Latest news with #postapocalyptic
News.com.au
a day ago
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Twisted Metal's Stephanie Beatriz's brutal feedback for co-star Anthony Mackie
IN LONDON When it comes to feedback, Anthony Mackie's Twisted Metal co-star doesn't mince words. The Marvel actor has revealed how he and Stephanie Beatriz hit the right tone on their dark, post-apocalyptic action comedy – explaining that he left it up to the Brooklyn Nine-Nine alum to curate the jokes. 'I would always go to her and say, 'Stephanie, is this funny?' And if she said, 'Yes', we'd keep it'. If she said 'No', we'd trash it,' Mackie, who is both lead actor and executive producer of the series, told ahead of season two's release. 'I think the biggest lesson I learned from Stephanie on set is just to be honest … it's not trying to be funny or trying to make something out of nothing. It's really just letting that character be real.' Season one of Twisted Meta l, based on the hugely popular nineties PlayStation video game, premiered in July 2023 and follows the story of a talkative milkman with amnesia, John Doe (Mackie), who is tasked with journeying across a post-apocalyptic wasteland to deliver a mysterious package while facing ruthless marauders. Beatriz, who plenty of fans will know best as Detective Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, is Quiet, a bada**e car thief who strikes up a friendship with John. Season two shifts to focus on a sinister demolition derby – or 'tournament' – run by the mysterious Calypso (Anthony Carrigan), where the best way to win is to upgrade cars … with stealing an attractive option. Needless to say, given the setting and what fans have already seen in season one, the wild driving scenes in the new chapter are truly mind-blowing. 'Sometimes they let us drive, but for the really crazy stuff, there was a stunt driver driving … but he's usually mounted on the top of the vehicle, so all the mechanisms feed up to him,' Beatriz told 'And then we're inside with the cameras mounted on the car as well, going really, really fast, flying around the set, doing crazy spins and turns … and I loved every second.' Mackie added: 'Just being in a car and somebody just ripping the road to pieces, and all you can do is just hold on … It's a lot of fun.'
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
40 Acres review – Danielle Deadwyler is driving heart of post-apocalyptic home-invasion horror
In the event of an apocalypse, the world will no doubt divide into two groups: people intent on survival no matter what, and those of us who take the view living will only prolong the suffering and get it over with. Hailey Freeman in 40 Acres is the former – it's in the genes. Her great-great-grandfather was a slave who escaped a plantation and made his way to Canada to farm. Now the land is Hailey's and helpfully she's ex-military, which comes in handy fending off cannibalistic marauders in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Even better, she's played by Danielle Deadwyler, the actor inexplicably snubbed for an Oscar nomination for Till. Set 14 years after a fungal pandemic wiped out the planet's animal life, 40 Acres is essentially a home invasion thriller. Unfortunately, not everyone has gone vegan; gnarly cannibals prowl in packs, human body parts dangling from their necks as trophies. On the farm, Hailey (Deadwyler) lives with her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes), his daughter, their kids, and her teenage son Manny (Kataem O'Connor). Galen is of Indigenous heritage, and is teaching the family Cree. To survive, Hailey rules her household like a general: iron discipline and daily push-ups. Deadwyler plays it with grit and feeling; her beautifully expressive eyes convey Hailey's strength but at the same time the constant terror. Deadwyler's performance is the driving force here. Without her, the audience's attention might drift to the predictability of a plotline that hinges on Manny's adolescent rebellion against his mum. There's also the matter of some unnecessary flashbacks filling in backstories, leaking out tension. Which is a shame because first time feature director RT Thorne skilfully executes the cat-and-mouse games between the farm and the invaders, resulting in some uncomfortably suspenseful moments. And there are really interesting ideas, too, about this new horror in the context of Black and Indigenous experiences: displacement, generational trauma and survival. 40 Acres is in UK cinemas and on MGM+ from 1 August.
Top Gear
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Top Gear
Remembering classic games: Rogue Trip Vacation 2012 (1998)
Remembering classic games: Rogue Trip Vacation 2012 (1998) Less 'Crazy Taxi' and more Certifiably Insane Taxi... Skip 1 photos in the image carousel and continue reading Turn on Javascript to see all the available pictures. If you're looking at this PlayStation-exclusive arena-based vehicular combat game and wondering why the title above doesn't have the words 'Twisted' and 'Metal' in there, then you've got a good eye. After a messy contract dispute with Sony, Twisted Metal developer Singletrac left to create this spiritual sequel. And the spirit in question appears to have been an unlicensed blend of moonshine, gunpowder and gasoline. Set in a post-apocalyptic 2012, Rogue Trip turned a series of US locations into warzones as you tore around the place unloading a barrage of explosives at your opponents. Predictably, it played a lot like Twisted Metal, only with tighter, less drifty handling which made it easier to draw a bead on a rival car. Advertisement - Page continues below As you'd expect, there was a colourful collection of heavily armed vehicles to choose from. The loose connective tissue was a satire of Americana, whether that's a Sunday school bus driven by a scantily clad nun, an alligator wrestler in a modified airboat or a 1967 Chevrolet Bel Air piloted by an overweight Elvis impersonator. The pièce de résistance was a hotdog themed Weinermobile-inspired car called Meat Wagon, driven by a character called Dick Biggs, whose special ability was smashing opponents flat with a gigantic fibreglass sausage. Had he not died some 59 years before the release of this game, Freud would have had an absolute field day. And if you're still wondering about the slightly confusing vacation theming, it's because the Rogue Trip added a unique wrinkle to the gameplay to keep you occupied. In every map there was a tourist who, once collected in your vehicle, could be ferried between photo opportunities to earn you extra cash, but made you the prime target. This is less Crazy Taxi and more Certifiably Insane Taxi. Advertisement - Page continues below Top Gear Newsletter Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Look out for your regular round-up of news, reviews and offers in your inbox. Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox. Success Your Email*
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Groundwater by Thomas McMullan review – a lesson in foreboding
Thomas McMullan's debut novel, The Last Good Man, was a darkly unsettling post-apocalyptic fable about moral puritanism and the perils of mob rule. Set in an isolated Dartmoor village, it was commended by Margaret Atwood as 'a Scarlet Letter for our times' and won the Betty Trask prize. His follow-up, Groundwater, opens in similar style, with its protagonists fleeing a city in favour of rural seclusion, but this time his story is rooted in a more prosaic and recognisable present. An unexpected inheritance has spurred John and Liz to trade in their rented flat in London for a remote house by a lake. After years of trying unsuccessfully for a baby, their relationship strained, both hope that the change will shift something inside them. Meanwhile, though most of their furniture is yet to arrive, they must prepare the house for Liz's sister Monica and her family, who have invited themselves to stay. From the opening pages McMullan stokes an unambiguous sense of foreboding. It is August and the weather is stifling. Walking by the lake John encounters a baby deer, struggling to stand on an injured leg. The next day after breakfast, Monica's children find the fawn dead on the doorstep. A stranger claiming to be a local warden materialises on their land and invites himself to stay. No one thinks to check his claims. When three students from a local campsite also contrive to inveigle themselves into the group, something terrible, it seems, must happen. Reading Groundwater, I was repeatedly reminded of Chekhov's famous exhortation that one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. The warden, Jim Sweet, tells John and Liz about the caves deep below the surface of the lake, miles and miles of unmapped tunnels snaking through the limestone. Liz is haunted by the memory of a dog she watched dying in the hallway outside their London flat. She stares at the walls of trees around the lake and thinks of the California wildfires on the news: 'All that burning, a thousand things dying.' Ominousness is piled upon unease and yet McMullan meets his own challenge only with the humdrum. Terrors are proved baseless. Confrontations blaze briefly and fizzle out. Unable to bring themselves to say what they are really thinking, the adults conduct long and often mundane conversations about inconsequentialities, while the twin interior monologue that shifts often confusingly between John and Liz adds little insight or forward propulsion to the narrative. Insufficiently differentiated, their voices blur: though we spend much of the novel inside their heads, their true selves remain opaque, unformed, out of reach not only of themselves but of the reader. Liz, a writer, is working on a scheme to monitor the black rhinos in a national park in Kenya, but 'she hadn't been to the national park herself … everyone was remote'. The same sense of remoteness, of a reality half-understood but never experienced, pervades these pages. Meanwhile a second intercut narrative, in which dream-like versions of John and Liz draw items including a crystal decanter, a crutch and a child's hobby horse from the waters of the lake, adds a baffling dollop of mysticism to proceedings. As I read on, my thoughts kept returning to another novel set by a lake, Sarah Moss's Summerwater, and not only because of the powerful echo in the title. Like Groundwater, Summerwater, told over a single rain-lashed day in a lochside holiday park in Scotland, is preoccupied with the quotidian, exploring through its 12 narrators the fissures and fractures that open in relationships, the certainties brandished like weapons against fear and vulnerability, the joys, yes, but also the small, terrible failures of courage and understanding. Why, then, does Moss's novel triumphantly succeed and McMullan's never take flight? It helps that Summerwater's simmering tension finally explodes into catastrophe, while Groundwater swerves perplexingly away from climax and sputters out. But it is Moss's astonishing acuity, her uncanny ability to see inside the human heart, that lends her work such power. It is much, much harder than she makes it look to draw readers deeply into the small dramas of small lives, harder still to find the universal in the particular, to draw fresh and meaningful patterns between people and landscape, between age-old cycles of existence and the insistent demands of the here and now. Moss manages it with flourishes of sly humour that both leavens and intensifies the horror to come. McMullan's novel would definitely have profited from a few more laughs. Instead, in striving for an elusive profundity, he reminds us how strikingly difficult it is to spin gold from straw, and how very rare and precious are those Rumpelstiltskin writers who show us how it's done. Groundwater by Thomas McMullan is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To order a copy go to Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Groundwater by Thomas McMullan review – a lesson in foreboding
Thomas McMullan's debut novel, The Last Good Man, was a darkly unsettling post-apocalyptic fable about moral puritanism and the perils of mob rule. Set in an isolated Dartmoor village, it was commended by Margaret Atwood as 'a Scarlet Letter for our times' and won the Betty Trask prize. His follow-up, Groundwater, opens in similar style, with its protagonists fleeing a city in favour of rural seclusion, but this time his story is rooted in a more prosaic and recognisable present. An unexpected inheritance has spurred John and Liz to trade in their rented flat in London for a remote house by a lake. After years of trying unsuccessfully for a baby, their relationship strained, both hope that the change will shift something inside them. Meanwhile, though most of their furniture is yet to arrive, they must prepare the house for Liz's sister Monica and her family, who have invited themselves to stay. From the opening pages McMullan stokes an unambiguous sense of foreboding. It is August and the weather is stifling. Walking by the lake John encounters a baby deer, struggling to stand on an injured leg. The next day after breakfast, Monica's children find the fawn dead on the doorstep. A stranger claiming to be a local warden materialises on their land and invites himself to stay. No one thinks to check his claims. When three students from a local campsite also contrive to inveigle themselves into the group, something terrible, it seems, must happen. Reading Groundwater, I was repeatedly reminded of Chekhov's famous exhortation that one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. The warden, Jim Sweet, tells John and Liz about the caves deep below the surface of the lake, miles and miles of unmapped tunnels snaking through the limestone. Liz is haunted by the memory of a dog she watched dying in the hallway outside their London flat. She stares at the walls of trees around the lake and thinks of the California wildfires on the news: 'All that burning, a thousand things dying.' Ominousness is piled upon unease and yet McMullan meets his own challenge only with the humdrum. Terrors are proved baseless. Confrontations blaze briefly and fizzle out. Unable to bring themselves to say what they are really thinking, the adults conduct long and often mundane conversations about inconsequentialities, while the twin interior monologue that shifts often confusingly between John and Liz adds little insight or forward propulsion to the narrative. Insufficiently differentiated, their voices blur: though we spend much of the novel inside their heads, their true selves remain opaque, unformed, out of reach not only of themselves but of the reader. Liz, a writer, is working on a scheme to monitor the black rhinos in a national park in Kenya, but 'she hadn't been to the national park herself … everyone was remote'. The same sense of remoteness, of a reality half-understood but never experienced, pervades these pages. Meanwhile a second intercut narrative, in which dream-like versions of John and Liz draw items including a crystal decanter, a crutch and a child's hobby horse from the waters of the lake, adds a baffling dollop of mysticism to proceedings. As I read on, my thoughts kept returning to another novel set by a lake, Sarah Moss's Summerwater, and not only because of the powerful echo in the title. Like Groundwater, Summerwater, told over a single rain-lashed day in a lochside holiday park in Scotland, is preoccupied with the quotidian, exploring through its 12 narrators the fissures and fractures that open in relationships, the certainties brandished like weapons against fear and vulnerability, the joys, yes, but also the small, terrible failures of courage and understanding. Why, then, does Moss's novel triumphantly succeed and McMullan's never take flight? It helps that Summerwater's simmering tension finally explodes into catastrophe, while Groundwater swerves perplexingly away from climax and sputters out. But it is Moss's astonishing acuity, her uncanny ability to see inside the human heart, that lends her work such power. It is much, much harder than she makes it look to draw readers deeply into the small dramas of small lives, harder still to find the universal in the particular, to draw fresh and meaningful patterns between people and landscape, between age-old cycles of existence and the insistent demands of the here and now. Moss manages it with flourishes of sly humour that both leavens and intensifies the horror to come. McMullan's novel would definitely have profited from a few more laughs. Instead, in striving for an elusive profundity, he reminds us how strikingly difficult it is to spin gold from straw, and how very rare and precious are those Rumpelstiltskin writers who show us how it's done. Groundwater by Thomas McMullan is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To order a copy go to Delivery charges may apply.
