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Get the feeling that you’ve been here before? They need to prevent a future where the world is destroyed by a CGI effect. The stalwarts are back. We’re not sure who’s good and who’s bad, or why. Have to confess I found the opening of the series somewhat irritating. But last night’s episode I Am Become Death pulled it all together quite nicely – for now. I like Sylar as a family guy, and I’m looking forward to Zachary Quinto as Spock. I remain irritated that they don’t broadcast very much at all in DD 5.1. Only HD customers seem to get that.
Nuclear post-apocalyptic movies most often represented technology as having been rendered useless (or dust) by the bombs. One interesting feature of I Am Legend is that the infrastructure remains. Most people are wiped out or turned into zombies (let’s face it: they’re zombies) by disease, but there are still generators and there is still some petrol left. Will Smith still works out. He has to, or he can’t run away from the zombies. His house represents an upper middle class enclave (no – the US is not a classless society) in the midst of chaos, the chaos being represented by a return to a pre-technological lifestyle. They’re hunter-gatherers again – none overweight, low blood pressure, fast and strong. It just happens that they hunt and gather humans instead of pre-historic antelopes and berries. They even appear to have a prototypical religion. And they probably don’t fret about when the screen protectors for their new phones are going to arrive, all the while carrying their phones around in plastic bags. Not that anyone would actually do that of course.
They were always a waste of everyone’s time. Scotland had the courage to hold out and have nothing to do with them, but like the saps we are we caved in and inflicted them on a generation of year 9s – filling them with half remembered nonsense about “key scenes” (whatever that means) in Shakespeare plays that meant nothing to them. Ed Balls is quoted as saying “increasingly the national test is less and less relevant.” When were they at their peak of relevance then? I must have missed that. Kind of makes me laugh to think of retired teachers having to cancel their holidays because they now can’t earn their yearly bonus by ticking page after page and then making up a number.
Be careful about approaching it. It’s a closed environment with limited possibilities, and will eventually croak. The mood is more rewarding.