quietearth [Celluloid 10.03.07] post apocalyptic movie news





Well folks, I'm proud to share an exclusive we have, and that's the announcement of the upcoming post apocalyptic movie The Last Man based on the novel by Marry Shelley of Frankenstein fame. I spoke at length today to both the Producer Gabriele Andres and Writer/Director James Arnett and I have to say they are great people and really shared alot about the movie! We are in for a serious treat here because this was definitely a labor of love. The movie is currently in post-production and should be finished by the end of November, and while we are just making the initial announcement, you can bet there's going to be alot more material coming. I could tell you about the cool warfare scenes, or some of the action scenes, or the hardware and settings they got to use in the flick, but I know you want the storyline, and I don't want to give it away.


Here's the story:

"In the beginning of our story, Mary Shelley’s THE LAST MAN, black marketers loot an abandoned Soviet bio-weapons lab in Siberia, releasing a weaponized strain of Small Pox.

This weaponized strain of Small Pox was designed back in the 1980’s with a sixty-six day incubation period for maximum penetration into a population before detection. What that means in the story is that everyone, everywhere gets infected before anyone even suspects that an aggressive pandemic has already overtaken the world. With a mortality rate over 98%, this experimental strain was never intended to be released because there is no treatment and there is no cure. It’s Soviet doomsday strain MPPV.

This strain is so effective, Infection Phase One produces pre-eruptive pox, fever and delirium that transitions quickly into Phase Two, which produces eruptive pox sores over the skin, blindness, vomiting, and high fever that cooks the brain that ultimately causes death within twenty-four hours of the first sign of any symptom.

By the time the pandemic has overtaken civilization, governments move quickly to isolate plague corpses in mass cremation pits hastily excavated in any open ground within most cities. All efforts to contain the fully distributed strain are completely futile because the soldiers and emergency workers are already infected along with the rest of the world’s population.

The remaining 2%, who survive the 98% mortality rate languish through both phases of infection with varying degrees of symptoms, transition into an undocumented Third Phase over the course of several months. This Third Phase is merely the stabilization of the scarred human body. These Survivors suffer varying degrees of blindness, physical deformation, sterility and madness.

Without any food source coming into the cities, what food stocks that have not already been scavenged have been exhausted. With starvation threatening the plague survivors, they turn to cannibalism and upon each other.

But within that 2% group, an almost imperceptible fraction demonstrate a resistance to the MPPV strain. Although infected and able to transmit the strain, this rare "carrier" represents the one in a billion "immune" case walking the earth. That Last Man is Lionel Verney, the subject of our story.

And with humanity depleted and physically distorted, the unscarred Lionel Verney, by default, becomes the strongest man standing, competing for his existence against entire clans of diseased survivors among the ruins of what once was Tucson, Arizona."

Here is the movie's official site which has some flash media, and if you head over to the blog link you can follow the movie from the beginning with plenty of pictures.
http://www.jamesarnett.com/aia/lastman.htm

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Michael (13 years ago) Reply

It looks like an interesting film, but they have been working on it for ages.

http://www.post-apocalypse.co.uk/2007/02/last-man.html

quietearth (13 years ago) Reply

Horror-movies.ca actually posted it 4 months ago as well, so I stand corrected.

Anonymous (13 years ago) Reply

I want to start by saying this was a great film to make. I was in the film and it was a great script. The Producer and Director are wonderful people. I can hardly wait until the film comes out. It was an experience that I will not forget and I have gone further because of them. Mary Shelley was a great writter of her time, and since the Producer and Director put this together it was just wonderful, and it is an outstanding film. It will be a film that everyone should see.

underground_slacker (13 years ago) Reply

huh. first ive heard of it, im gonna have to give this one a look when its released.

Anonymous (13 years ago) Reply

It took more than a year to make this, but big budget movies take that long too AND they have the cash to make them faster. So this should be excellent for a small budget film to get things done in that time.

Anonymous (13 years ago) Reply

No offense to the filmmakers, but Mary Shelley's name should be dropped from this movie. From the looks of it, the film has NOTHING to do with the novel save the name of the title character. It's sad---Shelley's "The Last Man" sort of originated the plague-apocalypse genre, and we can't seem to adapt it without turning it into a shoot-em-up pseudo-zombie flick. Newsflash: no such guerilla action goes on in the book; in fact, the plague doesn't even appear in the novel until the last third, because the it's more of a political satire-cum-roman a clef. And---again, no offense---probably much more interesting than another stale, explosion-laden story of biological weaponry gone wrong.

james (13 years ago) Reply

It's a screen adaptation. If you want to know how it was adapted, this explains why there are guns and airplanes and stuff

http://blog.jamesarnett.com/2007/12/14/on-the-adaptation.aspx

Kaitlyn Bridge (13 years ago) Reply

Ive read Mary Shelley's The Last Man, and although there is a plague in it that wipes out mankind, this movie description really doesn't seem to follow the story line of the book at all.
Mary Shelley's book was very much politically based and had a web of inter-tangled personal relationships, the plague was just a back story.

Jen (12 years ago) Reply

Fantastic action packed film by James Arnett and Kevin Lucero Less does genius vocal work, as always :)

Harry (12 years ago) Reply

I just saw the sneak peak of the movie. The story blows the book away. I didn't expect that. They are doing a promo showing the whole movie on their website for the rest of the July 4th holiday. Its 2 hours long. "The last man" link is under "online movies" on their homepage at www.jamesarnett.com

mobious (12 years ago) Reply

watched it this weekend, was ok for a pa flick but really the cgi & stuff made it crappy and it was like the omega man in allot of ways

Harry (12 years ago) Reply

I saw it twice. For a no budget PA flick it still made a lot more sense as a movie than omega man and I am legend. I also liked the dodge hemi. That's the ride I'd be driving.

Anonymous (12 years ago) Reply

If you see the film and think they did all this on a 7 or 8 thousand dollar budget, its quite impressive.

Steve Adelson (12 years ago) Reply

For those individuals who write, "this movie really doesn't seem to follow the story line of the book at all" I suggest you re-read the story. Mary Shelley's The Last Man is a three volume set published in 1826 and takes place in the mid-21st century through 2100. During this time frame, people still travel across the ocean on sail ships and use a horse and carriage as the primary means of personal transport. If Mr. Arnett made a direct transliteration of the novel to the screen, the movie would have been savagely ridiculed for not being "modernized." The origional story is not an "action/adventure shoot 'em up" In her book, Lionel Verney is the orphan son of an impoverished nobleman, not a nebbish hospital orderly with aspirations to be a baseball player. The Last man is actually a Romantic. The story also questions the voracity of the political élite and ideals they stood for, which was usually corrupted by person self-interst.

Anar (12 years ago) Reply

I just saw the movie and I really liked it. Some scenes are a little funny, but it´s still well-made. Nice. And I liked the strory.

yeahyeahyeahs (11 years ago) Reply

i dont get it.

Tom_Slattery (10 years ago) Reply

I can sympathize with the anguish and difficulties the Arnett, et al, went through to modernize "The Last Man." As Steve Adelson points out in a comment above, Mary Shelley wrote a story that 1826 readers could understand. In 1990 I wrote a screenplay modernizing "The Last Man" in a different way than Arnett and revised it in 1998. When I saw that Arnett had made this movie, I knew I could no longer sell my screenplay. I rewrote my screenplay as a novel and posted it on two free sites:
http://issuu.com/tom_slattery/docs/the_last_human__novel_
And also on:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/957681/THE-LAST-HUMAN

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