10 Biggest Movie Myths About The Apocalypse

#5 - Survivors

Let me first say that jumping into a refrigerator at ground zero will 1) result in incineration, 2) will not freakishly be thrown 6 miles clear of the devastation while all other debris is consumed in the mushroom cloud, 3) old refrigerators did not have an internal release lever so said moron would be trapped, 4) getting out of the fridge would be stepping into a wave of super-heated air that would vaporize your lungs, 5) looking at the nuclear bomb would blind you, and 6) you'd still be bombarded with lethal doses of radiation.

The movie myth about the survivors is that they will wander as lone individuals ("Mad" Max Rockatansky), gather into ravenous criminal gangs (The Humungus et al), or turtle around essential resources (Pappagallo). This model is replicated in other post-apocalypse movies, such as the Postman, Waterworld, and others. The basic split seems to be at best 50/50 cowardly hiders vs. motorcycle gangs. In some cases, its more like 30/70 in favor of the crazies. But I disagree with this sociological construct. Consider a natural ecology. The losers in white hiding behind a wall of ruined cars are the herbivores and the bikies are the wolves. The happy-happy commune can support a much larger population because they are farming, mining, refining, or whatever is their base industry. They also gain the advantage because any neutral aligned person in the area will trade basic commodities with them. The bandits on the other hand must prey upon the weak and like wolves must cover a huge territory. There is a finite amount of prey that they can cull before starving themselves out. That model does not support a large population, but rather a hardy, small group of hunters. For instance (in movie terms), if a pack of wolves finds a den of rabbits, they would spend weeks circling, making threats, shooting their wolf guns in the air, before any pay-off. This means that they are wasting huge resources in this display of strength and ... at the same time ... not eating. If they do manage to get in there, they'll quickly exhaust the reserves of the rabbit den. Without their own level of knowledge to sustain that resource, they're screwed. And the other thing that modern world has shown us ... people with resources or money are not afraid to be ruthless to protect it. €So a more accurate guess is that these communes would grow quickly as more and more stragglers find safety AND they would boast a professional fighting force against a necessarily smaller, but opportunistic niche of bandits.