The Crazies

Seen at: Carmike 10, Ft. Collins, Feb. 27 at 4:30

Please note that I made a point of seeing this on the first afternoon of its release. One should see zombie movies on opening day, to catch the fullest manifestation of the vibe of the audience seeing it.

I haven't seen the George Romero original, but the fact that Romero is the executive producer here is good enough for me. Someday the Academy will stand for George too.

The movie earned my complete respect in the first couple minutes. First, in a rural establishing shot (supposedly eastern Iowa) we see a cloudy sky with a patch open in the middle. In the patch we see the criss-cross patchwork of several chemtrails.

It really shocked me to see chemtrails in the movies. I've been a chemtrail watcher informally for about six months, and it had occurred to me chemtrails would never show up in movies, because they make the sky look ugly.

But I was wrong. Here they were---in a Romero movie. Then a few minutes later we see a jet crossing the sky, a close-up, emitting what could either be a contrail or a chemtrail. This was getting good.

The story revolves around a deadly virus that is unleashed in a rural town. The virus escape is caused by the crash of a military jet carrying it.

At this point it occurred to me: oh, god, they are going to make up stupid explanation about chemtrails. This is the way it works: before the public is turned on to something the government is doing, it will show up in a Hollywood movie, in some slightly outrageous but obviously fictional setting. That way, later if one tries to bring up the topic, many people will say, "Oh, you saw that in a movie."

But that's not what happened here. Thankfully chemtrails never showed up explicitly in the plot. All we saw were the small references at the beginning. That's the way to do it, by small references that introduce the images, that subtly encourage people to notice the unspoken phenomenon.

Like I said, I gave the movie a complete pass after I realized this, and enjoyed the story, plot-holes and all, including the outrageous climax that violates verisimilitude on a level noticeable by someone from Iowa, but utterly forgivable for the sake of storytelling.

Love live narrative!