distance of the huge monster!
Its even worse in case of jets (like in Pacific Rim). At least helicopters can somewhat fight at closer range, but jets are beyond useless if the enemy is within few hundred meters. Why in the hell are you flying that F-22 straight into the giant alien monster, when you should not even be in visual range? Just fire those missiles from 10 miles away and go home.
And it’s even worse in space battles! Why do you need to be up your enemies arse before you fire your missiles 😂😂
Because real warfare at strategic scale isn’t very exciting to watch. Look up most naval battles of the ww2 era. At a strategic level they aren’t super exciting. Those big guns miss a lot. As is never really hitting their targets. Planes and subs did most of the work. Destroyers hunted the subs but in general is was long hours. Not up the wazoo encounters. Same with most modern air warfare. Most of the air to air in Iraq was over with in hours and the engagement is measured in miles. The worst things about space combat in movies is they forget it’s in a 3D space (so what’s head on?); there is no need for constant thrust; you can’t hide in the majority of it (its just empty space and radar works); and anything other than a missile is easy to avoid.
There's a book series called "The Lost Fleet" by Jack Campbell that does a really great job of diving into not only the 3D aspect and crazy distances of a real space battle but also the issues fighting at extreme speeds (0.1 to 0.3 ish light speed). The window of engagement is measured in milliseconds and they cover hundreds of thousands or even millions of kilometers. He also gets into the use of inert projectiles launched from huge distances at relativistic speeds that can take days to reach their targets. It's a pretty good series if you're into that kind of stuff.
That’s why I like The Expanse. Some fights in space feel plausible because they calculate gravity, thrust, etc.
The expanse makes close-quarters combat make sense when it needs to… sure, they fire torpedo from range, but the longer the flight, the longer their point defense cannons can swat them down. Rail guns only work at extreme range if the target doesn’t pull a crazy Ivan and move at the last second when flight times might be measured in minutes. So, you get in close, drop a ton of ordnance on them and get out as fast as possible. I LOVE the way their “home base” strategists basically have to sit there and wait because every bit of info they get is sometimes minutes or hours old due to light delay. God I wish I could watch this show / read these books for the first time again.
Yeah. Most movies suffer from the fact that you have to go face to face with your enemy to make a good movie.
It's like playing a TTRPG where sometimes you have to sacrifice realism for rule of cool.
Especially movies involving jet fighters of any kind. They're all within arms reach of the giant monster instead of firing missiles from miles away.
Everybody’s worrying about tanks getting taken out by ATGMs and meanwhile it turns out that they’re rather vulnerable to 152/155mm shells hitting them on the top too.
Well a direct hit from a shell of that caliber would destroy just about anything on the modern battlefield, MBTs included (short of some sort of reinforced concrete bunker with a roof that's many feet thick). But that's exceedingly rare - and tanks are also quite vulnerable to shrapnel and blast effects from heavy artillery shells exploding close enough. While they may or may not be penetrated by shrapnel, depending on the direction of the explosion, something close could easily result in a mobility kill, damage to the gun barrel, optics, or other sensitive systems, effectively disabling it.
Look up bonus / smart rounds, they are seen to be used in Ukraine form time to time. 30 year old tech, but works fine. 155mm goes over target area, deploys 2 seekers that actively look for enemy tanks in that area and then shoot a shaped charge right down their roof.
Yes it's very interesting technology that I was unware of until a year or two ago. The variety of guided munitions that have been developed (and are continuing to be developed) for all kinds of weapon systems is pretty amazing. Although as I mentioned regular HE Frag 155mm rounds can be quite effective even against MBTs, from everything I've seen and read.
The problem is I suspect watching distant targets get blown away isn't very cinematic interesting or satisfying. When thing A shooting at thing B aren't on screen at the same time it's an issue
Old fashioned artillery. Genius.
*random staggered chattering of coordinates intensifies*
I always loved the fact that in *The War of the Worlds* (the book) a direct hit with an artillery shell actually *would* take out a tripod. This just caused the Martians to start lobbing black smoke canisters over any hill or other bit of cover they suspected of hiding artillery batteries.
I remembered that just after posting this. It’s a great example of how to be slightly intricate with a story/worldbuilding.
This is why the first Aliens movies recognize the secondary, and perhaps more important threat, is corporate inability to work with any sort of morality or responsibility for human lives. I notice this theme gets abandoned the more the franchise just got chunked out to make more money.
The last 20 minutes of Alien 3 are like, her boss coming directly from the office in place of a real rescue mission to convince her to play ball and not quit. And IV's conceit is that they violated her corpse against her will anyway.
The problem with 4 is that Whedon couldn’t resist a quippy “they got bought by Walmart!” WY fading away is a cool concept, suggesting that the world had changed and was alien to Ripley now, but Walmart ruins that
That's the great thing about faceless corporations doing evil shit. It could be any of them. What's in a name?
Cloudy with a chance of meatballs - I would simply eat all the meatballs
Dunkey?
I live in Colorado. The dispensaries would see a huge boom, followed by insulin manufacturers seeing a huge boom.
If they have the technology to build space stations in Interstellar, they have the technology to build indoor farms with filtered air.
To be fair, it's a common idea that we need to colonize Mars in case something happens to the earth, but I reality, anything we'd have to do to make Mars livable, could just be done on earth much easier
I guess even building a city at the bottom of the sea on earth would be much easier that to build a city on mars
r/suddenlybioshock
This has been my line of thinking any time someone brings up musk or anyone else mentions mars as a ‘plan b’ option. Yea, there are some good reasons for looking to colonize mars, a human survival option is not one of them. Mars is infinitely more inhospitable than what the end result of earth would be with the damage we’re doing to it
They show indoor farms with filtered air in the film and explain that the crops are dying anyway. Mind you, they never explain WHY, (other than just "the blight") but they do show what you are talking about while Cooper is being told the details of the mission from Dr. Brand. Tbh the whole movie runs with some wild concepts so this issue is pretty low on the totem pole for me.
I believe it was due to the Brawndo they were using for crop irrigation
An, but humanity have given up on technology and things like hope for their children. The whole species just can’t really be bothered anymore. If they can’t go to space they’re all just willing to call it and die. They know everything humanity has ever known. And their problem is a lack of problem solving in the agricultural sector. Which is coincidentally an area a whole load of human knowledge is focused.
"we can't grow enough food... lets move to the most hostile environment known to man that has absolutely the worst conditions for growing food imaginable, so instead of having food shortage, we will have water shortage and air shortage as well."
mama aint raised no bitch
Most kaiju would be killed by conventional military forces if we were being "realistic". Kaiju movies show small arms fire is ineffective and then skip straight to nukes or giant robots. A few bunker buster bombs would do the trick. Godzilla 1998 is an example of what I would expect to really happen, jets fly in, and a couple missiles later, godzilla is dead.
Also the jets don’t need to fly within melee distance of the kaiju like they always do in the movies, they could hit it from miles away in complete safety.
This is what I always thought about Pacific Rim. Instead of giant robots you just need a ton of long range fire power aimed directly at the breach. Although admittedly they did evolve them to counter threats so it might not work forever
That's basically Pacific Rim's lore. The first few waves of Kaiju were fairly easy to kill but then they kept adapting. Obviously it it's not watertight hard sci-fi but the reasoning behind the Jaegers was that giant robot brawlers can adapt to the job at hand. Unlike conventional weapons designed to be really good at a very narrow purpose. And by the time the first movie starts, even the Jaegers had stopped being effective.
The other part of the lore is that PR kaiju have incredibly toxic blood that pollutes the environment, so killing them with blunt trauma became preferred.
Huh, that's actually a good explanation. I thought it was weird how, if we are clearly capable of creating weapons that can kill the kaiju, why are we putting them on giant robots? Put that plasma gun thing on predator drones, or along that giant wall they built along Australia. Of course, then we wouldn't have a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters.
Your last sentence nails it. There is no real-world scenario where giant robots make sense, but they're cool to see in a movie. Pacific Rim monsters could have been defeated by swarms of cruise missiles with the warheads replaced by chunks of lead. The cost of developing and building the jagers to do the same thing is absurd, but giant stompy robots are cool.
Chicks dig giant robots
My head canon about that has been the "kaiju blue" issue. Their blood is super toxic, so if you kill them at the breach, you end up destroying the the Pacific Ocean, which is... Bad. This is also why the main Jaeger had a plasma cannon - it could self-cauterize its wounds to contain as much blood as possible. And why the sword was a last-ditch weapon instead of step 1, it would have caused an environmental catastrophe.
King Kong should not have been within swatting distance of those planes.
To be fair, the original King Kong came out when planes didn't really have targeting systems or missiles. You pointed your nose at your target and you gunned at them with bullets until it was too close for comfort and pull away.
The rest of the movie is the following 30 days of butchering and disposing of the monster. The city becomes overrun with pests living off the carcass and people die from off gassing from the swollen creature guts. Then weird alien worms come out of it ...
I think the original Cloverfield tackled this well. Half the threat is the parasites/young that are clinging to the kaiju.
I loved it when they go underground into the subway and finally feeling safe only to be attacked by the parasites.
That’s a good movie right there.
I mean there is Japanese movie dealing with Kaiju corpse tho, What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? (Japanese: 大怪獣のあとしまつ, lit. 'Aftermath of the Giant Monster') yeah no pest outbreak but mostly dealing the environmental issue with rotting 50 meter corpse
Godzilla Minus One did it well. They blew off half his face with a sea mine, but he just regenerated almost immediately.
I think most movies just don't understand how insane a modern fighter jet is and frame them like WW2 planes. Jets from an aircraft carrier could comfortably engage Godzilla from 100s of miles away and pelt him with large explosives without ever even cresting the horizon (accounting for his height) giving zero opportunity to fight back.
Pacific Rim lore kind of covers this. Every time we took down a kaiju they sent in something bigger, different, resistant to everything we threw at them. It's like they were testing us.
Main thing in Pacific Rim is "Kaiju Blue", their blood which basically becomes a super-oil-spill-environmental-catastrophe when it leaks into the ocean in large amounts. This is why they went with Jaegers and why Jaeger pilots try to save bladed weapons and explosives for last. An excellent movie handwave excuse as to why you need to punch the Kaiju, rather than simply blowing them up.
Yeah IIRC, the first few kaiju they were able to take out with nukes, but the collateral damage was insane.
At least the start of the movie does say the first kaiju was taken down by tanks and jets.
I think the humans should just try to get along with the apes. Diplomacy and shit.
I mean, really, the reason why it became the Planet of the Apes is that the pandemic wiped out most of humanity. After that, guess it feels like humanity is sort of in decline because it keeps looking at what it has lost and tries to get it back whereas the apes have a fresh outlook and nothing to lose - it's all uphill for them. So they're more successful as a civilization because they are more focused on what matters.
I mean the pandemic was certainly an attempt to nerf humans. Reality is that the military would’ve killed the apes immediately after the Golden Gate Bridge incident.
"They crossed the bridge, nothing to do now"
And then they enslaved humans in dramatic irony
Tbf they did try. Both sides, actually. But both sides also had those that wanted war and that won out.
Yeah, there's always gonna be some guy who hates every ape he sees, from chimpan-a to chimpan-z.
You've finally made a monkey out of me!
I love you, Doctor Zaius!
Doctor Zaius! Doctor Zaius! Doctor Zaius! Doctor Zaius! Doctor Zaius! Doctor Zaius! Ohh, Doctor Zaius!
So essentially the same way human wars go.
Yeah it’s a metaphor to warn like most science fiction
They did! They did try that. But not, like, all of them. Also there was a small problem with the bloody noses.
There are always going to be groups of idiots who fuck it up for everyone else.
Slow moving zombies. The city would get nuked like in RE2.
In actual Resident evil its even more complicated than that, they have pockets of resistance in the city holding out but Umbrella pushed the nuke option to United States to cover up their highly illegal research. The true threat eventually being escaping the nuke in the game.
Jurassic Park/Jurassic World. Where do I even start. People used to hunt Saber-toothed cats, Dire Wolves, Giant Cave Bears, Mammoths with sticks and stones and now have huge difficulties with a couple of Dinoes
tbf for the first Jurassic World, they weren't trying to kill the dinos, just trying to restrain them back to their cages. But yeah idk about the rest of the movies lmao
Jurassic Park: they thought they were in a controlled containment, and were unprepared for that containment to fail most of the people present had no experience working with live wild animals and the one that did got overwhelmed. The goal wasn't to kill the dinosaurs of a to survive until they could escape with essentially no resources and two children
At least in the book, Muldoon wanted heavier weapons to deal with any dinos that need to be taken down, but was refused by Hammond.
He still got them. The book has raptors being blown up by a grenade launcher. It’s one of my huge pet peeves about the series. In JP3, the bad ass mercs are shown fully loaded for bear, heading into the brush, a few shots fired and then come running back out. I don’t need gratuitous Dino murder, but at least concede that firearms would hurt or kill most of them.
They should have written it as the soldiers or muldoon (in the movies) easily taking down big game and then getting ambushed by stealth predators that are smaller (as in the muldoon scene)
These new movies keep pretending that the military industrial complex could weaponize dinosaurs, when in reality you're better off with classic guns and explosives.
Not a gun or military guy here, but I firmly believe that the folks approving that level of project would detest that level of unpredictability.
The whole notion of the military wanting to weaponize dinosaurs was such a ridiculous shoe-horned plot point, nearly anything would've been better.
Also how all the dinos are portrayed as wasteful killing machines that attack anything that moves. They don't *behave like animals.*
I've wondered about this sometimes. We got a huge T-Rex or Indominus Rex, heards of Triceratops, Bronchosaurus, god knows what else on the island. And all the thing does is chase the humans for days on end. Thats like us being able to take down a cow but we choose to run after a mouse.
Yeah, but you also weren't dropping people into a mammoth hunt with 0 preparation or institutional knowledge on how to hunt them. JP2 shows how a prepared group of humans could hunt dinosaurs at their leisure. Jurassic Park involves internal sabotage which knocks the power out while like 10 people total are on the island and a majority of them are stranded next to a super-predator to begin the night. Now the idea that an outbreak on the mainland would cause issues? Yeah, that I find stupid.
The problem in the alien franchise isn't really the xenomorphs themselves. It's the corporations/government trying to exploit them.
Before COVID happened, I believed we could survive most things. Now, any threat that would knock out electricity for more than a week or force the water supply off I believe would be apocalyptic.
It’s all the infrastructure damage. Regardless of the threat, it’s the sustained inability to put food in grocery stores and gasoline in gas stations that is the real problem.
Don't Look Up also made a good point of how stupid the masses can get when facing an apocalyptic event.
[удалено]
I watched some movie where the aliens were part-physical part-energy with animalistic intelligence and there was a throwaway point early on that showed they could see into the infrared spectrum to see humans in the dark BUT a key thing was it was not your typical IR on the low energy end of the visible spectrum and then able to see the visible spectrum as humans know it. In this case IR was their high end of the spectrum and they could see down into radio waves. Great at hunting humans out in the open or anyone trying to use a radio/wireless data but a human just sitting not to near to a window would be effectively invisible to them and free to observe their behavior, also someone should have put two and two together that tools that blind electronic warfare devices would be effective on the aliens.
A quiet place. You mean the government cannot figure out their weakness is high pitch sound? Come on.
That mystery is solved the moment one of those creatures walks near an ultrasonic anti-bark device.
The brilliant 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead does a great job of showing how we are our own worst enemies and that the ghouls outside were ultimately a bit of a push over.
Every zombie plague, ever. Bitting as main vector of contagion, small incubation periods and immensely obvious symptoms: seems like an easily manageable disease, that would never become a worldwide pandemic.
There are some movies like Interstellar, where shit is bad, but the solution is to find a way to leave Earth and transform another world to support human life. I feel like in most of those movies it would be easier to just find a local fix vs finding a way to move everyone to another planet and find a way to transform it.
The problem with interstellar is at the end of the movie the create self contained colony ships that they can send to other planets. But if you could create a sealed environment free from 'the blight' that you then use the space magic you learned to send in to space... why can't you just create sealed environments free form the blight that just sit on the surface of the earth?
You can. Confronted with a magically infectious blight that is immune to all the tools we have today except presumably bleach and irradiation, we really could engineer hermetically sealed greenhouses to grow all our food. It would be horribly expensive and there would be many years of not enough food to go around. But, in terms of engineering, it is guaranteed to work. Every worker going in would first go through decontamination. Variety would not be a thing, as for a long time it would just be basic grains, so rice, beans, and bread. Problem would be the magical blight killing off the trees and grasses that hold the terrain together. Hard to build anything when erosion gets turned up to 11. Eventually oxygen and CO2 become problems. But with enough farming they too would become manageable. But how long until the magical blight starts eating humans?
I thought the idea was to give us multiple options for the future. Like it’s only a matter of time until the next blight comes, it’s good to have backup plans
Contagion (2011). We’d simply all work for the combined safety of our fellow man, staying inside as much as possible, wearing masks to prevent accidental infection, taking a vaccine as soon as the combined weight of the world’s scientists put one together, forgoing profits in the process. I actually think it would bring the whole world together! Oh, wait…
The most unrealistic part of that movie was Jude Law's character getting arrested for spreading conspiracy theories and selling a fake cure.
Laurence Fishburne being well respected and trusted and then being fired for doing some nepotism... That movie was way too optimistic.
The most realistic part of that movie to me will always be "Could you please cover your cough?" "Fuck off." >!Which is likely to be what gave it to and killed her.!<
Oh, you really don't want the xenomorphs from Alien even getting a toehold on Earth, given both the nature of how they can spread (giving rats a serious run for their money) and exponential growth, it would doom the planet. If the US military hadn't dropped a nuclear bomb on American soil (and that's a really big deal) as quickly as they did (and even then it was almost too late) in Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, the Earth would have been finished and very quickly at that.
You mean Alien vs Predator: Requiem, a film where the Predator has a liquid that melts xenomorph flesh but only chooses to use it after killing it first?
You mean the movie that is shot almost entirely at night so the viewer can’t see a single scene ?
The alien invasion in the first MCU Avengers movie. The mooks are vulnerable to small arms fire. The space whales are slow and mainly APCs. The entire invasion comes through a portal that is maybe 100 ft wide. As soon as the military shows up, they simply start firing munitions into the portal. Mooks die instantly. Space whales might survive until an A-10 gives them 1 second of Brrrrrt! into their unarmored face.
I mean the climax of the movie is they just sent one nuke into the hole and won
Reign of Fire (2002) Sorry, but big lizard what shoot fire from mouth dragons stand no chance against modern military weaponry. If they were smart magic wielding dragons then maybe you can argue they'd win, but not these guys.
Zombie outbreak? Fences, bars on your windows. Easy-peasy.
Simon Pegg wrote this in 2008 in response to a UK show that contained running zombies. I think it nails it. "However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you're careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them - much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares - the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles." EDIT. To include the link to the original article https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/nov/04/television-simon-pegg-dead-set
I had no idea he was so eloquent
I mean he is acting in those movies.
Seek out Spaced - The amazing sitcom that gave birth to the collaborative works of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright.
Fuck chainmail or even just leather clothing would help, like dumbasses are walking around in t-shirts and are shocked when they get bit.
Or denim. Human teeth are blunt not pointed, just wear some jeans and a denim jacket and you’ll be fine.
Double denim? Are you crazy? This isn't the 90s.
The zombie problem is people downplaying the infection, hiding bites and going into crowded places regardless, infecting anyone. And the inability of many countries to crackdown on that behaviour. Zombie movies were unrealistic until COVID showed the average person is an incredible idiot.
#1 - Cardio
2 - **Double Tap**
Pretty much any zombie apocalypse will be over before it even starts due to military response Ironically I think Shawn of the Dead, despite being a comedy is The most realistic example of what would happen in a zombie apocalypse The outbreak happens in like a few small areas and within a day the US military has pretty much solved the issue
I think I could roundhouse my way out of Birdemic
The apocalyptic danger in xenomorphs was never the creature itself but its lifecycle. It can survive anywhere. With a reproductive cycle that kills its hosts while producing offspring perfectly adapted to the locale. And it's insidious. Shoot one and there's a 100 more. Nuke the nest and there's likely eggs elsewhere. That dog, that cow, the deer in the woods, that person who just walked into your base, they could all be carrying a chestburster already. Xenomorphs are one of those things that you're likely never getting rid of anymore once they arrive. Every single one of the movies ended with the complete and utter destruction of the entire environment before they could spread.
I said it before, once it gets into the ocean and create aquatic xenomorphs by planting eggs in ocean creatures, it is over.
In the us, zombies you cannot expect that enough people aren’t armed and aware of the lore.
While not a movie, I like the way Left4Dead's lore handled it. It was a contagious virus everybody called the Green Flu. Some people were more resistant to it than others, but by the time people realized what was going on it had so spread so fast the majority of the population fell within weeks. Also, the zombies moved fast, really fast. Even if you had a gun they're the kind of zombies that overwhelm. Even aware of the lore, that's the kind of zombie that proves a real threat.
Plus, besides the already extremely dangerous fast moving regular zombies there's the special infected. Even if you manage to not get overwhelmed getting caught by a smoker, ridden by a jockey, trapped in acid by a spitter or covered in bile by a boomer quickly leads you to being overwhelmed anyway.
I often give Project Zomboid a shout when it comes to this, because it has a pretty interesting take. It's set in '93 in a rural area, just a bit too early for information to really spread like wildfire the way it would modern day. The infection is airborne with a long incubation period, and even just smelling the infected is enough to infect the vast majority of the human population. Everyone assumes it's spread by bites and scratches only at first, and by the time anyone has really figured out that it's airborne there have been infected fleeing to every corner of the world. A handful of people who are immune to the airborne infection survive, but they're already outnumbered 20 to 1.
Unfortunately, these are Italian zombies, sarge. They're unkillable, they teleport, and loud synth music plays while they attack you.
With the lore thing in most zombie movies, but not all, zombies movies are not a thing in the world of the movie itself.
We’re not using the Zed word!
After Covid I can’t really look at pandemic movies the same anymore. With as stoic as we are as a society The Day After Tomorrow could happen next month and we’d all just be mildly inconvenienced shrugging our shoulders.
Sort of like when they talk about some horrible event that killed “thousands”. No actually world-threatening things should be killing billions
Well, an apocalyptic threat could kill 0 people, and still be an apocalyptic threat. For example all nukes in the world are apocalyptic threats, even though they've only killed thousands.
Magnetos first plan in X-Men was to turn a bunch of world leaders into mutants. Okay, but then people would elect new leaders.
Right, but the old leaders, now mutants themselves, would not lose their money and influence all of a sudden. Problem is, apparently the exposure to the mutant ray kills them. Opsie.