The resurgence of the "Eco-Thriller" subgenre

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shevek
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I know this isn't a new subgenre (it was big in the 70s, as I recall) but it seems to be having a resurgence.

Is anyone enjoying the recent resurgence of the "Eco-Thriller", where nature bites back against civilization?
Some take place in "modern times", and others emphasize the apocalpytic aftermath.

Here are some of the recent examples:

- The Superdeep (movie)
- The Last of Us (TV series)
- The Rig (TV series)
- The Swarm (TV series)
- See (TV series)
- Love and Monsters (movie)

If you're watching any of these right now, what do you think of the new obsession with this concept (brought about, I would imagine, by the
cultural emphasis on the effects of climate change), and which ones are you watching? Are there more that I've missed?
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People love a disaster. You are just seeing a shift back to another subgenera.

The 70s had many major transportation vehicle disasters like the Poseidon Adventure, Airport, Airplane, ... Then there were the asteroid hitting the Earth. Plenty of nature's revenge with an animal attacking from Jaws to the Sharknado series.
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Visitor wrote:
1 year ago
People love a disaster. You are just seeing a shift back to another subgenera.

The 70s had many major transportation vehicle disasters like the Poseidon Adventure, Airport, Airplane, ... Then there were the asteroid hitting the Earth. Plenty of nature's revenge with an animal attacking from Jaws to the Sharknado series.
Well, some of that disaster energy in the 70s was motivated by the first wave of environmentalism.

I'm not saying *all* of the productions I listed are like that now, but I think that many of them are.
Especially productions like The Rig (I saw the entire 1st season) and The Swarm, which seem to have a more specific bent of "look what we're doing to the Earth, and here is how it's biting back" with the Big Bad nemesis embodied by some kind of collective malevolent sentience.

I've just finished watching the first five episodes of The Swarm, and it's instructive how they are almost 'over-developing' the characters by presenting all of them in emotional soap-opera dramas which slow down the plots even as the disaster elements continue to escalate.

Normally, characters in disaster movies are underdeveloped (e.g. Godzilla) but in The Swarm, we're supposed to actually *care* about them, and by doing so, care about the problem they are presenting (in this case, climate change). It's an appeal to feelings, which also goes well with some of the ideology that is being intertwined within the characters' relationships. (but hey, that's just my opinion)

Has anyone seen The Rig or The Swarm? I suspect there will be many more shows like this in the coming years.
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shevek wrote:
1 year ago
I know this isn't a new subgenre (it was big in the 70s, as I recall) but it seems to be having a resurgence.

Is anyone enjoying the recent resurgence of the "Eco-Thriller", where nature bites back against civilization?
Some take place in "modern times", and others emphasize the apocalpytic aftermath.

Here are some of the recent examples:

- The Superdeep (movie)
- The Last of Us (TV series)
- The Rig (TV series)
- The Swarm (TV series)
- See (TV series)
- Love and Monsters (movie)

If you're watching any of these right now, what do you think of the new obsession with this concept (brought about, I would imagine, by the
cultural emphasis on the effects of climate change), and which ones are you watching? Are there more that I've missed?
But there was also a genre of man trying to fix nature causing calamity. Snowpiercer, both the movie and series. Another "fix the weather" ice age catastrophe with Lawrence Fishburn. And a few others.

And I don't know if this is some resurgence. M Night movie were the plants were killing people. Heck Godzilla movies all have this theme. Shin Godzilla. Even "The 100" might be considered a eco series though more about war.

I think the eco backlash theme is a fairly easy genre to do. And it has the effect of corralling the cast into a tight knit community to increase drama levels.
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Yes, we are experiencing climate change with record temperatures. I think in the 70's that feeling came from nuclear devastation (cold war). I also think there will always be apocalyptic movies, because it scares us, a nuclear war, a virus, alien invasions, the earth getting angry (2012), Artificial Intelligence....
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Mr. X wrote:
1 year ago

But there was also a genre of man trying to fix nature causing calamity. Snowpiercer, both the movie and series. Another "fix the weather" ice age catastrophe with Lawrence Fishburn. And a few others.

And I don't know if this is some resurgence. M Night movie were the plants were killing people. Heck Godzilla movies all have this theme. Shin Godzilla. Even "The 100" might be considered a eco series though more about war.

I think the eco backlash theme is a fairly easy genre to do. And it has the effect of corralling the cast into a tight knit community to increase drama levels.
Yeah, you're right, I should have thought of Snowpiercer. I also just discovered 2019's "I Am Mother"(Australia) where humanity is on the brink of extinction. And there was that other Australina movie "2067" from a couple years ago with a similar theme.

As far as the "tight knit community" you mean the proverbial "band of experts" who come together to save the world. Yeah, that's very prominent in The Swarm, with unusually deep characterization involved.

The weather has been really warm here this winter, Argento (mid-Atlantic temperate climate in Pittsburgh, now with many days in the 60s).
We're feeling the beneficial effects of the change, which nobody seems to talk about. (my gas bills went way down)

Anyway, yeah, it looks like we're in for a litany of eco-thrillers over the next few years.
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shevek wrote:
1 year ago


As far as the "tight knit community" you mean the proverbial "band of experts" who come together to save the world. Y
No I meant the formula of forcing people into a "fort", circled by enemies, who then have drama cause they can't just walk away from each other. Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica, Last of Us. Snowpiercer. Heck Snowpiercer had to introduce a human bad guy cause the storm just wasn't enough.
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Other examples:
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In the 50s it was the sub-genre of man's abuse/mismanagement of atomic radiation creating monsters that were the rage; i.e. Them (giant ants), Attack of the Crab Monsters and possibly The Giant Behemoth.
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I wonder if the genres where humans is at fault do better than the ones where humans are vicitms. V and a few other alien invasion shows come to mind where humans were just victims.
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Mr. X wrote:
1 year ago
I wonder if the genres where humans is at fault do better than the ones where humans are vicitms. V and a few other alien invasion shows come to mind where humans were just victims.
I would think the quality of the film's script, direction, acting and other important factors add a lot more sway to a film's popularity than the element of human fault or victimhood.

That said, I do enjoy humans as bait films quite a bit.
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That's how I see it, to think of ET as invaders or dangerous, is essentially that "we are ourselves". It is disturbing that prehistory and the history of our world have been tied to the course of warfare. For example, the conquest of America undertaken by European monarchies. I've read around that Alien ( hostile and disgusting creature) is inspired by a mixture of parasitic wasps, reptiles and I don't know what else. A characteristic of psychopaths is the parasitic life.
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I think we are confusing terms a bit, which is fine, but I just wanted to make it clear.

A true "Eco-Thriller" is one where our mistakes vis-a-vis caretaking the planet have come back to bite us.
50 "Atomic Age" thrillers do fit in that genre (with regards to misuse of nuclear power), although the current trend, as I've noticed, has almost entirely do with climate change. There was a previous trend in the 00s involving releasing of deadly viruses and pathogens, and that has continued.

Productions where eco-disaster only forms a *backdrop* to some type of other apocalyptic story is more accurately in the "apocalyptic" vein than
"eco-thriller". That would include something like the Road Warrior series, or the series "See", which I mentioned as a post-apocalyptic Game of Thrones set 600 years in the future in Western Pennsylvania after a virus has made almost everyone blind.

Then, in contrast, movies and TV shows with alien invasions are something else. The aliens don't necessarily have anything to do with our destruction of the environment...although the aliens could destroy the environment themselves, or they could be destroyed *by* it (in the case of War of the Worlds). But neither of those things are eco-thrillers. Something like "Alien" might be more of a commentary on corporate control and resource exploitation.

I am going to continue watching The Swarm (probably the best eco-thriller at the moment) and the movie "I Am Mother", and report back.

Update: "I Am Mother" is a fantastic Australian low-budget sci-fi thriller from 2 years ago which seriously delivers.
It was acquired by Netflix, so you can watch it there, or by other means (which I did).
There are only four actors in the film, only two of them playing human, so the effect is stark and cold and isolated, with lots of corridor fetish.
But it tells an ultimately very human story, and I won't give away the revelation, but it's mix of Terminator and Raised by Wolves
(which is equivalent to saying 'James Cameron meets Ridley Scott', which is a critics' exact quote).
The main role is played by Danish actress Clara Rugaard, who is eye-blindingly gorgeous even with no makeup, and at 25, she can still play 18.
With supermodel looks and acting chops, she is a Scarlet Johansson in the making, and the main reason for checking out the movie,
along with the interesting technological concepts involved, although the result is more apocalyptic cyberpunk than "eco-thriller" per se.

See what you think!
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It's disturbing to think that the course of our history has been so deeply intertwined with warfare and violence. It's even more disturbing to think that a hostile and disgusting creature like an alien is inspired by the parasitism of wasps and reptiles. It's a frightening reminder of how easy it is for humans to think of others as invaders or dangerous, which is ultimately a reflection of our own behavior. It's a troubling reminder of how quickly we can slip into a mindset of aggression and violence.
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Silo. Maybe eco related?
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Mr. X wrote:
1 year ago

Silo. Maybe eco related?
In the general ballpark of eco, but more apocalyptic cyberpunk dystopian.
Of which there is also a big trend nowadays. Like the entertainment industry is somehow getting us ready for something that will happen in real life,
thanks to a long-term master plan by old guys named Klaus.

Silo seems like Judge Dredd meets Cleopatra 2525, but without any sexy stuff.
(Rashida Jones is in this, so hopefully she gets to look gorgeous a bit.)
Based on a book series, apparently Silo was also a comic book from Jimmy Palimotti and Justin Gray a decade ago, but I couldn't find it on RCO.
I'll look out for it!
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Not to derail the discussion but it looks like a few new things are coming out. Xmen meets 1880?
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The Nevers? Looks like a bit more like a League of Extraordinary Gentleladies.

Anyway....to keep themed with the Australian sci-fi movies (I Am Mother, 2067) I decided to delve into the two "Occupation" films:
Occupation (2018) and Occupation: Rainfall Chapter 1 (2021).

Turns out they're not eco-thrillers, but much more from the Alien Invasion genre.
The first one is an all-out war epic to repulse the invaders, like V meets Red Dawn.
In the first installment, we meet the core group of characters who form a family of resistance fighters.
One of the standouts is "Amelia", played by the gorgeous half-Asian actress Stephany Jacobson - she's worth looking at throughout the film
and has that Ming-Na Wen level of hotness.
(You might remember her as Kendra Shaw from Battlestar Galactica's reboot.)

Then, the second installment is more nuanced. Amongst its war scenes, it both tries to make a moral point about xenophobia (so, Alien Nation or District 9) and it also makes attempts to inject goofy humor into the proceedings, with an alien turncoat character (e.g. Willy from V) who is attempting to "learn human ways" (Resident Alien), and a wacky buddy-humor duo which includes Kenneth Jeong (I guess casting director feel that any movie they put him is going to have quippy jokes). Also, there's a Bad White Guy. And the replacement actress for "Amelia the Human" in the second movie, Jet Tranter, is not quite as attractive as Stephany, but she makes up for it with brutal fight scenes (if you recall, she played Cassidy in the low-budget 2016 grindhouse flick 'Lady Bloodfight').
Overall, somehow it cost FOUR TIMES what the first movie cost to make!

Both installments of "Occupation" did either minimal or nonexistent revenue from the box office, so to me, it's not clear at all why Saban Films
would buy both of them up and back them, but since this was only Chapter 1 and it ended on a dour cliffhanger note, one can only assume
that Saban or whoever will cough up the dough to get Rainfall Chapter 2 made in the near future.

Not a total waste of time.
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Finished watching all 8 episodes of The Swarm.

Wouldn't recommend it:

- Too little for much of the overly large cast to do.

- Too many deviations from the plot of the book.

- No real clear villain or hero, and very little conflict (except with the undersea intelligence itself).

- Cheesy ending too reminiscent of Dave the Space Foetus from 2001.
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Another movie like this just came out.

The Park (2023) is about a world where a manmade virus wipes out all adults, and kids also die upon reaching puberty.
So the ruined world is basically Lord of the Flies, but the kids have a limited shelf life.
Eventually they figure out a way to cure the problem, but the solution doesn't make any sense.

They're laying on the apocalypse stuff pretty thick these days.
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shevek wrote:
1 year ago
Another movie like this just came out.

The Park (2023) is about a world where a manmade virus wipes out all adults, and kids also die upon reaching puberty.
So the ruined world is basically Lord of the Flies, but the kids have a limited shelf life.
Eventually they figure out a way to cure the problem, but the solution doesn't make any sense.

They're laying on the apocalypse stuff pretty thick these days.
Sounds like that Star Trek episode.
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You're right!! Episode MIRI.
Mr. X wrote:
1 year ago
shevek wrote:
1 year ago
Another movie like this just came out.

The Park (2023) is about a world where a manmade virus wipes out all adults, and kids also die upon reaching puberty.
So the ruined world is basically Lord of the Flies, but the kids have a limited shelf life.
Eventually they figure out a way to cure the problem, but the solution doesn't make any sense.

They're laying on the apocalypse stuff pretty thick these days.
Sounds like that Star Trek episode.
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tmon wrote:
1 year ago
You're right!! Episode MIRI.
Mr. X wrote:
1 year ago
shevek wrote:
1 year ago
Another movie like this just came out.

The Park (2023) is about a world where a manmade virus wipes out all adults, and kids also die upon reaching puberty.
So the ruined world is basically Lord of the Flies, but the kids have a limited shelf life.
Eventually they figure out a way to cure the problem, but the solution doesn't make any sense.

They're laying on the apocalypse stuff pretty thick these days.
Sounds like that Star Trek episode.
Yup! One of four Star Trek TOS episodes that the BBC refused to show during five blocks of reruns throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
also including "Plato's Stepchildren", "Whom Gods Destroy", and "The Empath", due to "madness, torture, sadism and disease."

It's as close a ripoff of "Miri" as that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode is of Ursula K Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
So I guess the Star Trek ripoffs work both ways :)

Update: I just re-watched "Miri" for the first time in decades. It does start out a bit creepy between Kirk and Miri - they had to make up the fact that the children were 300 years old to account for 'never getting involved with an older woman'.

But anyway, yes the premises are the same - there's even a young fellow who wears a mask like the kids in the The Park.
And, at minute 27, Kirk actually says "the last of us"! :)
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In my spare time last week, I watched two more eco-disaster epics of recent vintage.

---------------------------

The first one is a miniseries called "Station Eleven" which ran in 2021, based on a dystopian novel from seven years earlier. It's from HBO Max.
The disaster is a relentlessly virulent swine flu, which kills 99% of the population of the planet, so within 20 years, the planet has only sparse
human communities remaining.

It stars Mackenzie Davis, a beautiful actress who has unfortunately been relentlessly androgynized in most of her previous major projects
(Halt and Catch Fire, Terminator Dark Fate). She agrees to all of these projects, obviously, so I can only assume she agrees with this agenda.
The same holds true here, where she plays the lead actress in a traveling troupe of intense deviants who perform their versions of Shakespeare plays in a circuit around the American Great Lakes area, hitting all the tiny villages in the hinterlands, most of which seem to be inhabited by a few dozen people at most.

The conflict is set up wherein the quirky alternative artistic/dramatic actors in the troupe are elevated to being heroes, while the creepily toxic male cult leader (with definite autistic and sociopathic traits) who hunts them down using an army of brainwashed children is the villain. I have many questions:

1) In a post-apocalpytic scenario where one must hardscrabble to survive (even if that just involves growing food and hunting game), what possible function could "queer culture" types serve? Wouldn't they be the first to be killed? How does a group of them survive for 20 years on an itinerant play circuit if they don't grow any of their own food, and how do they even reproduce to include new actors? (There's only one member of the troupe who isn't from "The Before", and she acts very much like an over-emotional flighty teen).

2) Why Shakespeare? Was there some huge audience for Shakespeare plays before the apocalypse? No. So why would there be an audience after?
Wouldn't the vast majority of people in the pop-culture United States be much more familiar with television shows and movies from right before the disaster? So wouldn't it make more sense to either travel around with a rare movie projector..or to perform plays based on hugely popular properties that everyone knows, like Marvel or Star Wars or Disney? The premise ultimately doesn't make sense, and just seems like the writer's own wet dream trying to turn a dystopian scenario into what might be consdered a "utopia" in Current Year.

3) Furthermore, the whole thing is based around the fact that a pre-pandemic author published FIVE copies of a graphic novel called "Station Eleven" (which looks a lot like a Moebius or Jodorowsky comic) for her own vanity, and yet coincidence was such that two of the copies ended up in the hands of the two main characters (the actress and the cult leader), and each used this unknown graphic novel as their personal Bibles to expand their imaginations and live their way through the disaster. I'm not even sure why this magic MacGuffin graphic novel was necessary at all? Was it because the writer didn't want to lean on the crutch of using an actual Bible instead (like Stephen King) or some well-known sci-fi book series, or something like that? Personally, I don't think this "Station Eleven" element was even necessary for the story to work, and if so, the series didn't even need to be called "Station Eleven".

4) If there are hardly any people left, where does the cult leader get his endless supply of attack children from? (These children strap bombs to themselves, so it's obvious that he could get more, or he wouldn't be blowing them up)

I watched this til the end but I wasn't too impressed. I think the point of the series is to demonstrate how sophisticated human culture can survive even in the most extreme conditions, but I don't think the way it was conveyed made a whole lot of sense. Whole lotta wishful thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_E ... iniseries)

-------------------

The other one, I thought, was a lot more engaging and interesting. This is 2016's The Girl With All the Gifts (based on a 2014 book), a movie filmed and produced in England, but with pretty much the exact same premise as the video game The Last of Us which came out around the same as that 2014 book did.

Namely, a cordyceps fungus infects everyone's brain and turns them into large hordes of fast-moving flesh-eating zombies called "hungries."
However, a handful of the hungries have actually retained some of their human intelligence, and these are the ones who are going to take over the world and make the mere humans obsolete. They're obviously the next step in evolution, and the ending is therefore telegraphed from miles away.

What's interesting, though, is how the story gets there. The dangerous trek across the English countryside to London is undertaken by a ragtag band of human survivors from a military base. The outstanding lead role here is filled by a young black British actress named Sennia Nanua, who plays a "hungry" who is also very polite and social, and super-intelligent (who knows? she might even be a lesbian!).

Nanua absolutely carries the movie, and the adult actors pretty much all follow her lead. Even though you pretty much know what's going to happen in the end, the action is still suspenseful. So, if you like the productions that I mentioned at the top of this thread which pretty much kicked off this whole "Eco-Thriller" discussion (namely, The Last of Us and The Superdeep), you're going to enjoy The Girl With All the Gifts.

It's too bad that Nanua really hasn't been in any significant role since. I could see her working out as a young genius on a starship in the next generation of Trek productions (she's considerably more engaging than the actress who plays young Uhura in Strange New Worlds).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_ ... fts_(film)
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I watched The Girl with all the Gifts back then in cinema. I thought it was quite impressive. Quite a chilling atmosphere they created in overgrown London. Afaik they used drone footage from cities close to Chernobyl for some of those scenes, instead of just computer graphics.
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I watched two more movies of very recent vintage (2022) which could both be considered spins on the Eco-Thriller genre but with very different stories.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Bl ... ine_(film)
is based on a book published only a year before which is basically an instruction manual on how to do active violent property-damage resistance (a la Extinction Rebellion, Stop The Oil, or the coal they recently dumped in the Trevi fountain), aka eco-terrorism in the name of hard-left climate change hysteria.

Somehow, the professor who wrote the book still has his job at Lund University in Sweden even though he wrote a terrorist manual basically akin to the Anarchist Cookbook. Either there's really good freedom-of-speech in Sweden, or the government there agrees with his perspective.

The film, however, isn't set in Europe, because the target audience is North American, where the message apparently needs to be most delivered, and also where the majority of the viewing audience money is.
The plot is basically gathering together a bunch of disparate misfits, a la the Breakfast Club or Ocean's Eleven, in pursuit of the goal of blowing up a West Texas pipeline to send a message about stopping the use of fossil fuels (which would, of course, utterly destroy the economy, but the terrorists don't care if it does).

You'd think that was enough of an agenda, but in fact, the DEI funding for this project kicks in when you get to the casting:

- two black lesbians from Cali
- a black film student from Cali
- a Chicana student dropout from Cali (who is of course named 'Xochitl' because Aztlan, man)
- a Native from Dakota who is somehow a self-taught genius at explosives
- a salt-of-the-earth West Texan hardscrabbler who has been personally wronged by the oil company's eminent domain
- two Antifa kids from Portland

[Since inquiring minds wanted to know, yes there are two makeout scenes.
The one between the two black lesbians is tender and loving, full of concern and crying. They just kiss and spoon.
For the Antifa couple, the excitement of doing the terrorist act makes them horny and they fuck while waiting for instructions.]

Perfect casting, right? The only thing missing is someone whose pronoun is "they". But I'm sure this list was progressive enough to secure backing from the ESG sources.

Anyway, the movie is what is says it is: a literal roadmap, showing every little step with electrical and chemical skill, on how to build large bombs that could not just blow up a pipeline, but pretty much anything.

And yes
Spoiler
They do blow up the pipeline, but two of them take the fall for it, and go to prison so the rest of the team can skate free.
The thing that seemed least believable is how all of these disparate people would communicate and gather from across the country to do this action in West Texas. You'd think that you could find *almost* the same level of diversity if it was just a bunch of members of the BLM and Antifa cells in Dallas/Fort Worth or something like that. A lot less purchasing of bus tickets!

More than anything, what's ironic about the existence of this movie is: Freedom of speech, man! Except I rather doubt that a movie like this will be shown almost anywhere outside the West. Certainly not in, say, China or Saudi Arabia or Iran or Turkey, or anywhere you could give insurgencies ideas. And, of course, the people who made this movie very much want to restrict our freedom to live our lives in certain ways. Irony drips like sweet molasses.

Is it a thrilling movie? Sure. I'm not 100% convinced with the rather light character development which is entirely in service of the agenda.
And the agenda is clear: destroy Western Civilization as we know it. Good luck with that.

---------------------------------------------------------------

If that last one wanted you to pass a law which requires today's college students to buy a license before owning a film camera (just kidding)
this next one is in a different league almost all by itself.

Vesper (2022) is a wholly European film funded in France and Belgium and made in Lithuania (which has some incredible forest scenery and very drippy bogs and fens, apparently). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesper_(film)

It's about a girl named Vesper who is somehow a genius (there's always a genius somewhere) in the field of biohacking: genetically engineering organisms on the fly.

This premise is made possible by the post-apocalyptic scenario: in a quest to save the planet, a lot of genetically engineered organisms were constructed in labs (possibly ones like Wuhan). But these organisms were inadvertently released into the environment, somehow causing environmental catastrophe.

Now, the area where Vesper is controlled by elite scientists in domed cities called Citadels, where they engineer seeds that can only be grown once (so, like Monsanto now), leaving the rest of the population outside the cities poor and desperate to survive. These peasants live in basically medieval shacks but somehow they have super-advanced machines like energy reactors which run on bacteria, huge refrigerators which contain chilled bags of blood, drones that can apparently be controlled by some kind of thought transmission, and makeshift chemistry labs. So, why are they poor if they have all of those resources?
Spoiler
Though Vesper's character is developed well, she could be almost anyone, as the plot basically comes down to the eventual release of a strain of seeds which regrow themselves, rejecting the need for the controlled technology from the Citadels.
I do have some questions, though:

- Some of the functions of the weird fungal-looking genetically altered organisms are explained in the process of the very interesting worldbuilding,
but their potential is left unrealized. None of the organisms are named, nor is there any sort of Bible for them (a la Dark Crystal, or Love & Monsters).

- We're told that an ecological disaster happened, but the world looks fine to me! Beautiful pristine forests stretching out in every direction.
So, the disaster happened only to the humans, but the rest of the world is fine? No climate change or desolate wastelands?

- We never see the inside of the Citadels or even get near them. This is unfortunate because we get very little sense of what life is like inside them or why it's better than living in a pristine forest. All we see from the citadel is a brief glimpse of a dying scientist, and a group of faceless fascist hunters who hunt down Vesper like they're the First Order from Star Wars or those faceless cops from THX-1138.

- The trope of the heroic young girl is taken to a bit of an extreme as she is pretty much able to solve any problem which comes her way. It would have been a bit more believable if she had maybe a small group of friends with her, as she seems to know what to do in almost any situation.

- There are lots of flying machines (or are they flying organisms?) zooming above Vesper in the air. But they never come to Earth. They never threaten the populace. And we never find out what they're for: surveillance, transportation? Who knows? Seems like they're just part of the aesthetics to provide a bit more of a Bladerunner atmosphere for some reason.

- The idea of the "Pilgrims" is left very open-ended. Her mother left her to join them, and they are a group of veiled reclusive raggedy monks who never show their faces and just drag useless junk into huge piles around a squalid camp where they've built a really tall tower. Which begs several questions:
- why can't she reunite with her mother if she is among that group - I mean, she must be living in that camp, right?
- The Tower looks well put together, lashed pieces of wood and metal with thousands of ropes. Did the crazy Pilgrims build that..really?
Or did someone else build it for them? Where are the intelligent leaders of the camp who would have been managing such a project?
We never find out any of it. Ultimately the only purpose of the tower is
Spoiler
so Vesper can climb up it, looking at the Citadels in one direction and the pristine forest in another, and then deciding to spread the seeds like Johnny Appleseed.
But the positives here are that the world-building is great. This is not your typical sci-fi as the plot moves very slowly, and the focus is personal (always on Vesper) despite all the weird bio-tech floating around.

The best comparison I could give it is it's like a live-action version of a Miyazaki movie - very dreamy visuals at times - perhaps closest to Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind, which is similarly post-apocalyptic. Vesper is similar enough to Nausicaa to make that comparison, although in service to that, I would have loved to see her grab one of those flying machines and hit the sky, zooming over the Citadels and bombing them or whatever.

I understand that this was well watched in Europe, but nary a peep in North America, I think. Overall the production lost money, which is a shame because it would be nice to see a sequel, to see how Vesper (who is rather young for a heroine protagonist) progresses further in exploring and liberating her post-apoc world.

Definitely check it out!
Last edited by shevek 10 months ago, edited 3 times in total.
VegaTaxeca
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Any lesbian action in the first one? :)
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shevek
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VegaTaxeca wrote:
10 months ago
Any lesbian action in the first one? :)
Ha!
Yes. I've amended the post above to include the two makeout scenes (one gay, one straight).
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Thanks for the quick response. I always try to concentrate on the important parts. ;)
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shevek
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The eco-thriller survey is back.

----------------------------------------------------

First I watched The Thaw (2009).
Starring Val Kilmer, this one has a premise somewhat similar to The Thing, except the group of scientist explorers is on a contained island in the Arctic and the creatures are ancient bugs who thawed out from a frozen wooly mammoth.

This movie lays it on very heavily on the menace of global warming, emphasizing the need for everyone on the planet to heavily "sacrifice" in order to turn back the tide of climate change (this is mentioned multiple times). Since this was made during the Obama years, I suppose someone was really influenced by the Al Gore messaging going around at the time on this subject.

There's a lot of emotion and "no no no no!" screaming. Three relationships are developed - a world-famous client scientist and his estranged daughter; a student researcher and his on-and-off sexy Asian girlfriend; and the selfsame daughter with another student.
The daughter turns out to be the heroine in the movie, which is ironic because she is portrayed as caring the least about the climate.

There's a fair amount of body horror in this as the humans and a polar bear get thoroughly infected by the bugs who crawl into them and lay eggs.
Only, in the movie, it is demonstrated that the bugs aren't actually bugs at all: they're VERTEBRATES.
Why this is so important to stress in the movie, I don't know. Since the lowest known form of vertebrates are actually fish or amphibians, it's not explained at all how a unknown family of vertebrates evolved who are able to be as small as bugs, and in fact look a lot like silverfish.
It makes no sense - why can't they just be insects or arthropods?

Anyway - there's a secret superhero cameo here, as the super-hot Asian girlfriend is Steph Song, who later played the Asian Supergirl in the VR realm of the Supergirl TV show episode "Alex in Wonderland" (Season 5). She could have been a gorgeous regular cast member in some superhero show. Doctor Light, for example - who was briefly portrayed in The Flash. For some reason, I feel connected to this because the first actress who played "X-Machina" in Heroineburgh had almost the exact same name.

Not a waste of time at only 90 or so minutes. The bugs (or whatever) are pretty creepy so that's a plus.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Now we're back in Current Year, where the global climate crisis has re-emerged as a problem.
I think that somewhere around the year 2016 or so, someone in the movie industry that all of these contemporary eco-disaster horror films have to rely on the premise of a fungus. Perhaps everyone was even called into one room (or one chatroom on the Internet) and told YOU MUST USE A FUNGUS! Because that's what everyone does.

Unearth (2020) is about a small rural town (West Virginia maybe? they never say) where there are two farming families who are neighbors (and secretly, two are lovers).

The one family sells out to frackers who drill for natural gas, while the other family holds out and refuses to sell. They are poisoned anyway by the fracking chemicals getting into the water supply, so they start getting sick.

But this is not a normal kind of slow sickness where you might get cancer over a few years. The frackers have apparently unleashed an ancient
FUNGUS from beneath the ground where they were drilling, and it gets inside everyone in both families, causing both insanity where they start killing each other, and a bit of gruesome body horror with the fungus tendrils sticking out of both skin and orifice.

Because it's Current Year, you have a lesbian romantic subplot. But unfortunately, it doesn't work out between the two women and it doesn't go beyond kissing. However, the one survivor is the blonde girl who resists the lesbian relationship. Not sure what that says about the movie's message.

The whole thing turns out to be ominous, as the runoff from the fracking is showing spilling into the waterway which leads to the ocean.
So there either could have been a sequel, or maybe the point was just to show that you can't keep a fungus isolated - it will spread everywhere
and doom humanity or whatever.

I would skip it unless you're into movies like Deliverance. Backwoods settings don't really thrill me unless maybe there's a crytpid like the Mothman involved.

--------------------------------------

In the Earth (2021) is about a scientist and a forester in England who are taking a two-day walking trip into the woods to find a researcher who they haven't heard from in months. All of this takes place with a backdrop of a pandemic that just happened. Not sure why that's even important to the plot.

Also is it really possible in modern times to take a two-day trip in a 'wilderness' somewhere in England (especially near Bristol, where this is supposed to be set) without seeing anyone? I have the impression that England is densely populated, but maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, they find the lost female researcher, but she isn't lost at all - she's trying to contact the intelligence of a huge mycorrhizoid fungus mat (see the Gaia movie below for similar theme) using sound from speakers and flashing lights. She has all kinds of sophisticated sonic equipment and synthesizers in the middle of the woods like she's Robert Moog trying to contact the aliens from Close Encounters.

However, the two hapless travelers also encounter the female researcher's wayward husband, who has left her to start up his own camp where he kidnaps travelers and uses them in rituals to worship the mycorrhizoid fungus intelligence (see the Gaia movie below for similar theme). He likes to chop off people's body parts, too - a definite sicko. However, he doesn't turn out to be the main threat.

Some pretty decent peril happens to the Indian actress who plays the forestry guide in the film: Rashmika Ellora Torchia. She apparently won a Breakthrough Performance award from British Indie Film for the role. She's not particularly attractive, but still worth watching for how deeply she gets into the role. There's no backstory on her so it's all about how well she plays the victim and triumphs over that.

The effects and editing on this film are extremely trippy and psychedelic. If that's your bag, dig into it, man.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gaia (2021) is like somebody said, "Hey, there are already two eco-fungus movies with 'Earth' in the title coming out out this year, so how about we use 'Gaia' instead even though the word is never mentioned in the script?" and then they did it.

Featuring a very small cast, this movie is about two research scientists who are doing a survey of a forest in a canoe, and stumble across a crazy plant biologist and his son who are living off the land in a shack in the middle of the forest.

Apparently, this forest is underlain by a gigantic mycorrhizoid fungus mat which has attained sentience and has captured a whole bunch of humans and turned them into blind fungus zombies (like the clickers in the Last Of Us). The biologist and his son worship the sentient fungus like a God, and eventually there is a whole scene which imitates the Biblical Binding of Isaac, so you can guess how that came about.

The researchers are a Black Guy Who Gets Killed Pretty Quickly (not very woke for a current movie, guys!) and an Asian woman with an extremely shapely body, with whom the wild boy naturally falls in love. She continually gets into peril and danger, and doesn't make it out alive.

This is R so there are some nice naked shots of the Asian actress, Monique Rockman.
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Watch it for Monique's role and for the awesome practical effects (lots and lots of fungi).

--------------------------------------------------

One other thing I noticed about these films is how similar the soundtracks are: every horror film composers seems to be drawing from the same bag of ominous dark ambient sounds.
Last edited by shevek 8 months ago, edited 2 times in total.
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I think The Last Of Us spawned a generation of fungus horror stuff. But if humanity is smart and works together we will survive it. Horror is such an inexpensive genre too produce it lends itself both to random cool original ideas, and also no less than one billion knockoffs a year of whatever the cool new thing was.
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Dogfish wrote:
8 months ago
I think The Last Of Us spawned a generation of fungus horror stuff. But if humanity is smart and works together we will survive it. Horror is such an inexpensive genre too produce it lends itself both to random cool original ideas, and also no less than one billion knockoffs a year of whatever the cool new thing was.
The thing is its scary cause nature does have this. Cricket fungus, ant fungus, crab parasite that changes the gender of the crab so it can make parasite eggs. Insect and fungus world is a top notch horror movie.

I was thinking the walkers in Walking Dead were victims of a fungus. The ant fungus literally steers the ant to other ants to infect them. But they announced its a virus.
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Mr. X wrote:
8 months ago
Dogfish wrote:
8 months ago
I think The Last Of Us spawned a generation of fungus horror stuff. But if humanity is smart and works together we will survive it. Horror is such an inexpensive genre too produce it lends itself both to random cool original ideas, and also no less than one billion knockoffs a year of whatever the cool new thing was.
The thing is its scary cause nature does have this. Cricket fungus, ant fungus, crab parasite that changes the gender of the crab so it can make parasite eggs. Insect and fungus world is a top notch horror movie.

I was thinking the walkers in Walking Dead were victims of a fungus. The ant fungus literally steers the ant to other ants to infect them. But they announced its a virus.
Oh yeah, life on Earth is messed up. Life for an insect especially, I mean, I wouldn't fancy it. They've got all those fungi things, they've got other insects that's do The Thing From Aliens to them, they get stepped on, it's rough. Small mammals can have it pretty bad as well, toxoplasmosis turns them into zombies and then cats rip them apart. Then the cats transfer the parasite to humans via poop and it makes women mean*.


*Slight oversimplification but it has been noted to cause behavioural changes. Otherwise mostly harmless unless you have HIV. See: Trainspotting.
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Dogfish wrote:
8 months ago
Oh yeah, life on Earth is messed up.
As NG Tyson said, earth has killed 99% of the life on it.
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Mr. X wrote:
8 months ago
Dogfish wrote:
8 months ago
Oh yeah, life on Earth is messed up.
As NG Tyson said, earth has killed 99% of the life on it.
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