Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Re-Kill

You know how it is, you're wanting to kill some time, or just feel like having something on while you do other stuff. I'm certainly not going to watch something I have real interest in, because I might get interrupted.

Re-Kill is a zombie apocalypse movie, but set after humanity has seemingly reached some sort of equilibrium. The undead are mostly under control, people are back at their jobs and homes, but there are of course still random undead out there who could start the whole mess over again if not found and killed. So there are teams for that, and being America, we have turned their struggle into a TV show, where a camera crew accompanies them on missions, and interviews them, and so on. The movie is basically one "reporter", Jimmy, and his camera guy following one particular team through a series of increasingly bad missions, as it quickly becomes clear the undead are starting to learn and organize. They use strategy, distractions, misdirection, in addition to overwhelming numbers (and these are fast zombies, fyi).

The movie is trying to be a satire, in the same way as the original Robocop. There are lots of commercials, many of which promote sex as part of some American committee promoting repopulation. There's one that shows a couple screwing on a bed and the phrases, "Good for her, good for him, GOOD FOR AMERICA" overlaying the scene. The network is promoting a week of stories about how people survived the apocalypse, at least one of which was probably not a guy surviving a zombie so much as using the apocalypse as cover to kill his pain in the ass father-in-law. The Re-Kill show picks out a rookie on his first mission as their main character and give him lots of screen time, really push the blonde white boy as the star, even though he knows nothing. It's not exactly subtle or difficult targets, but it's more effort than I expected.

The very end end doesn't quite fit. It doesn't take place within the show, but after, as a reveal of how things turned out. SPOILER, the outbreak emerges again and what's left of humanity is trying to hole up in some "ark" hidden inside a mountain, sending out teams to try and rescue any other survivors they get word of. And the one member of the team we followed who survived has become a big wheel in all this. Something about the "massive survival bunker" thing didn't sync up with the rest of the movie for me.

Still, it was a better movie than I expected, and worked as something the pass the time.

2 comments:

SallyP said...

I have heard of worse premises.

CalvinPitt said...

It was actually a lot better than I figured from the title. I was expecting the zombies were somehow coming back from having already been killed once before, which seemed incredibly stupid, but also something somebody would have tried at some point. What they went with was definitely a wiser choice.