Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)

Rated R for a lot of cheap lookin' gore.  It's that kind of splatter gore that you get with a lot of zombie movies.  Because it's a murder zombie killing spree, there also has to be a moderate amount of language. Sometimes, that language can be in song because the movie is also a musical!  There's also references to sex without actually having sexuality in the movie.  R.

DIRECTOR: John McPhail

I had heard about this movie in the past and I had the mildest curiosity when it came to checking it out.  I've been on a small warpath about watching Christmas movies that I haven't seen yet.  I got through a lot of The Holiday (which, by the way, is far too long for a rom-com) voluntarily.  But Anna and the Apocalypse should have been one of those movies that is a threshold movie.  It has what my wife is looking for (A Christmas musical) with what I'm looking for (zombie carnage).  And for the sake of checking boxes, Anna and the Apocalypse mostly nails that.

The real problem is me.  (Thank you, Taylor Swift, for making this part of my thought process.)  Anna and the Apocalypse is one of those movies that wears its influences on its sleeves.  I'm not the only one who recognizes it.   Heck, I don't even think that the production team would shy away from the fact that it uses a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and  Shaun of the Dead as its influences.  Without a doubt, McPhail is wildly indebted to Shaun of the Dead, unfortunately to the point of fault.  While Anna and the Apocalypse isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, it loses a lot of its legs coming from a weak foundation.  Without mincing words, Anna and the Apocalypse is an homage of other homages.  

The three things I recognize in its DNA is Buffy, Dr. Horrible, and Shaun of the Dead.  Those three things are already commenting on long running tropes.  The reason that they were so genius is because they were self-aware when very few things were self-aware.  I know Joss Whedon is the force behind two of those things, but between Joss Whedon and Edgar Wright, we see people who are deep lovers of genre coupled with an insane amount of talent.  (As much as Joss Whedon needs to be off-the-grid for a while, I can't deny that the man is incredibly talented.) When Wright and Whedon made their respective projects, they had pulled from a wealth of stories, crafting something that was poignant and challenging.  It never felt like a lesser product.  I hate to say, Anna and the Apocalypse, in its homage to these projects, feels more like a novelty than something that spans the test of time.  

Do you know what it really feels like?  For some people, this might be a positive thing, so I'm not going to talk about it too harshly.  Again, people should like what they like.  But the movie feels like an R-Rated Disney Channel original movie.  I know that Disney Channel made their own Zombies musical franchise, so I'm not that off the mark.  But because Anna is mostly a take on the zombie comedy without making a ton of references to zombie films outside of Shaun, it has that poppy feeling without a feeling of polish.  (Note:  I tend to do this a lot with my blog entries. I write negatively about something that I moderately enjoy.  Thus, I have to point out that I didn't actually hate Anna and the Apocalypse so much as I have to explain why I didn't love it.) 

Some of the issues comes with the songs.  Anna and the Apocalypse --and good on them for working through this --feels often pretty cheap.  It is a movie that is working on a budget.  I get that this was a fundraised effort, expanding on a short that was made prior to this.  Now, the movie doesn't go full synth.  If it did, we'd be having a conversation about how Anna and the Apocalypse is borderline unwatchable.  But musicals are tough.  There's a reason that a lot of them aren't part of the cultural zeitgeist.  It's a lot of work and a lot of money has to be thrown at it.  It's definitely the line between Broadway, off-Broadway, and community theater.  A lot of Anna comes across as off-Broadway (the most snobby thing I'll write today!).  It has a lot of good intentions.  There's technically nothing wrong with the music.  But there isn't one song that either sticks or makes me laugh with the cleverness of the lyrics.  It's all...functional.  I think a lot of people had that issue with Moana 2.  I think Moana 2's lyrics and songs are better than people make them out to be while acknowledging that Moana's songs are better.

But the thing that Anna and the Apocalypse does get mostly right is the characters and the fun.  While I wish that the lyrics did what good lyrics do in a musical and gives us additional insight into characters, the performances are pretty fun.  I also have to give credit to the fact that the last act does have some truly solid curveballs.  Ultimately, like many musicals, Anna sets up the world to follow the rules of a musical.  The eponymous Anna wants to leave this small town behind while leaving a best friend who is madly in love with her.  She's made bad choices, but nothing that defines her so much that she comes across as unlikable.  If anything, her choices make her incredibly sympathetic and flawed enough that she fills the role of protagonist well.  Anna is charismatic and enough of an archetype that we don't need a ton of backstory to figure out where she's coming from. But it's her relationship with John that is the fascinating part.  For a musical, we traditionally have two ways that the John story can go.  John can either win Anna over, showing her that Nick is as vapid as he comes across as --or! --show some truly disgusting obsessive behavior where he has to come to grips with the fact that Anna owes him nothing.  These were the two options I had going into this.  Um...dying a violent death at the end of Act II, I wasn't ready for that.  He does something noble dying, leaving us to like John for who he was the entire movie (a consistently good dude who simply isn't the one for Anna).  But considering that we thought that there was going to be some resolution for his conflict?  That was a bold move, movie.  Well done.

I have a hard time coming to terms with Steph, though.  Steph is one of the few survivors in the movie.  I don't want to say anything about Sarah Swire's performance because I --in all earnestness --don't think that there's a darn thing wrong with it.  (She's charismatic and fun, matching the action movie vibe of a zombie movie!)   But she is incredibly American in a very Scottish production.  Her performance is fantastic, but for a different movie.  It's almost tonally off from the rest of her peers.  I don't think that this is Swire's fault.  I'm going to guess one of two things.  1) She didn't receive a lot of direction, thus she couldn't get an accurate read from what the movie needed in terms of her character or 2) she comes in with this butt-kicking character that made her stand out from her peers at the auditions and the directors tried forcing it into a movie that didn't need that because it was so scene-stealing.  I swear, that character rocks, but she doesn't fit very well.  If, on the weird chance that Sarah Swire has a Google alert for her name where she reads this: I think you crushed it.  I'm one stupid dude on the Internet who is trying to write this between moments of my one-year-old screaming that she needs help getting down the stairs after she just re-climbed up immediately before.  You did a good job.  Something just felt off.  You are a valid human being and an incredibly talented performer.

I'm glad I watched it.  I'll even go as far as to say that I had a good time with it.  Now that I'm closing this thing up, I realize that there was new thing that the movie commented on: Dead Rising.  But it's just a fun zombie comedy.  There were a billion zombie comedies after Shaun of the Dead and this is definitely one of the better knockoffs.  It just has a hard time standing on its own.