As a fan of near-future science fiction, I’m eager to see Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, which looks like it’s going to be as much a psychological drama as a science fiction movie:

It’s very easy to skip forward into a fully-established brave (or not-so-brave) new world, to 2161 when Starfleet Academy is up and running, for Rick Grimes to wake up in the hospital after the zombie apocalypse has already run its course, for Katniss to live in a District 12 that treats whatever cataclysm that dramatically reduced the human population of the United States and brought it under the dictatorial authority of the Capitol as an even that’s distant beyond memory.

But so much of the really interesting science fiction, particularly of the last few years, has been set at inflection points instead, rather than in the world those seminal moments produced. Max Brooks’ World War Z was a fascinating and refreshing spin on zombie apocalypse not because his zombies were fast or slow or some hybrid thereof, but because it was about people improvising, and learning, and making terrible sacrifices and awful mistakes to respond to a phenomenon that challenges everything they knew about the world. District 9 had the good sense to imagine the social consequences of an alien invasion, and to suggest that human unity in response to the revelation that there was life on other planets could make us seem as ugly as the giant insects marooned in Johannesburg. And Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is about a moment when we could have careened on over into a plague-scarred wasteland, but yanked ourselves back from the bring by discipline and chance instead.

Gravity may not be even that futuristic, though Cuaron’s work on Children of Men makes me hope he’s doing at least some world-building here. But however far away from our own time its set, it’s exciting to see a science fiction that isn’t set in a world where we’ve established full control of the stars, and where the future retains some of that bigness and risk.

This post discusses plot points from the March 31 episode of The Walking Dead.

There’s a way in which last night’s season finale, “Welcome to the Tombs,” felt like an anti-climax. All this buildup about the inexorable logic of war, all of that moral stakes-setting, and the closest thing we get to a proper battle is Glenn and Maggie firing a few rounds behind a barricade?

But reading the episode this way misses the point. “Welcome to the Tombs” is an attempt to do for the idea of heroic or noble war what The Walking Dead more generally does for zombie apocalypse: bring out the dirty, horrible, mundane reality that’s often hidden in shinier, more fun portrayals. The only guy who got to die a hero this season lived as a villain.

To start with, the bad guy gets away. After the Governor’s attack on the prison results in nothing but property damage and a hasty retreat, he faces a revolt from his “soldiers” — conscripts who weren’t interested in being targets in Glenn and Maggie’s free-fire zone. The Governor in turn does his best Marcus Crassus impression, and guns down his fleeing folk in a fit of rage. Theirs wasn’t a soldier’s glorious death in battle, defending Woodbury from walkers or attacking prisoners: they were victims of a war crime, the mass killing of defenseless innocents. And then the Governor takes his two remaining loyalists and rides off into the sunset, abandoning Woodbury to become, we can assume, post-apocalyptic America’s Joseph Kony.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 31 episode of Game of Thrones. If you want to discuss the events of A Storm of Swords or subsequent books in George R.R. Martin’s series, please label your posts as such.

As is necessary with a show like Game of Thrones, the first episode of this third season is concerned both with reiterating the larger forces advancing on Westeros—it begins beyond the Wall, where Samwell Tarly is pursued by the White Walkers and ends in Astapor, where Daenerys Targaryen is contemplating the moral implications of purchasing an army of slaves as a necessary corrective to the slow growth of her dragons—and dealing with the implications of the Battle of the Blackwater, which forged new alliances and left new scars. But it’s also preoccupied with another set of related themes. Where does power come from? And what are the paths to acquiring it, particularly for people born outside of birthright claims to influence?

Some men are made great, or at least elevated to positions from which they can achieve greatness, by circumstance. Mance Rayder, the former Brother of the Night’s Watch who’s united giants and gorgeous red-heads alike into a massive encampment beyond the Wall, brought them together through a shared threat. When Jon Snow, who’s turned his cloak at the behest of his Lord Commander, faces the difficult question of why he’s come to Mance, the answer he gives appears to be the ones that united the wildlings—the real deception is in suggesting that the wildlings and the Night’s Watch don’t share the same goal. “I saw Craster take his own baby boy and leave it in the woods. I saw what took it,” Jon tells Mance. “Because when I told the Lord Commander, he already knew. Thousands of years ago, the first men battled the white walkers and defeated them. I want to fight for the side that fights for the living. Did I come to the right place?”

Back in King’s Landing, another rather disreputable fellow’s found himself elevated by circumstance: Bronn the mercenary is become Ser Bronn of the Blackwater, a promotion related by the nervous Podrick Payne to two members of the Kingsguard who find themselves doubting his bona fides. But as Bronn finds out when he attempts to claim his title and the influence that would go with it is that titles don’t automatically carry power with them. Your claim has to be recognized—just as the wildlings had to grant authority to Mance for him to lead them, Bronn is finding that deference is not an automatic affair.

And power, once granted, can be taken away by circumstance or by a decision that strips you of legitimacy. Last season, Cat Stark made the decision to free Jamie Lannister to trade him for her sons, and now she’s reckoning with the status she forfeited for a chance to have her daughters back. “Find her a chamber that will serve as a cell,” her son Robb orders his men. When his wife, Talisa, protests that “She’s your mother,” Robb explains that Cat forfeited the legitimacy that would have entitled her to deference. “She freed Jamie Lannister. He robbed [Rickard Karstark] of his sons. She robbed him of his justice.”
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This post discusses plot points from the March 17 episode of The Walking Dead.

What a mess.

While the last two weeks of The Walking Dead saw the show restored to the first half of the season’s strength, this Sunday’s offering (“Prey”) was a giant leap backwards, marking the worst episode to date of the already-uneven post-break batch. But “Prey” was, at least, a clarifying failure. The episode was a case study in how a show loses dramatic force when it forgets its thematic core — a problem that became clear during the Governor’s full-on slasher turn Sunday night.

Let me first back up and run through what, thematically speaking, made The Walking Dead‘s best moments tick. Back in Season One, and in this season’s exceptional “Clear,” it was existential horror. The show’s harshly bright aesthetic, shot through with haunting images, hammered home the sheer terror of being alone (or nearly alone) in a world newly become alien and dangerous. The central antagonists weren’t, properly speaking, characters: herds of walkers, the need for scarce supplies like food and clean water, and psychologically coping with a scary, dirty, and uncertain way of life constituted the core challenges for the crew of survivors.

At the beginning of Season 3, the show broke firmly with that approach, backgrounding the zombie apocalypse and placing the problem of internecine human warfare in a world without a central authority front and center. It was, at first, a well executed switch — it forced the characters to confront basic moral dilemmas (like “who should we care for?”) and develop what is, for all intents and purposes, a foreign policy. The Walking Dead episodes that succeeded here were less about individualized terror, and more about the moral and political challenges people face when attempting to create a stable social order out of whole cloth.

The Governor was the key to executing this thematic shift. He was the show’s first villain in the most classic sense (no, Merle and Shane don’t count), but what made him so effective is that it wasn’t always obvious that he was “evil” in a similarly traditional fashion. Sure, the Governor was always a brutal, authoritarian, but before the mid-season break, it was possible to read his actions (save one) as rational responses to an irrational world. Killing everyone who could pose a threat to your group is an extreme, but not necessarily crazy, response to the fact that you can’t trust others to remain peaceful. His authoritarian decision-making procedure can be seen as the extension of Rick’s “this isn’t a democracy” declaration to a larger community. The challenge to Rick’s group (and the viewers) was to make the case that there was, in fact, something morally wrong with the Governor and to develop the appropriate response to the political challenge he poses.
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This post discusses plot points from the February 10 episode of The Walking Dead.

If the first half of the Walking Dead’s third season was about defining morality as care for your group, the midseason premiere took a step back to ask “what makes you part of the group?” In both the prison and Woodbury, the consequences of war shook the foundations of group structure, revealing seemingly unbreakable bonds to be fragile and calling into question the leadership structures everyone had been taking for granted.

The episode picks up right where the midseason finale left off, with Darryl and Merle set to fight for their lives and Woodbury’s amusement. The Governor’s decision to pit the brothers against each other gives Merle an opportunity to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s a Woodbury man. Reassuring whispers to Darryl aside, it’s not clear whether he would have committed fratricide in a bid to rejoin the Governor’s team had it not been for Rick, Maggie, and Glenn’s assault weapon-equipped intervention.

But it turns out the Prison Expeditionary Force’s efforts were for naught. A rescued Merle proves as poisonous as he was in Season One — his racism reemerges, asking Darryl if he had “gone native” when he sees Michonne with the group, and he sets about spilling everyone’s Woodbury secrets (Andrea is there!) in the fashion most likely to set off a civil war. Rick, rightly recognizing the threat to be too grave, kicks Merle to the curb, but loses Darryl in the process. That Darryl won’t abandon the brother who almost killed him for the group that saved his life shows just how circumstantial the group bonds are. Blood trumps from the moment, though it seems from the preview that Darryl and Merle won’t be having an easy time of it alone in the walker-infested wilderness.
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I hadn’t read World War Z by the time the trailer for the Brad Pitt-Mireille Enos movie came out, but after I finished it this morning, it was clear what a travesty this adaptation seems poised to be. It would be impossible to adapt the oral history as a single, coherent narrative. But the book seems like it would lend itself to a miniseries that could float between different perspectives, or perhaps even more fittingly, a series of movies like the Red Riding trilogy, which explored the long-running investigation into a Yorkshire serial killer. Here are the six sections of World War Z that struck me as the most likely candidates for stand-alone films:

Section: Kondo Tatsumi and Tomonaga Ijiro
Director: Stephen Chow
Why It Would Be Great: An otaku and a blind gardener take Japan back from the zombies? It would be one of the greatest genre mashups since Kung Fu Hustle, not to mention a pair of fantastic roles for Asian men. And while Chow is from Hong Kong, rather than Japan, his touch with Hustle was absolutely delightful. I’d love to see him have a shot at pitting two unlikely heroes against a mob of incredibly scary antagonists, and to pair it with some gorgeous landscape cinematography.

Section: Todd Wainio
Director: Ed Zwick
Why It Would Be Great: As he proved in Glory, the man can do a battle sequence. And it would be exciting to see a filmmaker with his kind of conscience take on the utter failure of the American military, and its attempt to recover from it, strategically and psychologically, and to turn the tide. Also, if Nicholas Brody’s going to get killed in the finale of Homeland this weekend, Damian Lewis is going to have some time on his hands. I’d love to see him take on this soldier’s role, particularly for the chance to see him get paired up with an honest-to-God, badass battle nun, who is Wainio’s partner in the reformed military.

Section: Admiral Xu Zhicai
Director: Shawn Ryan
Why It Would Be Great: Last Resort may be toast, but Ryan was on to something interesting with his story about a submarine crew gone rogue after it was given orders to fire a nuclear weapon on Pakistan. I’d love to see him take a shot at capturing the story of a Chinese submarine crew who smuggled their families on board and created a survivable society on board their ship as they fled from the zombie apocalypse consuming their country. Instead of deciding not to fire their nuclear weapons, as is the case in Last Resort, this story ends with the agonizing choice to nuke a bunker full of hardline Chinese leadership. It’s a harrowing adventure, but a deeply creative one, and it would avoid some of the pitfalls Ryan ran into when he tried to build out not just a sub crew but the population of an island in his ABC show.

Section: Xolelwa Azania
Director: Connie Field
Why It Would Be Great: Field directed Have You Heard From Johannesburg?, the amazing documentary series about the end of apartheid. While most of the people I recommend to direct these movies are feature directors, it would be fascinating to see Field go fictional and tackle South Africa’s decision to implement the Redeker Plan, an effort to save a core of South Africa by abandoning some of the population and the country’s land to the zombie infestation. As a story about racial reconciliation despite the echoes of apartheid in the plan, this could be a fascinating, subtle movie.

Section: Christina Eliopolis
Director: Patty Jenkins
Why It Would Be Great: This story of an Air Force pilot bailed out in the middle of infested zombie territory, staying alive with a voice on the radio as her only guide, could be an incredible showcase for a young female action star, maybe Gina Carano. And Jenkins knows a thing or two about directing a woman under extreme duress. This could be a simple, stripped-down, incredibly scary movie that wouldn’t even need to showcase a lot of zombies to be terrifying.

Section: Breckinridge Scott
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Why It Would Be Great: In Contagion, Soderbergh featured a repellant blogger, played by Jude Law, who spread the news of a false cure for a global pandemic, and was later found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company which hoped to spike sales of herbal remedies. I’d love to see him put this kind of scenario at the center of a film, instead of addressing it as one of many threads in a single movie. He’d have so much fun tearing into a figure like Scott, and portraying the luxury he lives in as a kind of suffocating rot.

The rotting zombies on The Walking Dead, foul as they are, have nothing on the show’s decayed human souls. The third season of The Walking Dead has been about what violence and scarcity do to our society’s moral codes — how our sphere of ethical concern narrows to a pinhead as conditions become dire. Last night’s midseason finale hammered the point home, using the battle between Rick’s band of survivors and the Governor’s to examine the hows and whys of moral decline after the apocalypse.

As The Walking Dead becomes less of a turgid zombie soap, and more about the conflict between bands of humans in a dangerous, anarchic world, its central question has become less “how do we survive?” and more “who do we want to survive?” Each major turning point in the midseason finale — Rick’s choice to spare Michonne, Darryl’s decision to turn back for his brother Merle, Carl’s intervention on behalf of a new group of survivors, and the Governor’s big speech casting Merle out of respectable Woodbury society — are all about defining who matters morally and what the answer to that question means for the people asking it.

The Governor’s answer to this question is the simplest and most inhuman: kill everyone who isn’t one of His People. “We’ll have to take them out, let the biters move back in,” he says of the prison group, comparing them to the National Guardsmen he massacred in cold blood at the beginning of the season. While Rick is more compassionate, treating people outside his group as objects of suspicion rather than targets to slaughter, his worldview also centers on a stark us-and-them distinction. “If this goes south, we’re cutting her loose,” he says of Michonne, who has yet to earn ingroup status despite putting herself on the line to rescue Glenn and Maggie from the Governor’s clutches.

It’s the reversion to this tribalism that makes The Walking Dead‘s apocalypse so chillinglly real. Modern moral progress, as Peter Singer argues, has proceeded by expanding the sphere of moral concern to an ever-larger group of people. People may have once only cared about those who share their nationality, race, or gender, but as Enlightenment ideals about universal human rights took root, humans have moved inexorably towards treating everyone as equally worthy of moral concern. The Walking Dead‘s third season has suggested that, when you demolish a stable society, this purported moral progress will have proved a smokescreen, and that our enlightened selves are just as brutally tribal as our ancestors.

The moral drama in the struggle between the two groups of survivors, then, isn’t over the appropriateness of groupism in the shadow of the End. Instead, it’s about how we rebuild our moral code from the ashes. The difference between the Governor and Rick rests mostly in how they make decisions, and not the decisions they make.

The Governor is, for all his pieties, a dictator. He alone makes every critical political decision, hiding critical information from his subjects to ensure that they always come to see his own righteousness. His labelling of Rick’s group as “terrorists” who “want to destroy us” depends on Woodbury’s residents not knowing that the attack was really a rescue mission, a worrying suggestion that War on Terrorism secrecy may be dulling our own moral sense. What seems right in Woodbury, in short, is whatever the Governor says is right.

Though Rick declared that “this is not a democracy” at the end of the second season, his decisionmaking has become more cooperative, depending on input and informed consent from all the group members. When Rick asks Darryl to escape with the group and leave Merle behind, he gives him reasons to so, appealing rather than ordering. When the Governor instructs his lover Andrea to stay away from the battle, he dismisses her questions with a curt “do as I ask.”

So though Rick is the clear leader of his group, their moral code is determined by mutual consent and deliberation rather than dictatorial fiat. Indeed, Carl’s suggestion that Rick give up his leadership post in the preview hints that the group’s moral democracy may bleed into an actual one. Under the Governor’s rule, that would be unthinkable.

I haven’t read World War Z, though it’s on the list. But this first trailer for it mostly seems like an excuse to show teaming masses of humanity roiling through the streets of world capitals and the prodigious firepower deployed against them:

Honestly it makes me think that Steven Soderbergh should direct a zombie movie. Contagion, his super-flu movie, was one of my favorite films of 2011, in part because it avoided all of the cliches of this genre. The violence and dissolution of society were on a realistic, deeply unsettling scale. Battling the virus was a major bureaucratic undertaking that required the people involved to take serious risks, confront their privilege, and deal with the gap between what they know they’re trying to do and how it seems to the public. The scale of the devastation is overwhelming, but it’s not complete. I’d love to see him address what comes after a disaster of this scale, and remind the moviegoing public that the bureaucrats who control food and vaccines are as important as the ones who control the bullets.

If you’ve ever wanted to test out how you’d fare in the post-apocalypse, Joss Whedon is here with the case that Mitt Romney is the candidate for you!

I feel like in the zombie apocalypse, Bain Capital would probably survive to restructure the remaining human sanctuaries. Can’t you just see the Governor from The Walking Dead calling for help in making his crackdown on Woodbury, Georgia more effective? Even zombie hordes can’t stop private equity.