Movie review: The Postman

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The PostmanReview by Duryea Edwards

I’ll give a good recommendation ( * * * + ) to “THE POSTMAN”.

I know that a lot of critics blasted it. Most of them attempted to call it “Waterworld Part II” and this is very unfair because the two stories have almost nothing in common. Waterworld is about a place where the world is quite hostile to the people who are attempting to stay alive and keep a society going. The Postman is about a world where there was a war (it appears to have been non-nuclear) and society fell and most of the major cities were destroyed but the planet, on the whole, is still in very good shape.

The year is 2013. There was a massive economic and political collapse as the millennium changed. There were major wars, and then smaller civil wars, and the bombing and burning that caused the destruction of most major and even mid-sized cities left the air fairly clogged with soot and there were three years of “dirty rain”.

A large number of people are still left alive but they are divided up into little communities that usually don’t communicate with each other. This started off as a way to prevent disease from spreading but now it has become a way of life.

In and around what was the Rocky Mountain States there is a self serving Military organization ( The Army of the Holeness ) which thrives on the fact that none of the little communities is strong enough to stand up to it. Its leader (General Bethlehem) makes it a point to discourage the small towns and villages from communicating with each other. This means that ( as military might and the ability to blackmail goes ) Bethlehem has the only game in town.

Then a strange thing happens. A postman arrives in one small town. He says that he is a representative of the “Restored United States of America” and that he (and others like him) are in the process of passing out old mail which has sat idle for more than a decade. He is also authorized to pick up any new mail that anyone might have and make an attempt at delivering it.

Some people think he’s a fraud but other people want to believe him. Yesterday everyone was just hoping that their little community could continue to survive and thrive and that they could somehow find a way to keep the Holeness Army from ruining what they were trying to rebuild. But today some people are hoping that there are actually other people in other communities who are willing to share information. And they find themselves hoping that there is a new government out there that just might be able to challenge General Bethlehem and his men.

My only major complaint concerning the story is that its a little bit too long … 2 hours and 50 minutes. It should have been about 2 and 30. There is this really long segment ( about thirty minutes ) which takes place before the Postman arrives at the gates of the village. The movie should have started with the Postman arriving and then done a series of flashbacks from there. What was thirty minutes at the beginning could have been reduced to about fifteen minutes that was shown during the movie in small dream segments and storytelling segments.

But it was a very good movie. And I would recommend it to almost anyone.