I tell you what… and this is hard. I wanted so badly to like Extraction. Hell, when you’re mostly shut in for 6 weeks, you’re going to want to like pretty much anything, from a dumb ol’ movie to the tuna salad sandwich you’re about to chomp into because you let yourself run out of cool things to cook. Expectations can just fuck up your day sometimes, so it may just be that factor coming into play that my first reaction was to review it with just two words: Fucking terrible!

I really like Thor… I mean Chris Hemsworth! He is probably the most likable action movie hero in a long, long time. He never came off as one of those self-serious hard nuts that populate the genre. It’s not that he’s unlikable in Extraction. Tyler Rake, the character adapted from the graphic novel by writer Joe Russo, is definitely sympathetic from what can be drawn from a very thin back-story (and when I say thin I mean wet tissue thin). You never doubt for a minute that he’s the good guy. It’s handed to you that he is a haunted, damaged guy with some kind of tragic back story. I want to say that it’s just that the explosions and fights kicked off too soon to get any real sense of what the back story is, but the damn film is 2 hours long so there should have been plenty of time. There are a few repeated murky flashbacks, one to a smiling child playing on a beach but I’m still not entirely sure if it were his own child or his own childhood he’s trying to retreat back to (which may be the more clever screenplay option).

There just isn’t enough back story though to tell the whole story, and if you can’t do that in two hours, what’s left? Maybe it was too ambitious? Maybe it should have been a mini-series? Problem with a mini-series though (there are actually a couple) is that it might be too much build-up for what may or may not be a happy ending. Sometimes happy endings muck a story up for sure and if people invest more than a couple hours, its sort of expected that all will be hunky dory at the end, more or less.

You don’t really get much of a story on the supporting cast either. There were old comrades from the war in Afghanistan but their tales are ridiculously vaporous. You never learn much at all about the beautiful woman who may or may not have been a love interest, and still you wouldn’t know if it were romantic, maternal or sisterly love. All of the above? Sure, that happens too but that’s never made clear in any way.

Extraction is just humorless and violent, seemingly for the sake of violence. Sorry, Chris… but that’s what’s left when the story line is so anemic. It’s good screen violence for sure, kind of fast and chaotic in the Fast & Furious sense of things. There are countless asswhippings, shootings, explosions, car chases etc. etc. etc. Once they start there are few pauses, except for one laborious break in the middle where they’re hiding out with another mercenary. I actually paused the movie in the middle of that while I considered whether or not to move forward. I had to ask myself if there was any reason to move on with a story I’ve seen a thousand times by now, despite that as I said, I really like Chris Hemsworth as an action hero. There just isn’t enough character to really like here though. The only thing about the film that was different is that it’s probably the first I’ve seen that’s filmed in South Asia… India, or Bangladesh or something. Even that though just reminded me of the part of one of the Bourne movies in a slum somewhere in North Africa.

One thing I will definitely give Extraction though, is that it’s probably the murkiest, grimiest, smokiest film I’ve ever seen. Whatever they were going for there, if they were going for something at all, really worked. You really felt the sweltering climate, the heat and the sweat and the dirt. It nearly choked my eyes.

Anyway, I wouldn’t rush to see it. It may or may not be fucking terrible but it still feels like two hours of my life that I’ll ever get back.

In the meantime:

Yes, yes… The Walking Dead, somewhere in the 7th season… How many more are left and can I do it? Can I get through? Probably at some point, but it’s a grind. Again, it may be different had I been following all along and sharing the ordeal with countless fans that include friends and family members. Without that…

The message has become a lot more obvious now. What exactly is anyone willing to go through to survive and protect the people around them. Some of the core characters since the beginning are openly asking that now. What have we become and can we ever come back from that and live in a civilized world and what the fuck is civilization anyway when brutality is always going to be required to maintain the illusion?

Can we change enough to survive the zombie apocalypse?

Can we live with the changes we’ve had to make?

Or are we all Negan?

Negan is a newer character mentioned early on in Season 6 (or maybe late in Season 5). Nobody is having a better time in The Zombie Apocalypse than Negan. It’s unclear, unlike the other characters, if he had to dehumanize to adjust to the madness or if he was always that way. His brutality is next level, even by The Walking Dead standards. He actually enjoys it. He gets off on it. The other characters populating the series are horrified by him, though it’s already pretty clear that a few of them have disappeared inside their own egos. The ones that aren’t horrified by themselves and what they’ve become are pretty stoked by what they’ve overcome and get to talking all righteous like what they’ve been doing is holding up all standards of decency and family and love and a vision for a better future. It is definitely a clever bit of writing as it does really mirror real life. Hell, even the most liberal-minded, soft-spoken lambs in Brownstone Brooklyn happily ignore any carnage we incur on people in other parts of the world. Barack Obama seems like a really decent guy and a family man but he did order countless bombings and drone strikes that obliterated not just the lifestyles but the bodies of innocent people. Anyway….

Negan’s brutality and his enjoyment of it has no pretense whatsoever. We should all hate him, right? Problem is he’s the most likable character on the series since the beginning. He has genuine charisma, and he is absolutely fucking horrible. Is it the lack of pretense that is so compelling? Is it his very directness and honesty? I’m not exactly sure why he feels like a breath of fresh air in a series that has otherwise become kind of boring. I don’t like him simply because he’s a fresh plot twist on a story line that’s become otherwise tedious. There may be no words for it but he’s actually likable, so I’m going with the honesty angle. I’m going with the lack of pretense.

I’m going with the fact that the writers have finally come out and said it.

We are all Negan.

There exists something deep within each of us that doesn’t really give a good goddamn about anything but survival, and maaaaaybe the survival of those closest to us, and fuck everyone else. Sorry, but I’m just trying to be honest myself here because I’ve seen what I’ve seen. I’ve been party to the conversations. Most of us really wanted to see Osama Bin Laden’s dead body and were disappointed when we couldn’t. The video of Saddam Hussein’s execution went viral for a reason and I’m pretty certain it wasn’t just right wing hawks watching it over and over. Most of us haven’t lost any sleep over any of the collateral damage we’ve been party to around the world. Sure it helps that most of us haven’t had to get our hands dirty to do that, but we don’t even lose a lot of sleep over the permanently damaged veterans that had to exact the vengeance for us. They’re the ones that have to continually ask themselves if what they did makes them the monsters, just as bad as anyone they’ve labeled evil. No, we don’t lose a lot of sleep over their suicides. We send thoughts and prayers to their families.

Oof, that went dark pretty quickly.

Yes, we are all Negan.

We enjoy the lives we enjoy, because we are willing to commit atrocities against other people not just only for survival, but for comfort. Most of us will never be pushed to question their own humanity because we don’t have to do it ourselves. We watch movies about it and call the people who go commit the acts heroes. We don’t lose sleep.

So why am I willing to explore this so deeply? Maybe it’s because I had to learn to sleep without inducing it with chemicals. No, I never went to war but I was, at a very young age, pushed to the point where I crossed the line and went into full, feral survival mode. Having been brutalized for ages and abused emotionally, physically and sexually I snapped and picked up a hammer and set about (unsuccessfully) killing my tormenter. I was over the edge and became what most would consider somewhat less than human. I didn’t kill him but instilled just enough doubt and fear that he never touched me again. I was still terrified but had crossed a line to knowing I would do whatever it took to get by. My living situation didn’t change but the way I lived did. There was still daily terror but I actually came to enjoy the control. I got off on his fear, which was my power. To an extent it crossed over into the rest of my life. I knew I could and would do whatever it took. Someone would come for me, but it would be at a dear cost. My life changed.

So why didn’t I sleep easier? It wasn’t from fear of anyone else alone anymore but for fear of myself. What had I lost? Who was I? Adolescence is a hard enough time identity-wise but it might be a little harder for those of us who went feral from too much time out in the wild. Long story short, it was another 35 years before I slept without chemical assistance of some sort or another. Then it was a few years to get comfortable doing and come to terms with decades of what to one extent or another, amounted to survival mode. It didn’t help that the person who I had fended off went on to kill someone, maybe accidentally or maybe not. It took a few years to figure out that her death wasn’t on me. It wasn’t because I had failed to do what no child should be expected to do.

Back to the point though… I got off on the power of knowing I would do whatever it took. Rick and all the “good guys” on The Walking Dead had been getting really full of themselves too. Negan came in like a reckoning. You ain’t righteous. You ain’t even honest.

You are Negan.

It’s taken the writers an awful long time to just come out and say it, and they haven’t quite but it’s looking that way. Anyone who isn’t seeing it just isn’t looking. The Walking Dead title may not be referring to the zombies. It might just be referring to the people who somehow became less than human. I like that the moral absolutes in the series have dissolved some. It’s honest. It’s just fucking honest, finally.

There is one final question in all this. We’ll get to that one another time though. That’s for later. Not trying to leave a cliffhanger. I just want to see where The Walking Dead takes it. Do they ask it? Do they try to answer it? Will I agree with them?

Okay… time to start the day. The antibiotics seem to be working. The fevers didn’t come on last night. The other meds took care of the cramping. The weekend is nearing. I may even get out for a run if the rains ever let up. Last day of April and it’s raining and bitter cold.

Yay.