Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I’ve heard this movie mentioned here and there but never that much about it. I didn’t even know the thing that happens the night that the comet comes is zombies until I was looking for zombie movies.

I really don’t know what else to expect. There’s a comet, and something happens, and zombie apocalypse, and it’s considered pretty good but not good enough to be that remembered in the mainstream.

After watching the movie:

For the first time since the dinosaurs went extinct, the Earth is about to pass through the tail of a comet, and very close to Christmas. Most of the country prepares to celebrate the rare occurrence by standing outside watching, but Regina Belmont (“Reggie”), a movie theater employee in LA who would rather be dominating the high scores of the arcade cabinet in the lobby, is convinced by her boyfriend Larry, the projectionist, to spend the night with him in the steel-lined projector booth and help him make some money loaning a reel to a movie pirate. In the morning, Larry’s contact still hasn’t shown up to return the reel, so Larry goes out to demand it back from him, and doesn’t find the guy but does get found by a violent zombie-like mutant. Following soon after, Reggie finds Larry’s motorcycle and escapes the same zombie on it, heading home to where her sister Sam slept in the shed rather than join their stepmother Doris’s comet party after Doris decked her for insubordination. Finding Doris’s clothes among the pile of clothes and dust in the street, Reggie realizes that everyone who was out when the comet was in the sky either turned to dust or zombies, and she and Sam weren’t affected because they both spent the night enclosed in metal shielding. Hearing an apparently live DJ on the radio, they quickly head to the radio station, but find only an improbable amount of automation and Hector Gomez, a truck driver who spent the night in the back of his truck. Assuming themselves the only survivors, Sam takes control of the station microphone, and the phone rings. A group of scientists that anticipated the comet’s effects and took shelter at an underground base are searching for survivors, but Dr. Audrey White is opposed to the other scientists’ plans.

Once again, I’m fine with magic comet dust turning people into powder or zombies on their way to becoming powder, but the assertion that Earth has not passed through a comet tail since the dinosaur extinction event didn’t sound right to me, and indeed, Halley’s comet famously passed close enough in 1910 that the planet passed through its tail (and there was a lot of panic about what that would do to people at the time). Though I respect that in 1984 there was less certainty about how the dinosaurs died out than there is today. There was less certainty in the late 90s when I was in school than there is now. Once again, not only are the zombies more in looks than in how they work (they’re on a sliding scale of sentience, and different people are in different stages of progression into mutation), but they’re also barely in it once the situation is established.

One of the things that doing minimal research on a movie before watching it allows for is surprises. I may now vaguely remember a mention that Robert Beltran was known for this movie before being cast as a regular on Star Trek Voyager, but it caught me off guard to see his name ranked highly in the credits. I hate to say it but he’s pretty much exactly the same as he was on the show, and while as part of an ensemble it’s nice to have him as a very stable element, as one of three leads I was a little underwhelmed. He’s definitely subordinate to the Belmont sisters in terms of who has to carry the movie though. I only found him entertaining beyond the “hey, there’s Chakotay!” factor when he was putting on a cowboy act to fool a guard. I’ve always had trouble reading him as Latino, but I’m not sure if that works against everyone else seeming to treat him as the most Mexican guy to ever be named Gomez or if it works with him having like one moment of calling out how the ladies are being racist at him. I wish I had more to say about the sisters. They’re just nice girls from the Valley who never signed up for any of this, and that’s fun. It’s nice to see them get to be sisters, and occasionally even not feeling competitive over claim to possibly one of the last men on Earth.

I wanted to do more exploring of pretty much everything. There’s just too many ideas to give them all enough time in an hour and a half. The zombie mutants as I mentioned were barely in it, the scientists were little more than teased until it was suddenly the endgame, and there’s both too little of encountering other survivors and of being the only ones left in an empty world that was full of people yesterday. It felt like a lot of time was spent on introducing Reggie and Sam’s existing lives and yet there’s so much to unpack in their parental situation that is just left at “their father is out of the country and their stepmother will not be missed”. Lastly, Reggie’s video game obsession has the markers of a Chekhov’s Gun but the only way I noticed it having anything to do with the rest of the movie after keeping her out of the way for her boyfriend’s casual death is that we finally meet the mysterious high score rival in the very end of the epilogue.

I would certainly watch this again, but I think in just about every measure it at best didn’t quite succeed at what it could’ve been. I’m not sure if I want to see it redone or if too much of the 80s charm would be lost. Or perhaps what I want it to be is just Zombieland.