Lost In Apocalypse

aka 末世人间道 aka Mo Shi Ren Jian Dao

2018
Written by Sky Wang, Baiying Wu, and Fei’er Zhao
Based on the comics by Ruibo Cao
Directed by Sky Wang

It wouldn’t be a film festival if I didn’t offer up a review of everything I saw there, and the final entry in the recent Another Hole in the Head Film Festival that I went to is Lost in Apocalypse, a tale of zombie attacks set in Mainland China. While the film isn’t bad, it was the least of the three films I did go see, the other two being Ghost Squad and Galaxy Lords, hence why I switched order for once and Lost in Apocalypse got caught in the crossfire. As regular readers of TarsTarkas.NET have probably figured out by now due to the dearth of reviews, but we don’t really watch zombie movies much at all. It just is a genre that got so over-saturated so quickly that I just didn’t want to sit through a bunch of boring ones. So automatically by the fact that I went to go see this one, you know it isn’t a run of the mill zombie story, but something good and worth watching.

We follow a group of characters that have to fight their way out of a zombie-infested hotel only to end up at an industrial plant where the zombies might not be the worst things around. (Spoilers: they aren’t, because Lost in Apocalypse follows the rules of good zombie movies and has people and their failings be more of a monster than anything else going on) There is Jack (Martin Yang) the school dropout working as a driver for Rich (Mingyi Yang), who is a jerk but Jack is loyal because he was the only one who would give him work when he was desperate. There is Helen (E’Naan Zhang) the news reporter who is caught in the trap of the only way her career will advance is if she sleeps with someone. Jack is involved in a business deal with Director Wu (Jia Fengzhu), which has something to do with schools but as we learn Director Wu has his hands in many pots and some of those pots are full of things that grab back. Jack reconnects with his old friend Michael, their paths diverging long ago due to Jack leaving school while Michael going on to become a successful reporter and family man. But before the deal can be finalized trouble bursts literally through the front door as a zombie comes in the room and people start getting chomped. There is a desperate stand as people who don’t necessarily like each other have to work together to try to escape, and due to a plot framing device we know several of them aren’t going to make it to later in the film.


Their escape brings them to a facility that Director Wu is supposed to control, but the men there have basically taken over their own way, and thanks to them having guns, they plan to just rob the group and night and move on (the facility head Greg has something much more sinister in mind for the young girl in the group, Cindy!) The film has two overall themes for the characters, as the people who act selfish run into trouble, but also if you act selfless that’s probably not good either as you might end up dead. The film is pretty liberal with the body count, which is both good and bad, as at some point your favorite character might become zombie dinner. But the scares are good, the tension is great, and the zombies keep coming no matter how many you kill off. The zombie fights are pretty keen, and generally feel like desperate characters fighting against big odds even if occasionally they have to cheat the zombie locations for movie tension purposes.

Lost in Apocalypse is based on a comic series that I haven’t read, so I can’t speak to how true it is to the original stories. Divorced from any connection to other media, we grade it on its own curve. Martin Yang is great as the loyal Jack, who puts up with his boss’s abuse far beyond what most people would and finally stands up to him. Mingyi Yang is even better as his mean boss, Rich, who is used to getting what he wants and playing dirty to survive. But E’Naan Zhang outshines them all as Helen, who stands close to the precipice of compromising her morals and we are left wondering if she would have gone through with it or not. The rest of the film takes a detour near the end as characters opine on loyalty and sacrifice, which ultimately hurts the pacing, but overall things are pretty sharp and Lost in Apocalypse turns out to be a decent ride.

Rated 8/10

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