World of Terror

I couldn't sleep last night.

At about 1 a.m., I got up, drank a glass of water and looked at Facebook.

Someone had posted, "If you are awake right now, listen to this," with a link to the live Twitter feed about the Boston police's massive manhunt. I looked through reams of posts, followed the action for a while, and finally went back to bed thinking, "The movies have been outdone by life, once again."

Terrorism on film has been pretty much a genre unto itself for a while now.

The premise of international terrorists, bad men with evil intent, has fuelled films from Die Hard to James Bond. The movies have skipped around the globe to find worthy sources of villainy, from North Korea to Syria and now back to Southern Russia. The White House has been blown up a couple of times already this spring.

You might think the people who make movies would speak to each other occasionally, but maybe not, given the sameness of the plot points and the similarity of the film titles themselves. The destruction of the sacred icons of Americana has become almost a cliché, but still the images keep coming. Even G.I. Joe got in on the action this year.

Zombie terrorism

But even if there are no new ideas in the world, there are still a lot of zombies apparently. One of the upcoming films that sets about destroying the United States, and then the world, is World War Z. The film, based on the book by Max Brooks, takes as its premise a global epidemic of unstoppable flesh-eating ghouls. We have met the enemy and he is us. He is also rather hungry and will stop at nothing in order to devour every living thing on the planet, from voles to blue whales to your children.

Whether the film adaptation of the book retains any of the more critical plot points remains to be seen. The damn thing stars Brad Pitt after all, so how political can it be? Mr. Pitt has already stated that the global politics that characterize much of the book have been dropped in favour of a simplified -- read American-focused -- story. A first glance at the trailer reveals that it is the middle-class American family imperiled again. Super dad must save the world, while sweet-faced wife and kids cower at home, although, this time home is a U.S. battleship. World War zzzz…

The book does make a few interesting stabs at the possible global repercussions of a pandemic. In interviews about his book, author Max Brooks stated the structure of the story was a means to address American isolationism. "I wanted to combat that in World War Z and maybe give my fellow Americans a window into the political and cultural workings of other nations. Yes, in World War Z some nations come out as winners and some as losers, but isn't that the case in real life as well? I wanted to base my stories on the historical actions of the countries in question, and if it offends some individuals, then maybe they should reexamine their own nation's history."

In the book, the American reaction to the zombie threat is only one chunk of the story. The international response, from the Chinese military to South African activists to Cuban Nationalists, is given expansive and detailed explication. Almost every different nationality -- Palestinians, Russians, Canadians, Norwegians -- is given some degree of coverage, as each country in the world is forced to do battle with an enemy that has no allegiance to anything but voracious hunger. The threat is everywhere. But it is the viral unseen, the notion of terror within that seems to set the alarm bells clanging the loudest and the longest. As it is with zombie pandemic, so it is with religious extremism, another disease of irrationality.

When asked in a subsequent interview about how he would compare terrorists with zombies, Brooks stated: "The lack of rational thought has always scared me when it came to zombies, the idea that there is no middle ground, no room for negotiation. That has always terrified me. Of course that applies to terrorists, but it can also apply to a hurricane, or flu pandemic, or the potential earthquake that I grew up with living in L.A. Any kind of mindless extremism scares me, and we're living in some pretty extreme times."

Random carnage

I suppose that is putting it rather mildly. The book takes as its premise the oral history of war, based on the model of Studs Terkel's book about the Second World War, The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two. Like The Good War, Brooks's book is comprised of episodic, first-person accounts from the survivors of the conflict. In this fashion, it reminded me explicitly of listening and reading the Twitter feed about the events in Boston, which was a little like watching a disaster movie unfold in 140 characters at a time.

Even as wild speculation and suppositions spilled out over the Internet, the reality of the situation appeared stranger and stranger. Surreal is the term that seemed to be used most often to describe a city under lock-down, with its warnings to shelter-in-place and streets devoid of people and cars. It is an oddly addictive experience to read these missives from Boston -- one part voyeurism to two parts curious horror. I can only speculate what it would be like to be in the middle of the action, but even from thousands of kilometres away the atmosphere is potent and pervasive. The description that people return to again and again is, "It's like a movie."

But of course, movies have a beginning, a middle and an end, and, until very recently, didn't bear much of a resemblance to real life at all. It is when life and movies converge that things begin to feel deeply strange. But also, in a more curious way, deeply familiar. We've seen the images of firefights, police barricades and terrified populations again and again on the big screen, like so many early rehearsals for the real thing.

World War Z is not the only world-of-terror film on its way. The summer film season is chock full of them. Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman explore the end of the world in Oblivion, so too M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth. Even James Franco gets in on the end of days action with This is the End. Edgar Wright's The World's End features Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, previously seen fighting off zombie hordes in Sean of the Dead, and now back in theatres shortly.

Whether it's war, economic collapse, terrorism, or zombies, maybe we humans feel the need to be chastened, taken down, punished for our misdeeds, if the next wave of end-of-world movies is any indication. Here I must turn to another film to make sense of things. Far from the fictional comic-book styling of explosion-heavy action movies, where Channing Tatum or Gerard Butler come swinging in, cradling a machine gun in the crook of one bulging arm to save liberty and justice, other films set about tackling the idea of terror with more humble tools.

'Wrong Time, Wrong Place'

In Wrong Time, Wrong Place, a young woman who lived through the massacre on Utoya Island, when a lone gunman dressed a police officer murdered more than 60 young men and women, tells her story to the camera. In the midst of talking, her gaze often fixes on some middle point, and she falls silent in memory. When the shooting began, she found herself rooted in terror, unable to move, until a door opened and she was beckoned into a bathroom stall, where a group of kids were hiding.

We tell stories, write books, and make films to explain things to ourselves, to impart order to chaos, to find reason. But in the end, does it always come down to random, inexplicable chaos?

Even if there isn't much point in looking for a reason why things unfold the way they do, it doesn't stop us humans from demanding answers. We throw our rational minds against the caprice of fate, looking for some great design in the universe and finding nothing. Except, maybe, for each other.

The story that resounds in Wrong Time, Wrong Place is about a group of students who survived by huddling together in a bathroom stall. By comforting each other in the depths of fear and terror, they save each other with their gentleness and courage.