COLOR | WIDESCREEN (2.35:1) | RUNTIME: 1 hr 18 mn
PRODUCERS: Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle
DIRECTOR: Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle
SCREENPLAY: Calum Grant
CAST: Adam Savage, Mark Routhier, Greg Lucey, Sally Dana, Brad Olsen, Angie Thieriot, Mary Rutherford, Kai Langenberg, Del Montgomery
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Joshua Atesh Litle
SYNOPSIS: Over a decade after the world's population was decimated by a plague, a pair of Bay Area filmmakers attempt to understand the event by interviewing survivors. Exploring the deserted streets and emptied neighborhoods, the two men collect individual accounts of the pandemic and look at the various ways people have dealt with the harsh reality of life in the aftermath.
San Francisco's population has been reduced to a mere 186 people, and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge is deteriorating. Looters raid the empty neighborhoods, where sealed apartments are full of canned food, supplies, and skeletal remains. Those with engineering and trade skills have managed to preserve some aspects of civilization. Repurposed car batteries and solar panels provide electricity, and rooftop
The filmmakers creatively sidestepped their budget limitations and embraced the mockumentary style. This pretense is ideal for shot-on-the-fly, no-location-permit, small-crew indie moviemaking. The faux-vérité gimmick is certainly nothing new in apocalyptic sci-fi films. It was used to great effect during the cold war era in such TV movies as The War Game (1965), Special Bulletin (1983), and Without Warning (1994). The narrative in all those was from a news viewpoint, however, and this film is told from the angle of the common man. The first-person camera perspective gives the story a gripping immediacy. It's probably no coincidence that it arrived just a couple of years after The Blair Witch Project, which enjoyed massive success with a similar tactic.
Adam Savage (co-host of TV's Mythbusters) plays a resourceful engineer who helps preserve some of the creature comforts of urban dwelling. Not only did he restore electricity to the survivor community by using huge lead backup power batteries plundered from downtown office buildings, but he's also the one who cobbled together a working battery pack for the cameraman.
This low budget effort offers an interesting and refreshing approach to the post-apocalypse scenario. The more effective moments are sometimes undermined by slips into tedium and pretension, but it still adds up to an admirably ambitious feature-film debut.