I have just seen a film. A magnificent film. A true work of innovation, given to us by none other than one of our most beloved living actors.

On top of his stellar acting career, king of cool George Clooney has also directed several films, often quite good ones, sometimes even great ones such as Good Night and Good Luck, one of my personal favorite films of all time. But today I am not here to simply review a film, for mere review cannot do this work justice. I am instead here to spin a sonnet, one dedicated to the Netflix masterpiece; The Midnight Sky.

Mr. Clooney isn’t just a good director, but an inspirational one. For one, he sometimes eschews the traditional three-act structure that such plebeians as Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese tend to be bound by. This was done well enough in Good Night and Good Luck, which, being a film about conversations and rhetoric, itself kept a conversational pace. The Midnight Sky, however, further innovates with the bold decision to replace the three-act structure with…absolutely nothing.

Experimenting with pacing? HA! Try no pacing at all. Take that, Kubrick you hack!

What will truly touch the audience and put them in tune with the plight of the characters is to make the film a succession of things just kind of happening, going from introspection to action without so much as a facsimile of rhyme or reason.

Oh sure, the movie starts traditionally enough, with George Clooney’s character alone in an arctic base, maybe the last man in the world waiting to die. It is a setup that begs for both an interesting and unique character piece as well as any actor/directors dream, the kind of self-indulgence that the Oscars would trip over themselves to award. And it would be earned, it is a masterpiece in the making. Some would say it is a crime to waste such a cool idea for something more tried and true.

But Clooney doesn’t settle for taking advantage of a unique and interesting premise. Instead, he quickly adds a little girl, turning this from a movie about the sole remaining human allowing himself to waste away to a movie about a grizzled, tortured man rediscovering his humanity by becoming the father figure of a child of whose innocence is waning in this dead world.

Because that…

Has never…

Been Done…

BERFORE!

…I’m sure it’s brilliant this time.

So anyway, Clooney and the little girl have to journey through the arctic to contact a space exploration vessel and tell them not to come back to Earth, which is ravaged by radiation. Why is it ravaged by radiation? Some lesser films would give a quick explanation, maybe tie it in with the character’s plight, like perhaps it was a result of man’s hubris and the exploration vessel needs to make a new start, or maybe it was some random cataclysmic event, the Earth itself basically getting a terminal disease just like Clooney. Fast, efficient and effectively depicting the global stakes through the arc of the characters.

SOME movies would do this. But in another brilliant innovation, the movie instead simply doesn’t explain at all what happened. A cynical person might decry this as naked apathy on the part of the storyteller, but I choose to believe there is some grand point being made about the futility of details. Humanity is done, the Earth is uninhabitable, that’s all you need. It couldn’t possibly be laziness. That’s an absurd idea.

Speaking of the exploration vessel, here we get a full cast of top level Hollywood talent. We get more bold storytelling decisions, as long stretches of movie are spent with the characters having long conversations that communicate absolutely nothing to the audience. Again, many films would use dialogue to build empathy with the characters and let us know who they are so we can want to see them succeed in possibly starting the new humanity. But we’re here to innovate not reiterate, so instead the characters remain one dimensional all the way through, given maybe one character trait each so that their nonsensical decisions at the end can make sense.

Sure, maybe Kyle Chandler and Demián Bichir’s characters returning to Earth to despite knowing they’ll die a horrible death SEEMS nonsensical, but they kept rambling about their families so it makes sense, yeah?

In fact, there is another layer to this; one could say the people on the ship reflect the audience, with Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo being the people who see the genius of this film and leave ready to start a whole new life, unable to go back to where they used to be, such is the enlightenment that comes with this work.

Meanwhile, Kyle Chandler and Demián Bichir represent the rest of the audience who just don’t get it, opting to die a slow burning death from radiation poisoning because that sounds better than watching this ouroboros of tedious nothingness for even one more second. Not that I could relate, obviously.

The layers of subversion are without limit. Federico Fellini? More like Federico FAILini amirite?

It should also be noted that Clooney has clearly learned from his betters. He notably starred in Gravity, made by top-of-the-line filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, and in a lengthy sequence emulates that movies thrilling disastrous spacewalk. Not only does Clooney start the sequence with an endearing scene of all the characters singing a full pop song that surly would not make any audience member yearn for the sweet embrace of death, but then comes the real innovation. See, where Gravity held itself to normal standards by having it’s sequence be full of nails-in-your-seat tension and thrills, Clooney chooses to instead have Astronauts stuck in space avoiding deadly debris have all the thrill and tension of nearly stubbing your pinky toe on a rock but then you don’t. But then you find out you did stub your pinky toe just a little. And that’s a bummer.

See, it’s like real life. What’s more thrilling than real life?

Mr. Clooney also looks to the career of one M. Night Shyamalan, surly a director worth emulating, as he ends his film on not one, but two twists. Ah, but you see in the early days of Shyamalan’s career he would use plot twists to further the character based stories he was telling, giving a final revelation that recontextualized the entire story and hitting Bruce Willis (for it was always Bruce Willis) with devastating information that changed the context of everything he had learned from the rest of the story. It was a final jolt to the audience that didn’t just surprise them, but made the whole story one to remember forever.

Since this method has been so thoroughly established, The Midnight Sky eschews it, instead not only making one twist both insultingly predictable and yet landing with such a lack of impact or consequence that you wonder why they even bothered having it, but a second twist that actively detracts from the movie, making half of Clooney’s actions now completely pointless. And as I said these scenes were already big bags of nothing to begin with, so with one reveal Clooney successfully manages to make half his film actually less than nothing. The absolute mad lad. François Truffaut is swooning in his grave.

All of these elements come together to make The Midnight Sky one of the greatest works of subversive genius in the history of science fiction.

I mean, it must be, right?

Because if it isn’t than this would be one of the most insulting movies I’ve ever seen in my life. A vacuous void of a film that revels in it’s own lack of…anything, really. The total lack of characterization, theme or message, the refusal to take advantage of the genuinely interesting ideas presented in favor of overused cliché’s presented with great importance but zero innovation or interest. It would be all the self-important emptiness of a Zack Snyder movie but with all the excitement of an episode of Murder She Wrote.

And that just can’t be the case. I wasn’t being sarcastic when I praised Clooney, he has made some great and innovative films, he couldn’t have possibly made on the most unimaginably awful waste of potential in a sci-fi movie I’ve seen since Prometheus.

Right?

I have no real lead-in to this subject, for the title should say all.

…

I tried to open in something resembling iambic pentameter. That was embarrassing. Please forget that it happened.

William Shakespeare’s relationship with mainstream culture is a strange contradiction. His works are probably the first thing that comes to mind when someone thinks of “high art”. Shakespeare plays are often rejected at first glance by non “highbrow” individuals, the language written off as an impenetrable jumble of strangely flowing thees and thous. I call this strange because Shakespeare is about as populist as a writer can be. I’ve heard him described as the Michael Bay of his time, and while that is certainly hyperbolic there is a grain of truth in it. Shakespeare’s plays are generally incredibly simple tales aimed at a mainstream audience. There is rarely anything to read into the stories beyond the surface level, and the surface level typically just consists of tales where a collection of people do really stupid things informed entirely by their emotions. If it’s a comedy everything works out, if it’s a tragedy it doesn’t. The only real barrier is the language, which I argue is like learning how to ride a bike or learn a new sport; it seems incomprehensible at first, but keep at it and it quickly becomes second nature. The biggest problem is that there is a lot of antiquated dialect, but almost every Shakespeare book I’ve every read comes with annotations explaining what the outdated words and phrases mean so that shouldn’t be much of an issue. Once you get past that the plays are just fun, engaging stories enhanced by the language, which once you get used to it is really wonderful to hear and say.

That being said, I do understand that it can be difficult to get into Shakespeare, especially since the source of first exposure matter a lot. You can be introduced one of three ways: read the text yourself, attend a play, or see one of the many, MANY film adaptations. This being this blog we are obviously going to talk about films. But my point is that first impressions mean a lot, and in the case of Shakespeare the greatest obstacle is that first impression coming from an obnoxious windbag.

What?

Of course the doll is a better poet than me.

For years Shakespeare was represented in film by the likes of Sir Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. Geniuses both, their films masterpieces all…

…Masterpieces most, but also not particularly accessible, what with their haughty performances, slow pacing and overall portentous weight. Great if your snob like me, annoying if you’re a normal person (actually I don’t like Olivier movies, don’t tell my snob friends). They basically represent everything people fear Shakespeare is, artsy fartsy crap aimed at the criminally highbrow, more essays than entertainment.

Everything changed in 1989 with one film, and more importantly one filmmaker:

Celebrated Shakespearian actor Kenneth Branagh made his stunning film debut with his adaptation of Henry V, Shakespeare’s rousing war story, previously adapted by Olivier in 1944 as a piece of British military propaganda made at the behest of Winston Churchill (yes, really). Branagh, in contrast, adapts the play as an anti-war film, highlighted by gritty and true to life battle scenes. He also put together a cast of A-list stars who deliver the lines in a natural, accessible way that makes the dialogue easy to comprehend even if you don’t understand every word. The dialogue and scenes are also delivered with a more cinematic pace, bolstered by engaging cinematography and Patrick Doyle’s magnificent score. The result is a Shakespeare adaptation that spoke directly to the mainstream audience, rather than down to them.

The outcome of these decisions was a critical and financial success, which led to a decade long renaissance of Shakespeare adaptations that cribbed from Branagh’s style. A-list celebrities, contemporary settings and modern film pacing was the order of the day, and the result is a conga line of films that crushed the line between the intellectual and the accessible.

I’m not going to go into that much detail about many of these films, mostly because I’ll probably write about a lot of them individually in the future. I’m more interested in overall trends of this era of adaptations. I also recommend looking up the cast lists for all of these movies because pretty much all of them feature an all-star cast turning in great performances and listing all of them would take too long.

One of the things that can make Shakespeare a difficult pill to swallow is that his most famous plays are his tragedies. People tend to forget about all the light comedies he wrote, works far more digestible to the casual viewer. The 90’s, however, did not forget, and we got some high quality and very audience friendly adaptions. First and foremost was Kenneth Branagh returning for his bombastic take on Much Ado About Nothing, a pastoral rom-com that zeroed in on his dynamic with his then wife Emma Thompson. Branagh and Thompson as intellectual rivals-turned-lovers Benedick and Beatrice make for some of all-time best Shakespeare screen acting, their every scene sizzling with wit that makes the language as easy to follow as it has ever been. Another comedy was gender-bender comedy Twelfth Night, adapted by Trevor Nunn. The movie is an enjoyable one, but it is made impressive by the fact that the central joke survives the adaptation process, as the central joke of the shenanigans born from a woman pretending to be a man is a very stage specific concept, potentially ruined by having a camera clearly showing the lead actress and making it more difficult to swallow that anyone could mistake her for a man. However, the breezy feel of the movie, as well as the strength of the performances, carries it and allows the film to stand as the light fun it is meant to be. Unfortunately the most beloved of all Shakespeare comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was adapted in 1999 by Michael Hoffman to underwhelming effect. It’s pretty, well cast and uses the anachronistic stylings of 90’s Shakespeare to amusing effect, but none of it sticks together and it ends up pretty underwhelming. Still, not a bad rainy afternoon flick.

Another method of making the bard more digestible was to give Shakespeare plays a more modern setting. For example, Richard Loncraine’s Richard III moved the play’s historical setting to World War II era, turning Sir Ian McKellen’s (freaking top notch) take on the titular character into an analogue for the rise of Hitler. The result is uneven but very enjoyable. The most significant example of this stylistic choice, though, is Baz Luhrmann’s vision of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo + Juliet (I have no idea why the plus is in the title) takes the old teen tragedy and tries to make it more relevant to modern teens by setting it in…well, it’s not really Miami, more Miami through the filter of MTV, Nickelodeon and Spring Break videos. There is something inspired about this approach, though it comes with an obvious problem: The film is already dated in its approach, it’s vision of modern teens having only applied to its own generation. It does work as a time capsule of that era though, the dated fashions and aesthetic carried by the timeless story and text. Granted, the text is marred by the fact that Leonard DiCaprio and Clair Danes struggle with the language from beginning to end, resulting in performances that fluctuate between stilted and over-the-top as they try and compensate for their inability to naturally deliver the dialogue, a problem made even more baffling by the fact that most of the supporting cast does not share this problem (particularly Harold Perrineau’s practically peerless Mercutio). That fluctuation is characteristic of the movie, which bounces from inspired to annoying and back again constantly. If nothing else it is memorable, I suppose.

There was also a whole subgenre of adaptations would excise the text entirely, instead taking the story of a Shakespeare play and applying it to an entirely modern film, usually an entry of a then-popular film trend. These tended to be very loose adaptations that used the concepts of the plays and applied them to very modern stories. For example, Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You was a high school comedy of the She’s All That vein that loosely adapted Shakespeare’s notoriously repugnant romantic comedy The Taming of the Shew. The movie only really adapted the basic set up of the play, seeing Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger playing off-putting loners who form a touching relationship based on mutual understanding and empathy, rather than the plays ugly story of a weird man putting a difficult woman in her place. Also of note was My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant’s landmark entry in the New Queer Cinema movement (the rise of visible independent LGBTQ+ art in the 90’s). This films B-plot saw Keanu Reeves’ Scott, a street hustler and son of the local mayor, act out the story of Prince Hal form Henry the IV Parts 1 and 2. This worked shockingly well, demonstrating the relevance of the bard’s stories, that such an old tale can be married so affectingly to the most modern of concepts. On a less classy note there was Troma Studios’ Tromeo and Juliet, the first movie to be written by Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn. This was the story of Romeo and Juliet filtered through the lens of Troma Studios’ house style of budgetless campy ultraviolence and intentionally offensive schlock. And of course, Disney’s The Lion King, directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, cribbed heavily from Hamlet to box office shattering effect (The Lion King also has a lot of Henry IV in it but that’s neither here nor there).

I couldn’t find a subcategory in which to fit Oliver Parker’s Othello, which is a pretty straightforward adaptation, but it is pretty good and notable as one of the bizarrely few adaptations where Othello is played by a black actor (Laurence Fishbourne, magnificent), as opposed to…

…Yeah.

Franco Zeffirelli returned to Shakespeare after his definitive 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with a new version of Hamlet starring Mel Gibson.

People will tell it’s good.

People are lying to you.

Speaking of Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh made yet another splash with his own take on the bard’s masterpiece. Branagh’s Hamlet is notable for using the full play, where most adaptations cut large swaths out, often leaving out whole characters and subplots. The result is a 4-hour long epic that benefits fully from Branagh’s energetic direction, gorgeous set design, a ridiculously star studded cast that sees A-list actors in even the most incidental roles, and Patrick Doyle turning in another top notch score (he also did that in Much Ado About Nothing, I forgot to mention that). This combination of elements means the movie demands your attention at every moment, making it difficult to nod off in spite of the intimidating run time. It’s a tough sit but a deeply rewarding one, a crown jewel of this era.

If there could be said to be an endpoint for this trend, it would have to be Julie Taymor’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus, simply titled Titus…

…You know what? I can’t sum up Titus in brief. That’s for a future post. For now, let’s leave it at this: The woman who created The Lion King’s Broadway show made a movie out of Shakespeare’s worst play. The result, as could be expected, was a lot. And it is glorious.

Also, I would be remiss not to mention that a badly dubbed 1960’s German TV adaptation of Hamlet was featured and riffed in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Nothing to add, just wanted to bring it up.

It should be said that this era of Shakespeare movies did not just stop with the 90’s. The early 2000’s saw a series of misfires that resulted in the trend petering out. These included but where not limited to Michael Almereyda’s occasionally clever but mostly lame version of Hamlet, starring Ethan Hawke, set in the modern day, and notable as a deeply effective cure for insomnia. In the loose adaptation category was O, a modern version of Othello set in a high school. It is a product of the post Columbine age and an interesting and well-intentioned exploration of teen violence but ends up a deeply unpleasant misfire. It tries to be a commentary on modern racism and sociopathy in the preppy school setting, but the events of the play end up severely counterproductive to that theme and the results are ugly and confused. Rounding us off is another Kenneth Branagh joint, this time an ambitious adaptation that turns the rather underwhelming romantic comedy Love’s Labor’s Lost into a jukebox musical. Yes, this is a movie where actors speak in Shakespearean dialect until they suddenly break into showtunes of 1930’s musical numbers lifted from the likes of Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. I’d be lying if I said it worked, but I’d also be lying if I said it wasn’t kind of fun. At the very least it’s hard not to appreciate what an obvious labor of love it is, though fittingly it was ultimately a loss. The critical and financial disappointment of Love’s Labor’s Lost pretty much put the brakes on Branagh’s momentum, and he ultimately only made one more Shakespeare adaptation, that being As You Like It. This one is good but unremarkable, retaining Branagh’s characteristic joyful energy and engaging cinematography and performances, but lacking the spark of his earlier work.

So what point am I making with all this? Well…

…
…Uh…

…Yeah, not much more too it than that. So consider this a recommendation list while we are stuck inside in these trying times. Basically everything I have discussed (save the post 90’s paragraph) are enjoyable, accessible and worth watching, so if you are averse to Shakespeare maybe now is the time to take a step outside your comfort zone. You may be surprised.

P.S. It has come to my attention that in 1990 there was an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet filmed in Venice starring feral cats. Yes, really, director Armondo Linus Acosta filmed local cats, got Shakespearean actors like John Hurt and Maggie Smith to overdub them and set it to classic orchestra (Hurt also plays the crazy cat lady who oversees the cats). It seems like you cannot see this movie anywhere, but I declare it the greatest thing ever anyway. Here is the trailer, watch it and weep.

Warning: The following was written in half an hour in a confused frenzy and may not be coherent.

…

May be less coherent than usual. 

…Okay, you know what? I know I said no season 8 rants, but just indulge me. How on God’s green earth did D&D botch Daenerys’s character so hard?

Here’s the thing: in the books, where we have access to Daenerys’s thoughts, there is a clear build up to an eventual downfall. We can see her becoming increasingly narcissistic in her motivations, and she seems poised to become just as much of a monster as all of her stupid ancestors without even noticing it. It’s all quite smart storytelling. Unfortunately the show is run by a pair of clowns who literally think that stories being about something is for chumps and that it is more important to be surprising than coherent, so Daenerys’s turn to mad queen is given no sufficient build up because D&D either forgot to build up to it or deliberately didn’t do so in order to avoid fans figuring out where the story was going. Either way, it’s stupid and frustrating and these two have no idea how storytelling is supposed to work and it ruined the entire last season.

What really annoys me is that it would have been SO easy to make this work. Look, the thing with Daenerys is that she sees herself as a champion of the oppressed. She is merciless to her opposers because she learned the hard way that showing mercy to your enemies is a good way to get stabbed in the back, which by the way is why no, her caviler attitude toward executions was not any kind of foreshadowing to her fall. In a kingdom like Westeros executions are an ugly but necessary part of being a leader. For God’s sake, Ned Stark executed people without hesitation, and he’s the most morally righteous dude in this whole stupid universe. Check your moral preconceptions at the door and put yourself in the characters’ place before making dumb declarations about how killing your enemies means you’ve crossed the moral event horizon. Jeez.

Getting back to the point, other than all that Daenerys always drew a strict moral line; protect the innocent, destroy those who bring them harm. So no, it does not make a lick of sense that she would burn the citizens of King’s Landing because they would “never love her.” Like I said, that is the logical conclusion, but she was nowhere NEAR the point where her delusions had made the shift from “I must protect those who can’t protect themselves” to “I am a benevolent god and all must love me or burn.”

And what’s killing me is that the shift could have been more clearly made with one easy change, and it’s a change that needed to happen in general; don’t have the white walkers beaten so quickly and easily. I hate to rewrite the series because that’s always a tasteless and hacky thing to do, but I have no respect for D&D as artists, so fuck it here we go:

So maybe we start out on a regular giant battle with the white walkers, and it goes very badly. The Night King brings out the dragon and it lays waste to the armies, we lose a major character or two, it’s all very sad. While recovering the cast finds out that Cersei has betrayed them and decide that it is time to obtain her help, with force if necessary. They return to King’s Landing and threaten to burn it to the ground if Cersei doesn’t relent. She stubbornly calls their bluff, so Daenerys reluctantly goes through with it, raining dragon fire down on King’s Landing and its citizens until Cersei finally relents and joins the offensive against the white walkers. We see that Daenerys is at first ridden with guilt, but as those around her justify and rationalize using her powers this way she becomes more comfortable with the idea.

Battle with walkers goes down basically as it does in the series because if I try to fix THAT disaster we’ll be here all day and this has already gone on WAY too long. But afterward Cersei, being Cersei, goes right back to trying to take advantage of the situation and kill of the remaining characters to secure her rule. Daenerys realizes that Jon Snow’s true parentage is out, putting her own rule in jeopardy, so she flies of the handle, kills Cersei with massive collateral damage to King’s Landing so as to keep the population in fear of her, que the series’ downward spiral.

I’m not saying this rewrite fixes everything, there is far too much wrong with the final stretch of this show to make any kind of satisfying conclusion, much less with this sequence of events I pulled out my ass during this overlong stream-of-consciousness rant, but damnit that does work a little better, right? Because it’s something. There’s some kind of lead-in to the final sequence of events. Heck, this way Cersei actually does something in the last season, that’s nice, right?

Honestly, at first I was actually enjoying how bad season 8 was. I could never explain why the series had lost me without people arguing, saying I was wrong, saying it was still good. So sitting back and watching as the whole thing fell apart, as every bad decision I had tried so hard to explain came home to roost, that was the most fun I had been allowed to have with this series in a long time. But by the time the fall of Daenerys Targaryen had occurred, it was just depressing. It was depressing that a show that used to be this good had gotten this bad, this…this fucking lazy. The whole last act of the show makes me mad, because most everyone worked so hard and so passionately on it. Season 8 was a notorious production, a long and difficult shoot full of some of the most ridiculous amounts of effort any production could every put into a season of television. All that effort. All that passion. All of it from everyone. Except the people in charge. The people telling the story.

They

Were

So

FUCKING

Lazy.

I’ve seen people argue that the show wasn’t that bad because even at it’s worst it is so well made. The production is stunning, the effects immaculate, the actors never give anything other than their best. But here’s the thing some people don’t seem to understand, and I will certainly go into it at more detail at a later date: Writing. Is. Everything. A product with a bad script is a product broken at a fundamental level. If the script is bad, no amount of talent, effort or passion (unless the production basically ignores the script and improvises everything, there are examples of that that I will talk about at a later date). And the script of season 8 is some of the most shit-out dreck I have ever witnessed, the product of two men very obviously eager to be done with this show. Their only obvious interest being in subverting fan theories and expectations, rendering every payoff unsatisfying in a blatant disregard for decent storytelling. Their laziness let down everyone who had any actual passion for this show, from the production to the actors to the fans.

Even when I liked it, Game of Thrones was never really for me. I was never all that much into it. But so many people were. So many people cared so much about this show. And D&D, in a spectacular display of laziness mixed with egotism, let them all down. And for that, they have my seething contempt as creators.

It took the show dying for me to really care about it. And that…is not a great feeling, man.

Well, hello there. My name is Dan, and welcome to the right side of my brain. As you may be aware, the right side of the brain is the artistic and creative side. So this is where all thoughts on the media I consume goes, a creative mixing pot of all my thoughts and observations on the art I love so much.

Who asked you, Einstein? Let’s get a second opinion. From my own personal scientist.

Alright, in actuality this is just a weaksauce gimmick for my blog that I will probably regret in a year. Moving right along, I wanted to start with something pretty simple. Let’s start with a super original observation; George A. Romero’s Dead Trilogy (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead) are a trio of films that use socially conscious observational storytelling to brilliantly convey a three-act apocalypse. Yup, this is the kind of unique insight you can expect on this blog. Okay, so clearly this is an observation that has been made a thousand times, but only because it is not just true, but also wholly distinct even in the oversaturated zombie genre that these movies spawned. In fact, George Romero’s storytelling was so brilliant that the three-act apocalypse doesn’t just occur over three whole movies, but within the opening scenes alone. All three of these movies have some of the most effective openings I have ever seen, and the point of this article will be to explore why they are so brilliant, and how they single-handedly depict the three-act apocalypse. So, without further nonsense:

Night of the Living Dead’s opening is mundane, but thick with an atmosphere of dread. We open on siblings Barbara and Johnny visiting their father’s grave. The scene plays out slowly, with a lot of casual dialogue. The setting immediately gives off the sensation of death, which the characters naturally catching on to. Johnny teases Barbara about her childhood fear of the graveyard, eventually catching on to the fact that she is still afraid of it. This prompts him to tease her with the instantly iconic “they’re coming to get you, Barbara,” pointing out a shambling old man and teasing that he is a risen corpse before playfully running away. As Barbara walks after him the old man makes his way over to her and suddenly attacks her, and in that instant the horror begins. Johnny returns to fight off the zombie but dies in the skirmish, Barbara runs and drives for her life as the creature unrelentingly chases her in a long sequence that eventually leads her to the house where the rest of the film takes place.

As I pointed out in the summery, the most effective thing about this scene is how suddenly the apocalypse begins. Compare this to other zombie media like 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead, or even the remake of Dawn of the Dead. All of these products create a step by step descent from normalcy into hell. In Night of the Living Dead, we go from the mundane to a waking nightmare in an instant. In the greater scheme of the rest of the trilogy, we have witnessed the exact second the world began to end. This is it, no lead in, no explanation (I mean, the film does mention something about radiation from Venus, but that’s dumb and other movies disregard it). This quick descent is also effective for the scene itself, as the genuine shock and terror does a lot to mask a potentially silly chase, one which popularizes the trope of the running woman constantly falling down so as not to easily outrun her shambling pursuer. This is the most impressive thing about Night of the Living Dead in general, how the effective use of pacing and mood manages to lift up what could be an otherwise very hokey low budget horror flick.

Dawn of the Dead is very clever in how it captures the state of the entire world in a relatively confined space. We open in a news station where two of our main characters, Fran and Stephen, work. This scene handily establishes two important facts about the state of a world that is now some time into the zombie apocalypse. One is that in spite of the now uncontrolled outbreak society is still trying to hold together, and two is that it is badly failing. The studio is in total chaos. Everyone is arguing, no one is holding the place together, and we see all the “experts” being interviewed making it increasingly clear that no one has any answers about what is going on or how to handle it. The scene ends with Fran and Stephen abandoning ship in the stations helicopter. They eventually meet with SWAT team members Peter and Roger, who themselves have abandoned a housing project raid that went terribly wrong, with dead bodies the tenants refused to hand over coming to life and attacking them, and stressed SWAT members opening fire on living and living dead alike.

While Night of the Living Dead highlighted how individual people cannot cooperate even under the direst of circumstances, Dawn of the Dead turns its critical eye to human society as a whole. While this movie’s individuals do mostly fine on their own, we regularly get to witness the greater humanity seemingly going insane around them. Talk shows and interviews are full of bickering and conflicting statements, and our character’s morale is slowly drained as it becomes slowly clear that there is no hope of civilization holding together in this crisis. We see cops still committing racially motivated murders even in a project full of zombies and biker gangs still rebelliously destroying sanctuaries and attacking people with no real cause. While the Dead Trilogy is fundamentally about the dead overtaking the living, all three movies—but Dawn of the Dead especially—puts the true onus on the living for their own demise.

Day of the Dead, while generally considered a lesser film than its predecessors, has the most chilling opening of them all. Our leads, part of a group of scientists and soldiers holed up in a secure bunker to find a solution to the outbreak, go to a nearby town to search for survivors. As their calls echo through the town we are treated to a montage of total desolation. It’s the little things that really inform the world building of this scene. There is loads of money being blown along with the trash through the wind, visually equating the two. There is a newspaper with the headline THE DEAD WALK, indicating that it has not been too long since the outbreak began. An alligator on the steps of town hall are the only signs of life…until we see a lone figure walking the streets, then revealed as the handsome boy pictured above. More zombies begin to emerge from the surrounding buildings, the previously empty streets quickly becoming a sea of the living dead, and the protagonists dejectedly return to their sanctuary, having clearly been through this song and dance countless times in countless towns.

Day of the Dead is easily the grimmest of the trilogy, almost entirely based on this opening. The characters in this film are trying to find a solution to the zombie problem, but from the word go we see that there may be no humanity to meaningfully save anymore, a fact later confirmed when the head scientist calculates that the zombies outnumber humanity 400,000 to 1 at this point. On top of that we have the usual George Romero status quo where the remnants of humanity still can’t coexist, even in the most desperate possible circumstances, as the soldiers and scientists are constantly at each other’s throats over the lack of progress being made, basically all except the leads having been driven insane by cabin fever and stress by this point. We see that humanity could not change its ways no matter what, and ultimately the only solution offered by the film is for the few sane people left to just leave it all behind and take the opportunity to start over.

So, I have established why these openings set the tone and show the step-by-step downfall of humanity on their own and how that informs the films both individually and as a whole. But why does this matter? Well, I think what makes this so impressive is that for as perfect as it is, it is also not by design. All three of these movies were made almost a decade apart. They are essentially George Romeo making individual film essays about the way human civilization was declining in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s respectively, all incidentally tied together by the ongoing zombie apocalypse, which he probably only returned to for the sake of keeping people watching. Yet the trilogy fits together more cohesively then some of the planned franchises I have seen.

I have written this trying to find an answer to what makes this work so well, but the only answer I can find is that George Romero was an obscenely talented artist who knew how to make potentially rote social commentary both interesting and entertaining, and who had a special talent for starting a story. It’s not much, but it’s always worthwhile to appreciate great artists where you can find them, so I guess if you or I can take anything from this unremarkable little write-up it’s that George Romero was great and will be missed. And that’s all I’ve got for today. Any input from the scientific end?

I thought you weren’t real.

 …See you next time.