A Wistfully Merry Christmas
Crying about sequels (and sorry about not posting this on Christmas)
It has been approximately 6 years since I first watched Anna and the Apocalypse. I recall the day quite fondly. Cold. Frigid, even. It’s December in the Northeast and the closest theater was a half mile walk away. Because of the weather, it felt like a much longer walk than that. The theater resides on a college campus and given it was winter break, there was little to no activity near or around it. When I sat down, the only company I had was another guy sitting a few rows down in front of me. For what it’s worth, we laughed at the same jokes.
Now, normally, this is where the reviewer (me in this case) would launch into a somewhat hyperbolic overview of how what they witnessed dramatically altered their life. This is true. This movie did that for me. Then, usually, it’s backed up by stellar analysis and 3 hours of explanation and backstory or it’s about a movie no one is surprised to hear was incredible and the reviewer just hasn’t seen it before, sparking this epiphany for them. Think something like this (shoutout Breadsword):
Howl's Moving Castle - an Underrated Masterpiece
This is where I’ll buck that trend. Anna and the Apocalypse is not that. Preemptive spoiler for the movie if you haven’t watched it: it’s fine. It’s like a solid 7/10. And it’s a musical, in case that’s something you might want to be warned about. Someday, maybe, down the line, I will have a stalwart defense of this movie. Again, bucking the trend, this is not that either. It is instead a plaintive tale about a lightly researched topic near and dear to my heart: a story about Hollywood letting me down.
We begin with Pacific Rim. For those who have not seen Pacific Rim, go watch it and then return here. Your life will be better for it. Put simply, it’s a movie about giant robots fighting Kaiju (with a capital K), giant sea monsters from another dimension come to destroy Earth. Humanity, in a desperate attempt to remain the dominant species on the planet, created Jaegers (with a capital J), giant humanoid mechs, to combat the Kaiju. The plot was not complicated. The characters were straightforward and loveable. The Kaiju were–and still are–awesome and the Jaegers were badass. It was everything you should adore about movies.
In Pacific Rim, I find the heart of the reason I do this whole movie review thing. It is an indescribable feeling somewhere at the intersection of wonder and childlike joy kindling my love for movies. Drawing obvious inspiration from Japanese kaiju movies of the 50s and 60s, Pacific Rim paid unabashed homage in its monster design. The Kaiju were otherworldly, their lore a constant wonder for a viewer throughout the runtime. Every single one was unique and distinct with their powers representing the primal fear for nature as a direct result of their destructive capabilities. The movie opened with narration and viewers showed cities and world famous landmarks decimated as if they were playthings to schoolchildren. Similarly, the mech design drew inspiration from mecha anime starting in the 1960s, likely emulating some of the most famous like various Gundam shows and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The mech pilots were intrinsically linked to their machines, something that thematically spoke to the necessity of a bond, regardless of circumstances, to defeat an evil superseding that of petty cultural differences. All the while, its story remained upbeat and light with a constant feeling that no matter what, the enemy can be defeated. There were silly gags, memorable characters, plenty of tropes you’ve seen before, and a bittersweet ending to cap it off. It was, for all of its minor faults, a fantastic movie and a love letter to the visual medium and its influences.
The same cannot be said of its sequel, Pacific Rim Uprising. I can vividly recall the details of the first movie. I could probably walk through the plot beat for beat strictly from memory. A full rant can be saved for another day, but I can’t actually remember a single thing from the sequel. It suffered, ironically, from the same problem most modern day monster movies do: too many people talking, too many people involved, not enough monsters (or robots in this case) that pummeled each other. Notably, this problem was absent from Pacific Rim because of how strongly it clung to its core ideals and dedication to being fun before anything else. For every epic moment the first movie earned, its sequel squandered. Pacific Rim Uprising’s story was lame and uninspired with each and every character suffering from flat personalities or boring backstories. Completely burdened by trying to somehow outdo its predecessor, instead of following the same strategy of repurposing tried and true ideas and drawing inspiration from stories like it, it pulled an average post-MCU Hollywood move and set itself up for another sequel.
This is a classic modern Hollywood scenario. Either something cool or something old, or both in some cases, revisited a little too late or by people with misguided intentions. An insidious mentality that has ruined quite a lot recently. Off the top of my head, Star Trek (2009) comes to mind as a failed reboot that spawned several uninspired sequels, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again as a musical sequel that was entirely unnecessary, and every single live action Disney remake is a waste of time. Good and (relatively) original ideas like Pacific Rim are all too often abused and squandered making pointless sequels or spin offs that are paltry attempts to capture the magic of their source movie. The most insulting part of this isn’t that a lot of these sequels end up making money riding off the coattails of the its predecessor, but that the ideas that succeeded–the real value provided–is abused and the franchise mismanaged until it fades to irrelevancy, discarding all good will for nothing.
So where does that leave us with Anna and the Apocalypse?
I remember sitting there while the credits rolled thinking about how special what I had just watched was. For the first time since the likes of I am Legend and 28 Days Later, it was a zombie movie that took itself mostly seriously instead of satirically. It was a breath of fresh air. As a fan of musicals, even that aspect had to be lauded for managing to work seamlessly in combination with some pretty outlandish concepts. More intriguing than all of that, the movie worked with a cast of silly and imperfect characters, tragically afflicted by the world they were now forced to live with.
Anna, the main character and driving force behind the movie, was a severely underrated and endearing protagonist. Framed in a coming of age story, Anna and her friends near the end of high school. Anna’s plan was to take a gap year before college (university, but I’m not British). Amidst mere pedestrian troubles like a “complicated” love life and a domineering vice principal, Anna and her friends were abruptly thrown into a zombie apocalypse. She was forced to fight and struggle as each of the people she loved were taken away from her. She endured anguish without a moment’s respite for grief and was confronted with the most demanding challenges of her life that made everything else petty by comparison. Her hometown was ravaged, her friends and classmates murdered, sometimes by her hand, which spared Anna not a single second of relief for the entire runtime. By the end, Anna was left with none of them, pushed from her home for a slim chance of safety, no cure for the epidemic in sight, obligated to abandon everything and everyone she’s ever known. Watching her go through this alongside witnessing the innocence ripped away from a bunch of teenagers, Anna maturing out of necessity was heartbreaking and filled you with sympathy, even if you didn’t expect it.
The point of the movie, and so many others that are similar, was that Anna could be any of us. Admittedly, this was still fiction so there were some fantastical ways that things happen, but the point was that I can see myself in her shoes. I struggled to empathize because I didn’t want to empathize with Anna’s dilemmas. I didn’t want to see my hometown destroyed or be confronted with the decisions I’d have to make to survive. There were a lot of the expected zombie tropes, prompting the usual thoughts about scenarios you would need to handle to survive the zombie apocalypse. Surprisingly, Anna and the Apocalypse tied this together with its songs, even if they were a little on the nose. They carried the story as well as each of the characters and while not all noteworthy, they were catchy enough and advanced the story quite well. The contrasting energy of a bouncy pop tune and the decimating nature of the zombies was shocking at times, but charming always.
I am probably the sole remaining vocal fan of this movie all these years later. But Anna is sitting in a world filled with intriguing ideas and concepts. Especially after she endured what she did, seeing her become a jaded young adult with merciless intent to kill as many zombies as possible holds so much potential. Think about the possibility of a revenge story where she hand-delivers the cure to some of the only remaining people from her town, salvaging some of the only familiarity and comforts of home she has left as she attempts to resettle in her home. Or, Anna finds out that their hopes of safety are shattered when the thin veneer of protection the military provides collapses when a soldier hides his bite and gets infected. Maybe, Anna and her two remaining acquaintances are turned away by the military upon arrival, there’s a time skip, and we see the new hellish world through the day to day life they’ve developed for themselves. There’s so much to build upon in Anna and the Apocalypse’s world. Even Zombieland 2, a little disappointing as it was, still managed to capture a spark in exploring one of the endless ideas a post-apocalyptic world allows you to explore.
Did we ever see Anna’s world again? No. Will we? Unlikely, if I had to guess. Should we? That one is up for debate. Of all the movies that deserved a sequel, Pacific Rim is assuredly one of them. If Guillermo Del Toro wanted to, and he did by all accounts1, he should’ve been able to. More than that, the studios should’ve waited for him. I won’t resort to the empty complaints of “corporate greed” or whatever similar ideas stem from that because that’s not a fully formed argument in favor of the studio doing what they did. However, Anna and the Apocalypse didn’t have that studio backing. There was no high profile director, enormous marketing campaign, or a huge target audience. It had all the characteristics of a world worth exploring. It had concepts and characters with fates undetermined and plenty of gas in the tank for another heart-wrenching adventure. Surprisingly, it was a movie with the potential for a sequel with plenty of room to grow. Where so many others have failed, in a reality where we are somehow getting another Jurassic Park World movie and another three Avatar sequels, Anna and the Apocalypse 2 could’ve succeeded. I genuinely think it would’ve. You might think it’s crazy comparing these two movies, Pacific Rim and Anna and the Apocalypse. Perhaps it is. But through this lens, there are conclusions you can start to draw. On one hand we have a sequel that had the full backing of an entire studio and an anticipatory public, given a chance to recapture the original’s spark. Instead, the sequel didn’t and with the franchise (series, whatever you want to call it) reputation ruined after release, another sequel both unlikely and likely financially ruinous, someone in charge resorted to an animated show to continue. This not only further distanced itself from its original creators, but required an entirely new team and, even if it returned to the very medium that inspired it, meant another widening of the gap between the people spearheading it. Three entirely separate visions. Three entirely separate products. On the other hand we have an original movie that, while lacking in the buzz, the budget, and the grandeur, fizzled out in spite of that same spark. Deservedly so, from a financial perspective, but a clear cut example of the self-bankrupting nature of Hollywood and its executives. Quick to discard its own lightning in a bottle in favor of something flashy and deceptively effective.
Sequels and remakes don’t have to be this grating and demoralizing. I’m sitting here waiting for someone to actually recognize why John Wick as a movie series worked so that we can get another series just like it. I acknowledge the difficulty in the process of developing something like that, but those ideas shine through so frequently that it can’t be impossible. And this isn’t to discard the many “indie” (how this is applied to movies appears rather nebulous, so it will remain in quotes) films that are made and are fantastic. I just watched The Substance recently and it was great. I’m also not discounting major releases like the latest Pixar movies. My sorrow is directed mostly at the growing graveyard of ideas that will go unmade because Hollywood and the people who run it decided that retreading ground is financially worth being creatively bankrupt.
The top 10 movies of 2024 were either sequels, adaptations, or parts of huge, billion dollar franchises. I will go see original movies 100% of the time because I believe in supporting those ideas. I want more of them. I really just need the movies to go to support. While there may be one I can go see once a month or so, we are, sadly, sorely lacking and I continue to hope for a change for the better.