The Postman

Just finished watching this film on TV, and had never seen it before, so here is the review.  This was not a great film.

I really, really hope the book did a better job of explaining how civilization managed to collapse to such a total degree even though there were still large groups of people around, plenty of foliage and fresh running water and animals in the forest.  They didn’t really explain why everybody suddenly had amnesia about who Richard Starkey was, what P.S. meant and the only two people in the world who remembered the name William Shakespeare were Kevin Costner and the lead villain.  I also didn’t understand why Kevin Costner was so reticent to sleep with the super hot babe who propositioned him pretty straightforwardly on account of her husband was shooting blanks on account of “the bad mumps” even though he (Costner) had apparently been without a woman like forever and had just escaped from the evillest all male hellhole ever, it looked like the prisoners in the mine in Zorro, or the kids trapped in the cave in Indiana Jones, or a dozen other movies that have had a setting like that.  Dude, she’s hot, her husband says it’s O.K. and she wants no commitment.  What’s your problem?

Thank God for E Mail

Nor why he was hesitant to kill the villain in the end, but instead had to wait for the guy to pull a gun after he’d spared his life and the least likely person, the lackiest of the lackeys, put a bullet through his head at the very last split second.  In fact, they played that cliche 3 or 4 times throughout the film.  They also didn’t explain how the villain failed to recognize Costner all that time as his former prisoner, when the only change in appearance was that he’d shaved.  Nor did they explain why everybody was wearing such hideous clothes, draped in rags to the point that they might as well have been walking around in animal skins, and then at the denouement scene which is I guess about 20 years later or so, everybody dressed just like normal modern people, complete with jewelry.  Did they get the fashion industry up and running that fast, or had everybody just hidden their wardrobes during the post-apocalyptic era?

I sure hope the book did a better job of explaining all that than the film did.  Because the film, despite being reasonably watchable as an action/adventure type thing, really didn’t make much sense at all.