On the couch

What happens after the end of the world is big business recently.
It’s always been a runner of course, Mad Max and even earlier, The Omega Man mined that particular lode. Recently, however, popular science fiction has been tending back towards it. Maybe it’s post-millennial/pre-2012 anomie. Maybe it’s just producers with too few new ideas.
Whatever the reason, after a spate of “the world is banjaxed, how can we fix it?” flicks like The Core, Sunshine and Armageddon a few years ago, things moved on to “the world is screwed, how can we cope with it? whine-fests like 2012 and The Day after Tomorrow.
More recently, however, it seems like the inevitability of the end of the world has been accepted by film folk and topic du jour is “it’s all gone to hell in a handbag, whatdepressing outcome can we make a movie about?”
In some cases this has been great. The Road, for example, was based on a fantastic book and turned out to be a great, if incredibly depressing, evening’s entertainment. The likes of Zombieland and even I Am Legend are further examples of how Hollywood deals with matters when the toothless maniacs with “The End is Nigh” placards turn out to be right.
Latest to throw his hat  for the apocalypse hoe-down is Denzel Washington in Alber and Alan Hughs’ The Book of Eli.
Set roughly 30 years after an unspecified future devastated by what is hinted at being a religiously-motivated nuclear war, the world is a combination of lawless roads stalked by gangs of, at best, murderous thieves, and at worst murderous thieves who are hungry and have a taste for human flesh.
Civilisation, what is left of it, is a low-tech Wild West where the biggest guy, or the smartest one with the toughest henchmen call the shots. In this world walks solitary ass-kicker Eli (Washington). Headed west differentiates himself from the hoi poloi by a) being polite and b) being literate.
Books don’t feature prominently in this new world so Eli’s most treasured possession – the last Christian bible in the world – makes him a target for Carnegie (Gary Oldman) a local despot with aspirations of world domination.
After an interesting set-up – with Washington in morally ambiguous mode, killing when he has to and sherking confrontation when he can – matters lose some of their interest once Eli hits town and the story gets laid out. After that it’s really just a chase movie with elements of The Road, I Am Legend and Gunfight at the OK Corral.
Along for the ride in the role of spunky sidekick is Mia Kunis, proving to be a dependable screen presence in action, dramatic or comedic roles. As the villianous Carnegie Gary Oldman hams it up better than the keynote speaker at an international SPAM convention being celebrated at Hogmanay. He’s clearly having great craic doing it and it’s a fun performance to watch, counterbalanceing Washington’s mumbly, monosyllabic Eli nicely.
A not unentertaining watch, The Book of Eli ends up promising more than it delivers.
Thousands of years removed but of a similarly bleak outlook is Nicholas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising.
Despite sounding like a moronic Viking slasher flick, the latest from the director of Bronson – a fantastic and underrated movie – is more fairly described either as “pretensious twaddle” or a “powerfully evocative film by a visionary imagesmith”.
Filmed in Scotland and featuring barely any dialogue, Valhalla Rising stars James Bond villian Mads Mikkelsen as One Eye, a Viking slave in Scotland who, after freeing himself from his captors in stomach-shurning style, falls in with a group planning to head to the crusades.
Mute and communicating only through a child – the only survivor of the group he killed to free himself – they are blow off course and find themselves marooned on unknown shores.
If it’s striking visuals, powerful acting and flashes of grusome violence you want then Valhalla Rising is the film for you.
If, however, you want a coherant narritive, something more than one incident or line of dialogue every five minutes then you might be best advised against it. This level of arty noodling has been know to cause hives.