Thoughts on zombie games.
I guess what I hate about zombie games,and zombie media in general,is the whole "we're screwed" thing that pervades the whole genre. The idea that the zombies are an unstoppable force even when they're not.
For example,if you have a means to quickly kill a zombie,like shooting them in the head,it takes away the viability that these things are a real threat any more than any other deadly illness would be. One might point to,say,the black plague and say "But look how many people died because of that",but one has to bare in mind our knowledge of how to contain a disease was very limited back then due to how little we knew of biology. Modern quarantine techniques would make it much harder for a disease to get out of one city,zombies or not.
Second,the whole "attracted by sound" thing is as much a liability to the zombies as it is to the survivors. Consider this. You wire a building with homemade explosives. You turn on a radio/mp3 player/boombox in the middle of the building and sneak out before the zombies get there. Wait til it's full and boom goes the zombies. It's like the pipe bombs in Left 4 Dead taken a step further.
But over all,my point is that these zombie movies/games/etc,ultimately have this feeling of hopelessness to them. Like there's simply no way to win. And that just bothers me that all it takes is a few easily killed zombies and suddenly,humanity is on the run and everyone's dying left and right. Like we don't have attack helicopters,tanks,a full military,and,in the worst case scenario,the nuclear option. There just comes a point where you have to ask what,exactly,all these highly trained fighting men and women are doing while all this is going down? And that's not even considering how other countries would react. I'm pretty sure no country is going to sit around with it's thumb up it's butt while a zombie outbreak devours a major country.
Well,just wanted to put that out there. Thanks for reading.
For example,if you have a means to quickly kill a zombie,like shooting them in the head,it takes away the viability that these things are a real threat any more than any other deadly illness would be. One might point to,say,the black plague and say "But look how many people died because of that",but one has to bare in mind our knowledge of how to contain a disease was very limited back then due to how little we knew of biology. Modern quarantine techniques would make it much harder for a disease to get out of one city,zombies or not.
Second,the whole "attracted by sound" thing is as much a liability to the zombies as it is to the survivors. Consider this. You wire a building with homemade explosives. You turn on a radio/mp3 player/boombox in the middle of the building and sneak out before the zombies get there. Wait til it's full and boom goes the zombies. It's like the pipe bombs in Left 4 Dead taken a step further.
But over all,my point is that these zombie movies/games/etc,ultimately have this feeling of hopelessness to them. Like there's simply no way to win. And that just bothers me that all it takes is a few easily killed zombies and suddenly,humanity is on the run and everyone's dying left and right. Like we don't have attack helicopters,tanks,a full military,and,in the worst case scenario,the nuclear option. There just comes a point where you have to ask what,exactly,all these highly trained fighting men and women are doing while all this is going down? And that's not even considering how other countries would react. I'm pretty sure no country is going to sit around with it's thumb up it's butt while a zombie outbreak devours a major country.
Well,just wanted to put that out there. Thanks for reading.
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Comments
I think that's actually THE point of zombie games / movies. The hopeless feeling of being a small group of survivors. It's more a fight against yourself / the other survivors as it is against the zombies. The zombies are just a means to an end, and most times a hamfisted allegory of consumerism. They get us to the real story, the day to day act of surviving, knowing you're probably just going to die anyway. It's what you do in those last few days / weeks / months and the impressions you leave on the people that succeed you that matters. THATS where the story comes from. The zombies are just how we get there.
Yes, but you are forgetting one of the staples of the zombie genre: everyone involved in the quarantine process is a massive bonehead!
Woody: Yeah,but that's kind of what makes it even more unbelievable. Airports and security got super tight with the whole bird flu thing. I find it hard to believe an outbreak of zombie virus would be treated more lightly. A more believable scenario would be people trapped in a city that's been over run with zombies and quarantined off from the rest of the world. Kind of an Escape from New York with zombies situation. That'd work better for me. Fighting to reach food and supply drops while outwitting or out fighting other survivor gangs as you wait for them to ok you from the quarantine zone for testing. At the very least,the zombies should be hard to kill as they have some imperfect regeneration ability that lets them recover from almost any injury but also gives them a ravenous hunger,especially for proteins which means meat.
But in the end,yeah,when you have A) a containable threat with
Whaa....!!!? I thought I was gonna live forever! Well you've gone and spoiled my day!
Well, I actually started another thread on this exact topic. In the 1978 Romero movie Dawn of the Dead (when the survivors are trapped in the mall), one of the characters basically spells out the connection between the undead zombies and consumerist zombies:
"Peter: They're after the place. They don't know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here."
Weird, but true!
I think zombies work better as a metaphor for the inevitability for death and the desire to remain an individual versus becoming one of the mindless masses who exist in a miserable state and will probably end up being destroyed trying to find a meal.
I think the point it was trying to make was that there is a finer line between humans and zombies than we'd like to admit. Who are the real zombies in the mall, the monsters or the people?
There is more than one way to interpret a zombie film, or any film for that matter. For example, one interpretation is that zombies represent everything the modern liberal fears from the "conservative agenda." Which you can find in this article.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a6YdNmK77k
And more than one liberal has referred to conservatives as "blood suckers". So the metaphors are interchangeable and thus defy the connections. It's really just people,both the audience and the directors,who are projecting their own ideas into what the zombie or vampire represents.
This is exactly what cinema is all about: the projection of ideas, the conveying of society at a particular point of time, the an expression of ones (the filmmakers) beliefs. Cinema is projecting, whether you like it or not, and has been to some degree ever since its inception. The zombie genre is just one of many different ways a storyteller can project a certain kind of commentary on society.
That's one of the things I was disappointed about by the Star Wars prequels. They could have told a great story about how the old republic tore itself apart thanks to the machinations of the Emperor,but instead chose to focus on every shoehorned in message,ideal,and dumb ass "comedy" bits. They didn't really focus on the narrative we wanted to see. That being how the republic ended,the Empire came to power,and Anakin Skywalker ended up Darth Vader. While that story is still in there,it's buried under so much crap,it's hard to enjoy it.
In the movies,I can't shake the feeling you're supposed to see things a certain way. But danged if I can figure out what it is. The narrative is so confused by it's attempts at symbolism,morals,and side messages,you can't really figure out what they were trying to say. And they don't just let the story play out,like "this happened,which lead to this,which lead to this",like most good movies do. A good movie presents a bunch of events in a logical way so you can see how A leads to B leads to C. These movies go all over and lack any kind of focus so they can deliver little messages that don't really matter to the story.
A lot of movies that try to use something as a metaphor often end up falling into the same trap. By trying to illustrate their ideals,they have to force their characters to behave like idiots,bring about unbelievably bad circumstance,and basically pretend something is a bigger threat than it is. Which brings me back around to my original point,the hopelessness forced into most zombie movies. It's all about characters being stupid and acting like something is a bigger threat than it really is.
Take Evil Dead. There,the zombies,you lop off a hand,it keeps moving. You cut off it's head,it still screams for your blood. And they can infect you,forcing you to cut off parts of your own body to avoid being completely taken over. This,my friends,is a real threat. It's realistically dangerous to face off against these things. They inspire fear by the fact they are not playing by any rules that we understand.
Most zombie movies,the zombies are little better than unarmed humans. Highly motivated,sure. Single minded and vicious,indeed. But how,exactly,is that supposed to be dangerous to people who have tanks? You could roll through zombie town in a tank with a guy on a machine gun up top and just roll over the zombie horde. Any that tried to get into the tank,well,good luck biting your way through freakin' tank armor. Hell,a helicopter with a loud speaker and a machine gun could easily draw out and shoot down any zombies out there.
That's one of the things I liked about Left 4 Dead. They had some pretty good excuses for how the outbreak got so bad. First,you have carriers. People who aren't effected by the virus,but are infected. These Typhoid Marys would explain how the virus got past simple quarantine methods. And they state several times they don't know how the virus is transmitted. And then there's the special infected. I could see a tank ripping off a hatch lid. I could see a smoker pulling someone out of a helicopter. I could see a hunter leaping a quarantine wall and finding new prey. And all of them transmitting a virus that most people are likely to get taken by. They really help explain things.
In the end,Walking Dead seems like another of those needlessly hopeless kind of zombie stories that just really don't inspire terror so much as "What the hell is wrong with you people,just run up behind the zombie and whack it over the head til it stops moving!" responses. Frankly,the only way I can see a virus like that becoming a wide spread problem is if someone was behind spreading the virus. Like the doomsday cult in Quarantine or Umbrella Corp.
Ray Nagin doesn't care about black people!
Movies are about a great many things and storytelling being one of them. But the use of symbols and metaphors is a part of storytelling. It adds depth to a text, and for some stories a sense of legitimately. If you are walking out of a lot of cinemas thinking "Wow,they really tried to sodomize that dead horse while they were beating it" then you are likely watching a lot of really bad movies. In good films the symbolism is subtle, usualy used in such a way that people who get it appreciate it and people who don't are still able to enjoy it on a more base level.
You've only nudged the tip of the iceberg on why the Star Wars prequel films were so bad. They were very poorly made, lacked interesting characters, suffered from awful dialogue, were too reliant on CGI, were inconsistent with the originals, were painfully unfunny and really I could go on and on and on.
Again, if you think this then you are likely watching a lot of bad films, either that or you don't know how to interpret the symbols and messages. Often-times it takes multiple viewing before one can truly understand a film and everything it is trying to say. When you say "A good movie presents a bunch of events in a logical way so you can see how A leads to B leads to C" I think you'll find it's laden with symbolism and meaning, it's just not as obvious and forced as the films you dislike.
That is just called bad storytelling, and yes, a lot of zombie movies fall into that trap. It is a challenge for the story tellers to bring fresh and new ideas to the table and not resort to cheap tricks and clichés to keep the plot progressing. While I have mixed feelings about it 28 Days Later did a good job avoiding those kinds of things.
It's not really fair to compare zombie films to The Evil Dead, they are trying to achieve different things. It'd be like if I said Predator should be more like Alien because they aliens in that film were more realistically dangerous. The Evil Dead is more of a pure horror film that blends more and more comedy elements as the series goes on, zombie films have really become their own genre.
If someone in the tank gets infected everyone inside is doomed and tanks don't run forever, at some point or other the people inside are going to have to go outside for something, whether it be the need to eat or to repair the tank. And machine guns don't have unlimited ammo. You could kill a lot of zombies sure, but it's not a absolute solution like you seem to be suggesting. And the helicopter one is even worse. Most helicopters can only stay airborne for about an hour, and every hour they are in the air they they spend two hours in maintenance. You seem to think a zombie apocalypse wouldn't be a threat at all but you clearly haven't thought it through if these are your reasons why.
Have you read The Walking Dead comics, or seen the television show? Just curious.
No,what I'm saying is Hollywood is pushing out a ton of bad films. Even the best movies coming out these days seem to be touched by the poop smelling fingers of bad writing to make a story/message work. And I guess what I'm saying is that zombie movies seem to be falling in with the horror movie cliche of "everyone's an idiot". Basically,for a zombie outbreak like this to get that bad,the ball has to be dropped on pretty much every level. From the highest levels of government to the common man on the street,everyone has to be some kind of idiot to let things get this bad. And while that may make it believable that an idiot would have trouble with what seems to be an easily solved problem,it also makes for a disconnect between the audience and the characters. If the characters are too dumb to relate to,there's no tension as the audience realizes this guy's looking to get eaten alive.
Here's a link to Phelous' Quarantine review which sums up my feelings on the whole thing with examples of what I'm talking about:
http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/teamt/phelous/29842-quarantine
Now,I'm not completely unforgiving. I will give characters in a horror movie what I like to call "the one big scare" moment. This is when a character realizes they're dealing with some abomination of nature and the world as they know it is turned upside down. Cause lets face it,how well would any of us take it if we met a real,honest to goodness zombie in real life? I,for one,would at least,AT LEAST,be momentarily stunned to see something like that in real life. And that's fine. I'll grant characters in a movie a "one big scare" moment and,yes,even a freak out. But once you've seen it,you shouldn't be freaking out EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU SEE ONE unless you're mentally unstable. So,yeah,unless someone has a heavy phobia about zombies,logical thinking and reason should set back in and they deal with the threat in a rational and intelligent manner.
And yes,the comparison of Evil Dead and other zombie movies is very much legitimate. Even in Romero's "of the Living Dead" series showed the zombies could be stopped and even contained. For long periods of time. This takes away from their threat. The difference between Aliens and Predator is that both aliens were dangerous in different ways. The xenomorphs were able to breed using hosts,much like a zombie movie where the dead join the ranks of the enemy,as well as powerful,semi-intelligent hunters,and the predator aliens had advanced technology. The only thing that slowed them down was they had rules about how they hunt things. There was never a point in either movie series where either of them are portrayed as anything other than an extreme threat. Containment of these things was basically impossible and very temporary. The only way to stop them was to kill them. And killing them is not easy.
Now,most zombie movies,the only thing scary about the zombies is numbers. But how can they get those numbers if they're pretty much shambling around and showing as much physical prowess as a geriatric on heavy thorazine? The army would be using these things for target practice. And why,in god's name,would you drive a tank around a zombie infested city til it ran out of gas? That's not how tanks work. You drive out and when you're down to half a tank,you go back to base to refuel and reload. I want you to look at that tank in the show. Tell me you couldn't see that monster rolling over a horde of zombies easily. Even if they were crawling all over it when they got back to base,they'd just be picked off by the guards holding the road. Same with helicopters. And I'm pretty sure the military has more bullets,flamethrower fuel,missiles,and rockets than you have zombies. Plus,most major cities have gun shops with more ammo and guns as well as some having ammo factories where you can MAKE more bullets.
And how would the zombie plague get from city to city? Zombies are slow even by human foot speed standards. It'd take DAYS if not WEEKS for them to get from one city to another. Yet,somehow,this plague covered a pretty good sized area,including DC which has tons of security in about a month or 2? No,that's not simply an outbreak. Someone had to have started this deliberately. Starting in police stations and military bases across the country. We're talking a massive conspiracy to completely disable any kind of infrastructure that could've helped stop it. That's the best answer I can think of.