It occurs to me that this year is the 25th anniversary of Kevin Costner’s second-worst movie – The Postman. (His first worst was, of course, the other post-apocalyptic movie Waterworld which was basically Mad Max with jetskis. Although Jeanne Tripplehorn makes the experience worth it.)
The short version is that after the apocalypse, a traveling actor masquerades as a postman from a distant restored federal government to garner himself protection and sustenance. However, he inadvertently inspires a movement to overthrow a warlord and actually restore the government.
The book, by David Brin, was a good bit darker with quite a few changes. Most notably, the book portrays civilization being held back from recovery by fanatical survivalists who adopt a heavily Darwinian (or Malthusian, I suppose) attitude. Survivalists are portrayed as madmen who are glad society has collapsed, embrace the every-man-for-himself world, and will fight to prevent the establishment of any type of restorative process. Also, the nature of and role of men and women is prominent in the book, as one character recruits her own army of women to subvert and manipulate the men, through feminine means, towards the shared goal of her and the postman.
The book also featured more of the day-to-day scrounging and hard-scrabble living that the postman has to go through before he stumbles onto his deceptive new career. There’s a scene in the book where he discovers a cache of high-value items (tooth powder, antibiotics, an AR7, etc.) and is forced to abandon it as bad guys approach. The book describes his anguish as he sees those items get taken by the bad guys when they would have made his life so much better. Good stuff. There are smaller, similar scenes throughout the story that remind you that this is a world where something as simple as a tooth infection can and will kill you.
The book is much less happy ending than the movie but both are still, in my opinion enjoyable. The movie is rather long at almost three hours, but Im cool with that since I’m a sucker for this genre of movie. There are humourous touches in the movie that are absent from the book, and, bizarrely, now-dead rocker Tom Petty appears as himself playing the mayor of a small town of survivors.
The movie still has the theme of townies-vs-warlords that was in the book but the strident and vehement attitude about evil ‘survivalists’ is absent in the movie. The bad guys are not really referred to as ‘survivalists’ but rather as just a rather large organized group of thugs, in the book they are quite clearly called ‘survivalists’ and are portrayed as ear-cutting killing-machines who are one-man armies.
Is it a good movie? No, not really? Is it a fun movie? Well, if your idea of fun is post-apocalyptic living, sure. Is it entertaining? Yes, if you enjoy this genre. I’d watch it if it came up for free on Amazon Prime or I saw it while flipping channels. Would I actually rent it? No. But I would buy the book. Not as great as Alas Babylon or Lucifers Hammer, but still an entertaining read with a little bit of food for thought here and there.
Oh, and according to the book, the events in The Postman take place in the near-future of…2013. I must have missed it.
