I don't know if I'd describe it's take as 'notably clever' but the focus wasn't on hordes of zombies / insane cults / etc but groups of people coming together and trying hard to rebuild some sort of life after a massive epidemic that kills most people. There were clashes between different groups, some resolved amicably, some with violence.
That's one thing I've never understood about the zombie shows. Instead of showing people banding together to deal with the problem, they almost always show people acting selfishly and tearing each other down. That's always seemed the biggest fallacy of those shows.
It would be interesting to see a left-wing values zombie movie:
"In a world where where a new disease ravages the body and mind of those affected, modern medicine and epidemiological responses isolate and manage the impact. Financial and social assistance is given to those displaced, encouraging social interaction and minimizing crime and suffering."
Many societies with turmoil have managed to resolve the situation and went back to normal. Surely that depends on the attitudes of people, and especially leadership, on how to deal with the situation.
Zombie television presents violence as the only option and the enemy as an incurable and unsavable evil. If the only option shown is to kill and build walls, then that's what they are programmed to do.
In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other. The foundation for this has to be built in peacetime.
I've always wanted a zombie/apocalypse/disaster movie where everyone works together and rebuilds civilization and the struggles therein, instead of it being about how humans are really evil when the shit hits the fan. So cynical!
One of the things about the film was how the humans treated each other far worse than what the zombies did to them. The zombies (the slow kind!) were just a force of nature.
I've been tending to view zombie works as metaphors for 'mindlessness'. That is, herd behavior, just following the crowd, etc.
Sometimes it does seem like there is a high risk of that happening. Other times it seems like we are already living in that world. A world where large groups of people can be worked up into a frenzy and convinced to support, defend, and propagate horrible actions provoked by minimal or non-existent facts and evidence.
The 'Zombie Apocalypse' to me is more about being stuck somewhere(life/work situation) fully surrounded by living people who don't use their mind. And then you go about gathering a merry band to fight the mindless herd.
Has anyone written "rationalist fiction" about a zombie setting? Something like what Worm [0] was for superheroes. Something that isn't just a genre-savvy parody of the flaws of characters in zombie films, but a serious exploration of a band of survivors working to build a community/society to survive and thrive against the zombies. It's probably hard to make it entertaining if one is in the mindset of mainstream tropes, but there's probably a way to make it work.
It's also worth pointing out how, even when humans work together, a single bad decision can make even the most elaborate plans fall apart. There's always one person who has to deviate from the group only to become feed, or in the case of 28 Weeks Later[1], giving a janitor access to the most restricted areas of a military base brings about the second wave of infection.
[1] Yes, technically they weren't "zombies" but that's not what's being debated :)
Walking Dead starts out Rick-against-everyone but veers towards a story about scrappy, regular folk coming together to more or less form a democracy, against a backdrop of total chaos. I read this as retelling a certain story of America, with the zombies standing in for brutal nature (and Native Americans!) and the protagonists the Europeans, creating a few different outposts of "civilization". I wrote about this reading here: https://blogtarkin.wordpress.com/tag/walking-dead/
There was a 1970s British show "Survivors" that had similar social concepts but after a pandemic instead of war. I think of this as the tail end of the era where science fiction still tried to be conceptual, instead of just using it as an aesthetic.
Imagine something like "The Walking Dead" series, but without the unscientific zombie horror and constant cheap gore.
"World War Z" [1] -- the book, not the movie -- is based on the premise that people would work together to ultimately overcome the zombie plague. Notably, Max Brooks wrote "The Zombie Survival Guide" [2] before he wrote "World War Z".
My favorite take on zombie fiction was a short story that posited that nearly everyone is globally infected, but infection can take one of two forms: form A is the regular "undead"-style zombies, but form B merely makes humans stupid. This explains the foolish choices movie protagonists must make for the sake of plot.
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