Never Go Through A Tunnel

It seems like a quick and easy way out, but dark and scary passageways usually house bad things that you don't want to bother with in the middle of fleeing for your life. It's simple: tunnels=death, for at least one person in the group. This is a tried and true fact of apocalyptic movies. Take for example the idiot drivers who decided to take the tunnel in Independence Day, toasted via fire ball (except for the ones who had that dog, but more on that later). Also who could forget the night vision moments in Cloverfield walking through New York's subway system. Avoid tunnels at all costs.

Do Not Join A Theme Gang

With the world ending, there will be many sad sacks who will try and recreate a Mad Max road warrior gang. Resist the urge to join anything theme-oriented. Basic rule of thumb: if you look like an idiot with a face tattoo or a fool running around in Medieval garb, you're going to get the sharp end of the death stick. Doomsday spelled this out pretty clearly: everyone who looked ridiculous got a ridiculous ending. Motorcycle gangs count too, don't forget even Romero's Dawn of the Dead leather riders got their just rewards for their hideous outfits and bad attitudes. Stick to the rag-tag refugee look, or lone wolf army motif. If you have to join a gang, stay in the back and never do anything you might later regret — like eat people.

Do Not Go Back For Loved Ones

If the world is ending, you may feel the need to find love ones that are in Princeton, a New York Library or a high rise apartment. This is a bad idea. Let go of your emotions and assume that everyone else in the world is dead, or trying to steal your food supplies. Going after loved ones almost always means your own death or the death of someone in the group. Look at it this way, it your loved one has survived and you meet up with them, bonus for you. But most likely they died from the plague, zombies, earthquake flood or whatever.

Never Be The First

I can't believe this even has to be said but no, do not go exploring in rooms, attic, caves, hallways or apartments where you are the first one in the door. My favorite character from Resident Evil Extinction, L.J., got bit by a zombie lady because he was checking out all the rooms to make sure it was safe. Let someone else do this, get a job as a medic or cook. There is no need for you to be first to go anywhere — let someone else do the exploring. If they find something really good, you can kill them and take it anyway.

Bring Your Pet

If you don't have a pet, I suggest you go to the pet store and steal one, looter style, or take care of your dead neighbors'. You may need this pet to help you keep your sanity or sacrifice its life for you, like in I Am Legend. Either way, animals are good luck when the chips are down for humans. You never know when a pair of love birds will come in handy to calm down a flock of murderous seagulls and crows. The same rule sometimes applies to children, but you will have to feed them considerably more.

Ditch The Biggest Guy In Your Group

They will turn into a zombie or rage machine, it's proven. Kill them before they kill you, or just ditch them at the next pass.

Don't Trust People In Uniform Unless They Have Defected From The System

Never trust the government, especially when the world is ending. It's a terrible idea, they would rather nuke the whole place than deal with people. If you see the military, run the other way or hide. Do not do what they say. The friendly people of Hollywood followed the advice of the government from Right At Your Door, and what happened to them? Same with the people of Raccoon City, from Resident Evil Apocalypse. Granted an ex-military person hell-bent on sticking it to the man can be a wonderful asset during the end of the world, just be sure to know the difference between the two.

Don't Barricade Yourself In

It always seems like a good idea, but 9 times out of 10 whatever you're trying to keep out gets in and now you're trapped. Think of the mess it caused for the cute little family in the beginning of28 Weeks Later and Shaun of the Dead. I say build a sky city in the trees.

Finally if all else fails, find the closest fridge, step in, and pray for a miracle.

Doctor Patrick Lee, of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Dalhousie, was somewhat surprised when he happened to catch I Am Legend on a recent plane flight, and for good reason - That whole thing about the downfall of humanity coming from a specifically-engineered virus created to kill cancer cells? Kind of struck a little too close to home:

Dr. Lee's work involves using a naturally-occurring virus known as "reovirus" to treat cancer... Dr. Lee tested the virus on mice in 1998 with some very promising results. In addition to causing brain tumor cancer cells in mice to shrink, reovirus appeared to seek out other tumors and eliminate them. Meanwhile, right now in the United States and the U.K., independent of Dr. Lee's research, there are already clinical trials underway to test reovirus on humans.

Okay, first off: Why is no-one stopping these clinical trials immediately, having seen how it all turned out in I Am Legend? And secondly, how the hell do you get on a plane showing I Am Legend? Everytime I'm on one, it seems to be some movie about women dying of horrible illnesses or Ice Age.

When Sci-Fi Meets Reality [Natural News]

But even though we all have twenty nine brains and a stomach that speaks Swahili, we shouldn't condemn Hollywood without considering the evidence. Here's the evidence for the prosecution:

1. Hollywood's unseemly hatred towards mutants.

Just consider the wealth of movies and TV shows about people who start spontaneously converting into something beyond their original human design, thanks to a genetic change or exposure to strange substances. Like the vicious ex-humans in Night Shadows aka Mutant, who terrorize a small Southern town. "Mankind's deadliest threat will not come from the skies," it proclaims.

There are also terrifying mutants in Hell Comes To Frogtown and a number of other movies. And on shows like Star Trek, whenever a character (usually a dweeb like Lt. Barclay on Next Gen) starts developing a super-mind — or evolving into a super-lizard — it's always portrayed as a bad thing.) Not to mention the murderous disease-altered mutants of movies such as 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, Omega Man and many others. (These aren't as well known as Night Shadows, of course, but they still have an impact on our mutant-hating culture.)
Counter-examples: Comic books come to our rescue. Mutants come off quite well in shows like Heroes and movies like the X-Men trilogy, which are either based on comic books or obviously derivative of them. Obviously, we should be using our superior posthuman intellects to boost the comic-book industry.

2. Why does Hollywood persecute cyborgs?

Again with the Star Trek hate: Trek gives us the Borg, who are the most hurtful representations of cyborgs imaginable. My friend Zzarglboz had to hide his swizzle-shaped head implants on the street for a year after First Contact came out.
They're like Frankenstein, only cyber! (And actually, some of our posthuman friends are partially dead, and the Frankenstein story is very unfair to them.) In the original Robocop, being turned into a cyborg makes Officer Murphy into a heartless killing machine. And for some reason, regaining his "humanity" is seen as a good thing. Says Cyberpunk Review:

As Murphy begins to realize who he was, and worse, what he's become, the question asked is what degree of Murphy's humanity remains? Murphy's partner, Anne Lewis (played by Nancy Allen) serves to surface these concerns, as she still thinks that Murphy is inside somewhere. Yet, every aspect of humanity has been taken away from Robocop - he doesn't have a home, but instead returns to a borg-like podchair at night to regenerate. Even if Robocop eventually considers himself human in some sense, it's no longer clear what that even means. At best, Robocop is part of that strange category we call "post-human."

3. Hollywood hates it when we merge with aliens.

In movies and TV, alien creatures that want to merge with poor ordinary humans and uplift them to a higher level of consciousness and ability are never "benefactors." They're always "parasites," or at best "symbiotes." For once, comic-book movie aren't even our friend, either — Spider-Man gets an awesome boost from the inky black creature in Spider-Man 3, but it's still portrayed as a terrible thing. Even though it makes his hair so much better! Plus in The Invasion, the alien "parasites" are horrible and awful, even though they clearly make Daniel Craig the most James Bond-esque he's ever been. The same goes for The Puppet Masters. And it's hard to find happy representations of people inter-breeding with aliens, either — it's always nasty and fatal, like in the Alien films or the Species films. When everybody knows that in real life, merging or interbreeding with aliens often works out great. (It's just like marriage, though — don't get hitched until you try living together for a while first.)
Counter-examples: Star Trek has one of the few I can think of, with its happy Trills, the symbiotes that make Dax and the other spotted-neck people all cheerful and ageless with the wisdom and the cute "old man" nicknames.

4. Movies and TV spread the hate against genetic engineering.

Just look at this hall of shame of genetic engineering movies and TV shows. You have your GATTACA, where genetic engineering upgrades the human race, but poor Ethan Hawke gets discriminated against because he's genetically inferior. (Which anybody who saw Reality Bites already knew.) And then there's the dark future world of Dark Angel, where people practice genetic engineering on humans, including the super-killer main character. And of course the aliens in the X-Files are practicing genetic engineering on humans. Not to mention, TV shows are always full of genetically advanced superhumans — including Khan's superior people in Star Trek and the subtly named Nietzscheans in Andromeda — who are all evil and intent on conquering everybody else. And in the forthcoming movie Splicers (or Splice), Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley create a scary-sexy human-animal chimera that turns out to be too much to handle. Why, oh why, can't movies and television ever celebrate the specialness of our genetically hacked brothers and sisters?
Counter-examples: Star Trek is the frenemy of the genetically upwardly mobile. On the one hand, there's Khan's gang and their whole Ceti-Alpha-Two keeping it real craziness. On the other, Trek does offer us Deep Space Nine's doctor Julian Bashir, who's a bit smug and obnoxious but otherwise a pretty decent upgraded human. So we'll call it even.

What can you do to stop the posthuman hate?

1. If you have mental powers as a result of mutation or some kind of alien implant, then use them on the producers and "suits" in Hollywood. Maybe if the blood vessels on their foreheads start swelling to the size of cantaloupes and everything tastes like bad salmon to them, they'll rethink their anti-posthuman prejudice. Otherwise, we may have to wait until the posthuman revolution happens, and then all of the regular humans will be tasped encouraged to treat us more fairly.

2. Support books. Books have been way more favorable to those of us who have moved beyond our human limitations. We'll have a post tomorrow detailing the pro-posthuman books that you as an aspiring posthuman, should read and support.

Top image adapted from photo by Lampeduza.

Stay Out Of The Basement:
A family father/scientist, Dr. Brewer, becomes obsessed with his flora experiments in the basement. His obsession begins to affect his behavior when his kids discover he bleeds green, is eating plant food and sleeping on dirt. It is later revealed that dear old dad was growing human clones from plants and the man they've been dealing with is really his plant clone. The real Dr. Brewer then destroys all of human and plant hybrids. But who's to say that's the real Dr. Brewer?

Why I'm Afraid Of Bees:
Gary Lutz's is a fan of computer role playing games. His computer games lead him to a company that advertises a real-life role playing game, where clients can switch bodies with other clients. Similar to The Fly, Gary accidentally gets stuck in the body of a bee that enters the machine during the switch. While his body has the mind of his partner, his partner's body is stuck with the mind of a bee, and Gary has the body of a bee.

Attack Of The Mutant:
Comic book fan Skipper Matthews is in fan-fantasy world when he discovers his favorite comic book characters have come to life in his town. Together he helps to defeat the villainous Masked Mutant. But unfortunately (or fortunately) Skipper gets sucked into their world (via ray gun) and becomes a real life comic book character as well, who bleeds ink.

Egg Monsters From Mars:
Dana (boys name) finds a mysterious egg and discovers that it's really from some crazy scientist. The egg hatches and the little monster becomes a pet to him. Of course the scientist will stop at nothing to get his eggs back, and the monster protects Dana, who later gets knocked up by one of the aliens.

The Cuckoo Clock of Doom:
This book was every siblings dream. Michael's bratty sister Tara is ruining his life and causing him embarrassment and beat downs from local bullies. For his birthday Michael receives a cuckoo clock that has the power of time travel. Michael figures out the switch and jumps back into time. Unfortunately for Michael he is stuck on a backwards loop that jumps him back year by year until he is a little baby. He figures out a way back, but manages to erase his sisters existence in the process.

Let's Get Invisible:
A mirror connected to a light switch allows a group of kids to turn themselves invisible. They all experiment on how long they can change back and forth until the connection fizzles and one child gets stuck in the mirror. The mirror world is another dimension where their evil twins have been trying to break out into the real world. By the end of the book you don't know who is the original character and who is their doppelganger.

Invasion of the Body Squeezers/ Revenge of the Body Squeezers (Part One And Two):
Very close to invasion of the body snatchers, but the aliens get into your body via hugs. In the second part though you get introduced to a whole host of new aliens that are trying to set off a bomb that would squeeze all humans into a tiny size.

Piano Lessons Can Be Murder:
This book straddles the scifi fence a little. Jerry is a little boy taking piano lessons from the deranged Dr. Shreek. The piano teacher is fascinated by Jerry's hands, and it's later revealed that Dr. Shreek is a large robot that harvests hands for his master. Granted Jerry gets saved by the ghosts of it's past victims...so not entirely scifi, but the still hand stealing robot helps.

After a couple of test screenings and the trailer, Hancock and crew were seen filming in New York City this Saturday night. How is this possible with the release date steadily approaching? Maybe they are searching for a new ending that will allow them the PG-13 rating that sources say they're having trouble getting. With the movie reportedly including scenes of Hancock shoving a man's head up his behind and unleashing destructive sperm, it's no wonder they're struggling with the MPAA. Hopefully Hancock can get his crew in gear for their release in July. (To be fair, Smith's last movie, I Am Legend, reshot its ending in November, only about a month before its mid-December release date, and it did great.) [The Bad And The Ugly]

Planet Of The Apes (Tim Burton version): Wait, what now? Abraham Lincoln is an ape? This ending sort of follows the original Pierre Boulle novel, but sadly makes no sense whatsoever because nothing in the preceding film sets it up.

Screamers: So the nice girl turns out to be a killer cyborg as well, but she's a good killer cyborg, sort of. And then there's a killer cyborg teddy bear on board Peter Weller's spaceship. Oh noes! The end.

The Thirteenth Floor. Whoah dude. What is reality? How did that guy who died in the 1990s suddenly turn up in 2024? Is anything really real, or is it all just a simulation within a simulation within a simulation?

Titan AE. The captain of the ship is our friend. No, wait, he's an evil traitor. No wait, he's actually changed sides again and now he's sacrificing his life to save our heroes. Plus, the good guy knows all about dolphins despite having been raised among aliens.

Android. Klaus Kinski is working to create androids on a hidden space station.... but then it turns out he's actually an android himself! Whoah!

Every M. Night Shyamalan movie ever. That guy is dead, hey? And the aliens are allergic to water, so they decided to invade a planet that's mostly water. And the village is now. Whoah!

Battlestar Galactica, "Epiphanies." And then it turns out the half-Cylon hybrid fetus blood is magically the cure for the president's cancer. Wha? Why?

The 27th Day. Aliens show up and give five capsules that will destroy the world to five humans. All the humans have to do is avoid opening the capsules of mass destruction for 27 days and the world is saved. But oh noes! The Soviet Premier gets control over one of the boxes and wants to use it to hold the world to ransom and attack the United States. Good thing it turns out at the very last minute that you can modify the capsules to slay "only the enemies of freedom." All WMDs should be that discriminating.

The Mist. The army shows up... just a moment too late!

I am Legend. The cured plague victim's blood is actually a vaccine! (This makes sense in the Heston version, but isn't really explained or fleshed out in the Smith version.) And Alice Braga and her kid can survive a huge explosion, as long as they're locked in an airtight vault. Plus, the village is now! I mean, the village is real!

Mission To Mars. Not only is there life on Mars, but it's incredibly goofy. And it turns out they seeded Earth with life. And now they want to meet Gary Sinise, so they can tell him how much they loved Forrest Gump.

Vanilla Sky. OMG, what is reality? Tom Cruise's tragic girlfriends keep merging into one woman, and he can't keep them straight, but then it turns out he's in suspended animation having a 100-year-shroom dream. But then he wakes up, and he's still shrooming. Or is he? He jumps off a building, and into a big eye. Whoah. What just happened? The end.

Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper. It turns out they're all animals!

Dark Star Rising by Frederick Pohl. The alien Erks promise to help restore America's lost superpower status... but it turns out every race they've "helped" before has died off!

Soylent Green. Up with people!

Superman Returns. Superman and Lois have a love child!

The Astronaut's Wife. Johnny Depp's astronaut is really possessed by a goopy alien... but electrocuting him just causes the alien to leap into his wife, Charlize Theron.

Highlander 2. No, wait — the Immortals are actually aliens from the planet Zeist! And Sean Connery and Chrisopher Lambert were friends there. They just... forgot about it when they came to Earth. It all makes total sense.

Andromeda, the final season. But wait, Trance the purple girl is actually a sun. No, really! And she gave birth to some kind of ultimate evil thingy.

New X-Men. Xorn, the wise masked mutant, is acutally Magneto, the misguided (also masked) mutant separatist. Oh noes! Except that he isn't. Never mind.

Iron Man/Avengers. Tony Stark/Iron Man has really been working for the time-traveling maniac Kang all along. Since the beginning! But never mind, here's his teenage self, carreid forward in time to take his place.

Amazing Spider-Man. Spider-man's longtime girlfriend Gwen Stacy had a baby — with the Green Goblin!

Captain America. The Nazi Red Skull transfers his mind into a clone of Captain America, and then becomes the U.S. Secretary of Defence. You go to war with the Red Skull you have, not the Red Skull you wish you had. Or something.

Amazing Spider-Man (again.) Spider-Man was his own clone all along! Oh wait — no, he wasn't.

The Clone Republic by Steven Kent. According to the author himself, there's a "stupid plot twist" involving guns that are way way too easy to sabotage. By pinching them. Which does seem a tad weird.

Quantum Leap, the final season. Suddenly Sam is jumping into famous historical figures. He's Lee Harvey Oswald! He's Elvis! But wait, there's also an evil leaper who's breaking everything Sam's fixed! And maybe Sam's a vampire! But maybe not!

Independence Day. The aliens turn out to be vulnerable to a virus on an Apple Mac. Steve Jobs, alien killer!

JLA. Amazo the killer android has all the powers of the Justice League — so he loses all his powers if the League disbands!

And of course:

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Luke and Leia are really siblings! OMG narrow incest escape!

Thanks to Liz for research help. Also, several plot twists came from here and here.

In Sleep Dealer, the U.S. has finally succeeded in stopping illegal immigrants crossing over from Mexico. But Mexicans can still work in American factories and farms for almost no money, thanks to the miracle of telecommuting. The people in Alex Rivera's film hook up their nervous systems to the Internet to control robots in the U.S., but it takes a toll on them, as you can see from the spooky clip and stills above. The film's title refers to workers who get so drained they collapse.

Rivera says this bizarre scenario may be what America wants: "to use the labor, but not have the person."

Here's the official synopsis for this Sundance-bound film:

The story begins with Memo Cruz, a young campesino, or peasant farmer, in southern Mexico. He's always dreamed of leaving his small pueblo and maybe finding work in the big cities in the north. His dream comes true in the worst possible way when his home is mistakenly identified as a terrorist hideout in a hilariously reckless "Global War on Terror."

Rudy Gaeta is a soldier fighting in this future war. He works for an American security company flying a remote control war machine — a pumped-up version of today's Predator Drone. Rudy's first assignment is to take out the "terrorists" in southern Mexico. Following orders, from his office in sunny San Diego, Rudy dispatches a drone and attacks Memo's home in Mexico.

Uprooted as a consequence of the attack, Memo has to leave the pueblo and go north to earn money to help his family start again. He heads to the massive border city of Tijuana.

On his way into Tijuana Memo meets a young woman named Luz. Luz is a writer, and going into the city to look for stories. After she meets Memo we see what "writing" means in this future. Alone in her room, Luz connects her body to the net and speaks. As she describes her day, the computer records visuals from her memories and the sound of her voice. She puts these recorded memories up for sale on the net - a blog, straight from the brain.

In Tijuana, Memo finds work in a futuristic factory - he earns dollars by connecting his body to the net, and controlling a worker drone in America.

At home in San Diego, Rudy, the soldier, is lonely and disconnected from the world. He spends his free time plugging in and watching recordings of other people's memories. A few days after he attacked Memo's home, Rudy has doubts - something about the attack didn't feel right. He searches for information on the net, and finds Luz's story. He buys it, and for the first time, through Luz's recorded memories, he sees Memo's face - the face of his victim.

Through Luz's stories, effectively through her eyes and ears, Rudy gets to know Memo. And as Luz and Memo fall in love, Rudy realizes what he's done.

• The film was supposed to be called Tonight, He Comes, although the title was changed (probably for obvious reasons) to John Hancock, and then later just to Hancock.
• Directors Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Jonathan Mostow, and Gabriele Muccino were all attached to the film at one point before they they attached Peter Berg.
• Hancock was supposed to be filmed before I Am Legend, but during the game of musical directors Hancock got pushed back and the vampire super-plague movie went into production first.
• The font in the trailer mimics the Heroes logo font. Coincidence? Shyeah, right.

It's best to think of post-apocalyptic movies as "survival movies." There's never been a post-apocalyptic film where the global nightmare killed every single human — unless it was some 1960s avant-garde experiment showing an empty wasteland for two hours. The point of post-apocalyptic movies is that people do survive, even if they have to endure horrible things in the process.

In I Am Legend, we spend a lot of time admiring how well Will Smith has preserved normal life, including stir fried veggies and DVDs. Just like Heston's swinging pad in Omega Man, Smith's living space looks comfy, even luxurious. When I talked to I Am Legend production designer David Lazan, he mentioned that his goal with Will Smith's house was to make it look as much like a normal Washington Square townhouse as possible — until the shutters come down at night.

And the TV show Jericho is all about how the lucky Kansas town clings to domesticity in the face of the mass slaughter of half the United States. The show lingers lovingly over its characters' pristine kitchens and nice clothes, even as they indulge in the greatest luxury of all — petty soap-opera drama.

Part of the thrill of survival movies is witnessing the extreme stuff people have to do to remain alive. It's the same reason we love watching people eat bugs on Survivor, or kids terrorizing each other in the short-lived Kid Nation. When it's not being cozy, Jericho spends a lot of time lingering over the near-starvation of the townspeople and the frozen corpses they have to step over just outside of town.

A few things have changed since 2000, when the nastiest catastrophe to hit the world was John Travolta in a crappy headpiece. These days, the hardest thing is guessing which decaying-orbit bomb will hit us first. Climate crash, Krugmaniac economic collapse, terrorism, peak oil, wars, a nuclear North Korea, avian flu, etc. But more than that, it's increasingly clear that the early 21st. century way of life in America is unsustainable. We can't keep up our current level of energy use or foreign debt forever. It feels a lot like the 1970s, the last time huge disaster movies were this popular.

So we try to imagine what it could be like when the American empire falls and/or the globalized post-industrial economy collapses. And we look for stories that show how we might possibly salvage our asses in that situation.

But maybe there's another explanation: we actually want to tear down our world of maxi-corps, sprawl and environmental destruction. And we can't imagine any way that could happen other than through some kind of omni-fucking calamity.

(Note: Children of Men came out in the U.S. on Dec. 25, 2006, which means almost everybody here saw it in 2007.)

So what's the most hardcore post-apocalyptic movie of all time? The answer probably won't surprise you...
In this chart, "warlords" refers to paramilitary leaders as well as organized thugs. "Degraded culture" means our culture has been reduced to shreds: there's the crappy Shakespeare performance in The Postman, and (scarier) Will Smith memorizing Shrek in Legend. "Weird power systems" means a jury-rigged power generator. Bonus points if it runs on pig shit.

(Note: We're not judging these things on their own merits as entertainment, or science. We're looking at how much we hated their versions of the future.)

The Invasion. In this movie's future, we encounter extraterrestrial life forms, and they're like Prozac parasites. They make everybody ridiculously well-adjusted and devoid of affect. Many people complained about the new upbeat ending, but it would have been great if science had overcome the parasites in a clever, believable way. Instead, we got the magic tacked-on rescue, followed by the easy miracle cure. Blah.

Spider-Man 3. Yet another movie about an alien parasite that changes your behavior. This one causes extreme singing and dancing foolishness, plus bad emo hair. The struggle with the Venom parasite, so intense and disturbing in the comics, becomes campy and dumb. And not unlike Invasion, SM3 has a pat -feeling resolution to the parasite dilemma. Sure, it makes sense that our future holds struggles against behavior-modding creatures, but do they have to be so boring?

Bionic Woman. This TV show should be just our flavor of near-future dystopia. Normally, we love an evil brain-sucking corporation that implants its technology into a woman and then believes it owns her. Unfortunately, BW just isn't bleak or brutal enough to be a fun dystopia. Instead, it's just wishy-washy. The bionics actually make Jaime wimpier instead of stronger. And the evil corporate overlord starts baby-sitting Jaime's sister and washing her dishes. Why?

Chuck. Another NBC TV show about a human who absorbs spy technology, another boring bleak future. Chuck gets the whole CIA/NSA spy database in his brain, but the spymasters who want to use him are ruthless and scheme to murder him as soon as they can line up a replacement. Too bad Chuck is such an annoying squealer that we root for him to die so we can get Chuck 2.0 instead.

I Am Legend. This movie belongs on the "worst" list because of that horrible tacked-on ending, which made The Invasion look like Citizen Kane. First of all, the science-magic device of the mutant's blood containing the anti-plague serum isn't explained at all. And then the salvation of the human race turns out to be this crappy little whitebread New England town, walled in against the heathen plague vampires. Bring back the Partridge Family plague survivors from Omega Man!

Y: The Last Man. In previous years, this comic-book series would have been on our "best futures" list. But it gets on the "worst futures" list for 2007 because of that bogus explanation for how all the men died. Sure, every man on the planet dropping dead at once was never going to have a totally logical explanation. But the explanation we get is just nonsensical, mystical and weirdly anti-science. (There's an alternate explanation involving the Israeli military and a botched bio-weapon, but it's discounted.)

Facebook's Death Grip. We'll all have too many Facebook friends to cope with in the future, net-preneur Jason Calacanis told the Washington Post. Now that Calacanis has thousands of Facebook friends, he just can't deal with all the friend requests and other trivia. So he's outsourcing his friend-management to an intern. In a few years, we'll all be in the "death grip" of overwhelming friend management that will prevent us having a real social life and make us hate our friends. Sign us up!

Future Files: The Next 50 Years by Richard Watson. The reviews and interviews of this book alone make it sound hilarious. For starters, in the future we'll have "ethical bankruptcy" to let us launder our reputations, because all our mistakes will be exposed online. And we'll suffer from "time-famine" and "space-anxiety." D00d! Anti-globalism will crush the European Union. The items in your fridge will talk to each other and formulate a possible dinner menu. Freud, Einstein and Darwin may well be debunked. But global warming won't be much trouble. My favorite part: he doesn't actually know what Friendfinder is. He thinks it's a service that tells you where your friends are currently located. Right. And Alt.com is all about tracking alternate timelines.

The Dark Space by Marianne De Pierres. This space-opera novel takes place in a dark future where humans have colonized Orion. And it falls back on one of my pet peeves: the far-future society that somehow mimics our own past. The human settlers on the planet Araldis somehow live in a crappy copy of Renaissance Italy. Except that it's all cyber, so instead of saying "bambino," they just say "'bino." Which we kept thinking was short for "albino." Oh, and an outer-space God speaks in 1337-speak.

Heroes. And finally, another NBC TV show. (Poor suffering NBC.) We didn't hate everything about "volume two," but the visit to the evil plague future was boring. And the hero-visits-horrible-future trick already happened in season one. This time around, it felt really peremptory, like "here's your horrendous death-future, so suck it bitch." Plus it would be worth losing 98 percent of the world's population to get rid of that boring Irish woman.

Sanders, author of Celluloid Skyline, says "everybody" thought there would be no more images of New York's destruction after Sept. 11. But the New York skyline makes too tempting a target for film-makers. NYC provides a "yardstick" for the scale of destruction, and is meaningful to overseas audiences in a way that Chicago or St. Louis just aren't.

Then we get to the crack-smoking portion of Sanders' quotes in the Times article:

In contrast to I Am Legend — which like The Omega Man (1971) is based on a Richard Matheson novel — the Cloverfield images verge on being tasteless, Mr. Sanders said. "They are playing on feelings not just about New York as civic symbol but on the shock of Sept. 11," he said. "To some degree, that's not fair ball."

I'm not sure which part of his statement is weirder. The idea that there's a "tasteful" way to show millions of people dying, or the idea that audiences can't tell the difference between real destruction and movie spectacle. Actually, I know: it's the notion that I Am Legend wasn't pure 9/11 porn, which it was. (How many times does Will Smith use the phrase "Ground Zero" in that movie again?)

Still, I'm beginning to understand why director Francis Lawrence decided to make I Am Legend look less post-apocalyptic and more nature-park. If you actually cut loose in your fantasy movie and show real destruction and havoc, then people will accuse you of being an impolite bounder, not fit for good society.

Luckily, the problem will solve itself. America won't be the world's main superpower much longer, and NYC won't be the world's leading city. Soon, people will be much more interested in seeing Shanghai or Seoul destroyed than NYC anyway.

[New York Times]

I Am Legend concept art from Warner Bros.

So much of the look of I Am Legend was outdoors. How much of that was designed in advance?

We illustrated it or key-framed it. It was an illustration of the area that we were dressing. We conceptualized how much we could visually do practically, and how it was going to be augmented in the computer.

Some of the concept art sketches look very painterly, especially the evacuation scenes.

Some of the early concepts were ... entirely created as an illustration, and then as we found the practical location, we took a picture of the location and augmented the location, and added what we needed to add to it. And altered the sky and added a grainier texture to the look.

Did you watch Omega Man?

A little bit. There was the original, with Vincent Price, and then Omega Man. It was kind of a take on both of them. But also the director Francis Lawrence wanted to make it feel like it was three years later, but it was not an apocalyptic environment. But nature takes over.

Some of the original concept art looks really bombed out. There are buildings that are just skeletons of metal.

As I came on... it was [decided] not to look so apocalyptic. It was kind of a mixture, [with] a hint of what happened in the midst of the chaos, and then nature taking over. It's been three years since the virus and the town has been blocked out. So rather than having it like Omega Man, with the streets littered with trash and stuff... things are biodegradable. Nature takes over, cleans and moves things around.

Parts of it are quite idyllic and beautiful. What was the reason for deciding to make it look less post-apocalyptic?

Not to look like all the others, and also it's a combination of rather than being him in this post-apocalyptic world, it's the natural world taking over. Nature's evolving.

Did you have anything to do with designing the mutants?

A little bit. Originally the concept was to do it live action, and there was a lot of pre-concept work done early on. And then as it didn't quite play out [as] they wanted it to. It became part of the digital world. So I was involved in some of the meetings [about] how to make the creatures or monsters still human, but a little more defined in its body structure and a little more elongated.

Did the original production designer leave because of the decision to make the film look less post-apocalyptic?

Oh no. No, not at all. It just had to do with personal family stuff.

So what are you working on now?

I'm working on Fast And The Furious 4.

In a fight between a Jedi and yourself, who would win?

Easily, it's always going to be the ninja! It was a bad idea for Lucas to go with the samurai model. Samurais were basically like the fashion models of ancient Japan. The ninjas actually had the skills. Plus Jedis are fictional. Ninjas are real.

Well that trumps our lightsaber question, then.

No, lightsabers are actual real things! We actually wield lightsabers, but we don't just stop there. We got lots of things made out of light, light-shurikens, light-chuks... which are not just lightweight, but they're also just made of light. You do have to be pretty careful when you hold those.

Okay, Ninja vs. Beowulf?

You know, I think Beowulf is kind of like the Chuck Norris of the ancient world, so he's an ally of the ninja. He's old English and old school, give Beowulf his props.

There's a film called I Am Legend coming out where Will Smith is the last man on earth. How would it be if the Ninja was the last man on earth?

You know, I liked it better when it was called Omega Man. Doesn't it seem like it's awfully familiar? You know, the ninja is very kill-sufficient minded, he doesn't just go killing willy-nilly, I don't think the ninja would let it happen. But the Ninja did kill Chilly Willy. He doesn't like penguins. He was a penguinja, actually.

What's more threatening to ninjakind, global warming or oppressive government regimes?

You know, it's more going to be the government regimes, because stupidity is what's behind that. The ninjas are actually stopping global warming by 23% through sheer intimidation alone. We're going and just staring at polar ice caps and daring them to melt.

If you're going to kick back on a Sunday afternoon and watch something science fiction related, what would it be?

Well, a better question is about what I'm doing that's scifi related. I'm actually getting all of the Orson Scott Card books made into movies, secretly, and I'm going to release them all at once as a 72 hour movie. The whole Ender's series, and the Shadow/Bean series.

Will there be ninjas in it at all?

Maybe! I mean who else could pull off all of those stunts?

So can you guarantee that everyone at this live show will have a good time tonight?

Absolutely! If you complain you'll get killed. Anyone that enjoys the show will make it home safely. Maybe.

[MovieMarketingMadness]

• A new viral video for Cloverfield shows nothing new, except the Statue of Liberty's head rolls down the street in a cool way.[Slashfilm]
• The hero of Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth becomes a quasi-immortal genius and then splits into two personalities, who debate the future of humanity. [MoviesOnline]

• In The Dark Knight, Batman steps up his campaign to crush the last mob families with the help of Commissioner Gordon and D.A. Harvey Dent... until the Joker shows up. [IESB]
• On Battlestar Galactica, a more assertive Cylon Six (named Natalie) butts heads with Cabell, while Starbuck gets stuck on the Das Boot-esque ship Demetrius. [SciFiPulse]
• A new Mark Caro film, Dante 01, stars a "mysterious survivor" who disturbs a prison at the end of the universe. [Cinematical]
• Sam Jones will be back as Pete Ross in Smallville. [MovieHole]
• You can watch the entire Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles pilot online at this link. [CC2K]
• And you can see the first three minutes of I Am Legend online too. [AICN]

Unfortunately, all the beautiful innovation of the film's "empty New York" effects - as well as the humanity of Will Smith, who is acting up a pretty good storm here - get lost in the final 40 minutes of the film. That's when the zombie-vampire-infected-thugs come out to play. What begins as a movie about how uninfected survivor Robert Neville (Will Smith) copes with his loneliness becomes a rather dull cat-and-mouse (or monster-and-hero) chase.

Plus, the monsters are pretty lame. Imagine a cross between the infected in 28 Days Later and the soldiers in 300 and you've got the monsters in this flick. Pasty white, fast-moving, with mouths that open to impossible proportions when used for roaring (which they always are), the "night seekers" or "day avoiders" or whatever the hell they're called are your basic fast zombie model. Boring.

What is terrific about this movie, and makes it worth seeing, is quite simply the setting. Every scene in empty New York is terrific, moody, and well-played. Neville's only companion is his dog, and Smith manages to make their relationship emotionally compelling and fun to watch. There's a scene where the loneliness-crazed Neville starts talking to mannequins in a store that's genuinely unsettling. And there are some action-packed moments when he has to rescue his dog from the monsters, but they're basically cheap-scare stuff with sudden movements in dark hallways.

I Am Legend could have risen above its B-movie plot if the monsters had been a little bit more complicated. Are they really monsters, or just a twist in human evolution? What makes them tick? Equally, the movie might have made a bravely dystopian move and never introduced Neville to another real human being. But the moment Neville meets more uninfected humans, the entire movie goes to crap. You can forgive a horror-scifi movie its tacked-on "we're all saved" ending if it caps off a well-executed adventure. I Am Legend is not that kind of adventure. It's fun; it's worth seeing if you like a little zombie action; but don't expect to be blown away.

• Planet of the Apes: Probably the most famous image from this film is ol' Chuck Heston riding up the beach and finding the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand, which means New York City is buried under a ton of coastline. "You blew it all up. You really did it. Damn you... goddamn you all to hell!" Sorry, Charlie.
• Escape From New York: While there's still a few people kicking it around New York, Manhattan has been turned into a maximum security prison, and of course they haven't been kind to the Statue of Liberty either. Director John Carpenter shot the film in St. Louis, Missouri and was able to convince city officials to turn off the power to ten city blocks each night to simulate the desolate city.
• Independence Day: New York City is bustling and full of life... until a giant flying saucer comes and zaps the place to hell. As expected, the Statue of Liberty buys it in this one, although it just looks like she might be taking a nap in the Hudson River, but the city didn't look fare quite so well.
• Deep Impact: New York City gets taken out by chunks of a comet that has been split in two in this 1998 movie. Several other U.S. cities supposedly get decimated as well, but it's Manhattan that we see getting blasted. A tidal wave created by the impact also takes out the Statue of Liberty, and pushes her head through the streets like a giant pinball.
• Armageddon: Two months after Deep Impact, Armageddon slammed into theaters, taking a good sized chunk of New York City with it. While the Statue of Liberty's plight isn't shown, we do get to witness the top of the Empire State Building coming off and slamming into the streets and bringing the observation level down to the ground floor. What a view.
• Artificial Intelligence: A.I.: Even the combined might of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg couldn't manage to put any intelligence into this film about artificial intelligence, nor could they save New York City from being flooded and smashed up like some child's Lego toyset. Although bonus points for having the Statue of Liberty survive, even though she's buried underwater up to her torch.
• Vanilla Sky: Tom Cruise wakes up to a bad day where he's the last person in New York City, resulting in a pretty spectacular shot in a desolate Times Square. The production was given unprecedented access to the location for filming, and the city let them shut everything down and empty it out one early Sunday morning just for this scene.
• The Day After Tomorrow: Director Roland Emmerich wasn't satisfied with blowing New York City to smithereens in Independence Day, so he decided to give the place a good going over in this film. New York gets battered by tidal waves, flooded, and then frozen to absolute zero in order to show you the dangers of global warming. Even the Statue of Liberty gets iced with sideways icicles.
• Cloverfield: All we know about this J.J. Abrams-produced movie is that some sort of giant creature starts tearing the city apart, and the Army tries to fight back. Plus, the thing whacks the heads off of Lady Liberty, and it goes sliding down a city street taking out cabs. For a thing built in 1886, she sure is pretty damned resilient.

It all started with the book by Richard Matheson I Am Legend (1954). Set in the mid-1970s, the book suggests that a mix of atomic weapons and vampirism have turned everyone in Robert Neville's neighborhood into angry marauders who attack his house every night. Mostly they just call him names, and (in one instance) try to have sex with him. Locked into bitter loneliness, Neville has become so insane that it's hard to tell the difference between him and the monsters. This disturbing novel never offers a ray of hope. Tone: Gothic paranoia.

Next came the ultra low-budget Italian flick The Last Man on Earth (1964). Vincent Price plays the hero, who lives in a state of depressed stupor in the suburbs, where the zombie-esque infected roam at night like juvenile delinquents or Beatniks. They are nearly classic vampires, fearing garlic and mirrors. We get a lot of rambling backstory about how all this bad stuff came to happen, and the lonely Price tries (unsuccessfully) to befriend a fluffy black poodle. Eventually Price gets it right and befriends a wild female survivor, which turns out not to be the greatest idea. Tone: Existential angst.

Then there's the infamous Omega Man (1971). Neville (Charlton Heston) battles white-skinned Luddites who shun the technologies that "destroyed the world" in some incomprehensible Cold War skirmish involving germ warfare. They call themselves "The Family" and wear mirrored sunglasses with Medieval robes. These aren't monsters so much as deranged hippies or cultists. Cracked out, clad in an endless supply of shiny track suits, Neville spends every day getting drunk and re-watching the Woodstock movie while mouthing the words. Later he hooks up with a Black Panther-esque mama and her brood of lost kids. Tone: Psychedelic nihilism.

Thursday's Smallville is the last new episode for a while. Don't worry, there are six more episodes already in the can, which will air starting in January. So how does Chloe get stuck with a bomb? It's Clark's fault, not surprisingly. Clark convinces Lana to help him take down Lex Luthor, and this leads them to someone named Adrian, who freaks out and sticks the bomb to Chloe. And Chloe's trapped in an elevator with Jimmy and the bomb, while Lex looks torn and pouty.

Meanwhile, NBC burns through one of its last few Journeyman episodes tonight at 10. When layoffs at his newspaper threaten to hit home, Dan travels back in time to the Register's Christmas past. And he runs into his own absentee father, whom he encourages to spend more time with his family. And no, that really doesn't sound too promising for one of Journeyman's last few chances to pull off a ratings miracle.

More time travel happens on Tuesday night with two new (to us) episodes of Life On Mars on BBC America. A cop from 2006 (John Simms from Doctor Who) gets stuck in 1973 and has to deal with the more unpleasant aspects of that era (bad hair, racism), plus his own past. Also, Cinemax is showing V for Vendetta around the same time, and Sci-Fi has Ang Lee's Hulk.

On Wednesday, the Discovery channel has "level 4" of Rise of the Videogame, which deals with the development of virtual worlds and lifelike characters. It's probably worth checking out just to see what "troubling cause and effect" they think The Sims and Everquest had. I'm betting it's that whole take-away-the-Sims'-toilet thing.

Also on Thursday at 8, the TV Guide Channel has an hour-long documentary about the making of I Am Legend, including an interview with Will Smith and behind-the-scenes footage. Just in case you haven't already made up your mind about whether you're going to see it this weekend.

On Friday, Sci-Fi has a Firefly marathon, for the three of you who don't have the DVDs yet.

Apart from that... there are a lot of reruns. If you channel surf enough, you'll hit a Star Trek episode.

At the start of his career, Smith sat down and analyzed the most successful movies of all time and tried to copy them, he told Time Magazine:

"I said, 'I want to be the biggest movie star in the world.'" Lassiter, seeing promise that few others in Hollywood would, took his friend seriously and found a list of the 10 top-grossing movies of all time. "We looked at them and said, O.K., what are the patterns?" Smith recalls. "We realized that 10 out of 10 had special effects. Nine out of 10 had special effects with creatures. Eight out of 10 had special effects with creatures and a love story."

Once Smith had the formula for a hit movie, he started applying it with gusto, leading to Independence Day, Men In Black, Wild Wild West and i robot. After few years away, he's hitting the sci-fi cash register again, with I Am Legend, which comes out next week.

He says Legend is a fall movie, not a summer movie — meaning it's not just "things that happen," but "people responding to things that happen." He also stars in next summer's Hancock, about a has-been superhero who has an affair with his publicist's wife.

The true horror in I Am Legend, and other stories like it, is having to watch what happens to people when they're robbed of society. It's no accident that Mary Shelley, author of horror-scifi classic Frankenstein, later wrote a post-apocalyptic book called The Last Man. Like many storytellers in the genre, she knew that no monster is scarier than a human being without companions.

Often the aloneness monster rears its head in post-apocalyptic scifi: New Zealand indie Quiet Earth tortures us with fear when our protagonist discovers he's the last guy on the planet; and the masterful 28 Days Later amps up the fear right away when the hero awakens to find himself alone in the middle of an abandoned London. Possibly the most desolate portrait of this aloneness comes in Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime, where a handful characters who can travel forward in time find that they've "jumped" to a future where humans are mysteriously gone. The time-travelers head to the future in longer and longer jumps, trying to reach a world where apes or spiders have evolved into intelligent life that can keep them company. But it doesn't happen. The sun just grows older and dimmer, and the lost humans never cure their species-loneliness.

Of course, there's being completely alone and then there's being "the only one." Being completely alone can sometimes be peaceful, as Ripley demonstrates in Alien when she crawls into her pod after ejecting the alien into space. But being the only human left in a world of mutants, super-evolved apes, or alien invaders - that's more typical in scifi horror. It forms the basis of often-retold stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and countless Alien ripoffs (often little more than slasher movies in space).

Still, no matter what horrifying creature menaces that army of one, the true terror lurking beneath the surface is the loss of protective community. This isn't a fear that humans reserve for themselves, by they way. The scary parts of E.T. (and yes, there are some) have to do with E.T. being a castaway who is vulnerable on a world dominated by homo sapiens. And those who read Frankenstein know that what makes the reanimated man into a monster is his realization that he's alone among creatures who want him destroyed.
Image from Marooned in Realtime book cover by Stephen Martiniere.