Under the shadow of the current environmental crisis, it can
be tough to view apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios lightheartedly, but
man, you just have to in order to keep your sanity. It’s why a movie like Dr. Strangelove was so cathartic for
folks during the Cuban Missile Crisis era and why a movie like Edgar Wright’s
End of the World is such a balm in our current precarious age. Most of the
movies in David J. Moore’s new movie guide World
Gone Wild: A Survivor’s Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Movies are not of the
comedic variety, but he maintains a light enough approach throughout to stave
off any serious anxiety while perusing the impressive 800 films he covers.
Moore invents his own ratings system to assess each movie:
“The Bomb” (it’s great), “Safe Zone” (it’s good), “Gold for Some, Useless for
Others” (which can really describe every movie ever made), “Go at Your Own
Risk”, and “Toxic” (it sucks). Books of reviews are always tough to review
because it’s a natural inclination to dismiss them if the author does not agree
with your own opinions, and I often found myself at odds with Moore. You may
find yourself at odds with him too since he’s often very critical of critically
lauded movies (he has little time for Dr.
Strangelove, Children of Men, and
The Hunger Games, for example) and
defensive of critically reviled ones (the 1998 version of Godzilla, Zardoz, and Battlefield Earth, for example). In the
writer’s defense, he usually does a good job of explaining why he is for or
against a movie, so I can at least understand his opinions even if I don’t
agree with them. He does seem overly into watching stuff blow up, though.
As always, the main point of a book like this is to turn the
curious onto movies he or she has never seen before, and I have not seen a huge
chunk of them. Nevertheless, Moore does miss some obvious candidates (Fail Safe, Return of the Living Dead, and El
Topo are a few of the more glaring omissions), while his extensive
interviews with the filmmakers behind such obscurities as The Aftermath, Bleak Future, I
Am Virgin will likely only be of interest to the hardest of hardcore
apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic movie fans. The design of his book—hard cover,
loaded with full-color photos—will appeal to everyone. It’s a handsome
presentation for a book on films that tend toward the grainy, bleak, and
barren.
