SURVIVORS (2008) [DVD]

Survivors (2008) [DVD]

Actors: Julie Graham, Phillip Rhys, Shaun Dingwall, Paterson Joseph, Freema Agyema
Format: PAL
Region: 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe)
Number of discs: 3
Classification: 12
Studio: 2 Entertain Video
DVD Release Date: 26 Jan 2009
Run Time: 369 minutes

Extra Features:

Easter Egg
A New World - The Making of Survivors
Character Profiles
Survivors FX Featurette
Audio Navigation and Audio Description (on feature only)

Movie: * * ½
Disc: * * ½

This 2008 BBC television series is a “reimagining” of a 1970s show of the same name, which was in turn based on a novel by Terry Nation. (Nation’s main claim to fame is that he invented Doctor Who’s Daleks.)

Like in the original series a virulent new flu virus kills off more than 90% of the world’s population literally overnight. Now what’s left of humanity has to survive in a world without any civilisation – no police, no army, no cell phones, no electricity, no laptops, no running water, no drive-thru, etc.

The original series made a bit of a fuss about how modern then-20th century man has fewer “real” skills than a medieval peasant. You may know how to operate a computer or drive a car, but if you had to, can you kill and pluck a chicken? Grow a vegetable garden? Hunt for food? Make a campfire without any matches? (Think that is easy? Then you’ve forgotten about that movie about Tom Hanks being marooned on a desert island . . .) Build a chicken coop? Install an aqueduct? Engineer running water?

Most people can’t do any of these things because modern Western civilization doesn’t require us to do any of them any more, and thus we’ve become several steps removed from the reality of our situation. (Most people for example do not think of what happens at an abattoir when they chow down on a McDonald’s burger, for instance. Our ancestors usually had to kill what they ate.)

This remake of Survivors aren’t particularly too concerned about these issues to be honest. Probably because then it would be Survivor – singular, a reality show about a bunch of back-stabbing Americans stuck on a tropical island. Instead we have the obligatory post-apocalyptic scenes with ragtag groups of survivors going to their local deserted Tesco for some “shopping” and coming into conflict with other people over potentially scarce resources.

When one thinks about it, the post-apocalypse movie or novel in which the thin veneer of civilisation is stripped away has become a genre in itself. It has been a retelling of the biblical creation tale ever since William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies about a group of schoolboys stranded on an island degenerate into savagery when left to their own devices. Its basic message is that people are basically bad. After all, there were only four people on the entire planet in the Book of Genesis and already one was killing the other!

You may not agree that people are inherently evil. It is after all a somewhat right-wing contention and you can always argue that if humanity is inherently rotten, then why did we bother with civilisation – which protects the weak and vulnerable – in the first place? But the fact remains that the best post-apocalyptic tales are the ones in which in people are shitheads: Mad Max, The Trigger Effect, The Road Warrior, Panic in the Year Zero, etc.

When it comes to the movies, happy people are boring people. Without any conflict there isn’t any dramatic interest. The biggest problem with this version of Survivors, written by Primeval (the Brit TV show with dinosaurs) scribe Adrian Hodges, is that the show is never entirely convinced of the genre’s ideological belief that people ain’t no good. In fact it proudly wears its Politically Correct credentials on its sleeves right from the start with its multi-ethnic cast of “heroes” who band together. You’d think that you were in a 1980s South African beer commercial! (Beer commercials in Apartheid-era South Africa blithely ignored racial realities of the day by presenting whites and blacks cheerfully socially interacting with one another as equals!)

As far as post-apocalypses go, this one is awfully British and polite as we have, gasp, scenes of people co-operating and negotiating! Sure the absence of firearms in British society – they are not as trigger happy as the Yanks for instance (your average British bobby still do not carry any guns!) - probably has something to do with it. Watching Survivors one however cannot help but be reminded of the cultural stereotype of the bowler-hatted Anglo-Saxon gentleman on the crowded bus being too polite to mention that you’re actually standing on his toes. Even the villains (with one exception) are all well-intentioned individuals who can be reasoned with. This somewhat Liberal point of view may be accurate, but it makes for unexciting television.

Towards the end of the show things luckily begin to heat up as Survivors takes a Libertarian stance as its heroes come into conflict with some self-proclaimed “authorities.” These scenes seem to have been written with Max Stirner’s famous quote that “the state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime” in mind.

By the final episode the show has belatedly realised that it is need of a good villain to lively things up, but by then all one is left with is a typical cliff-hanger season finale. Still, it bodes well for future episodes and one can only assume that things will improve. Or get worse for the show’s characters, that is.

(Survivors is also undermined by its over-familiarity: back in 1975 the idea of a plague wiping out most of humanity might have seemed reasonably fresh. But in the meantime we have seen it done in countless movies such as I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, Doomsday, and so on. Also, each phoney wannabe plague such as the recent swine flu health scare hyped to death by an overexcited media undermines its general believability.)

THE DISC: Six fifty-minute episodes are spread over three discs. There is a making of featurette titled A New World as well as one on the special effects. Image and sound is crystal clear as one would expect. Whoever put the disc together however made the annoying amateur mistake of not allowing one to skip over the opening credits using the Next button. If one does that, the viewer misses out on a chunk of that episode’s action in the process. Sloppy – especially for a BBC DVD.

WORTH IT? Flawed yet watchable, this British TV series will reward patient viewers who stick it out to the end. Hopefully the second season will be when things really start happening . . .

RECOMMENDATION: Worth a rental at the least, especially for post-apocalypse junkies . . .