Imma be real, I just wanted to stan about Day of the Dead and Captain Rhodes for a min…
You know a character I love to see? The crazy military guy in a post-apocalypse movie. There’s just something about ‘em. Cause you get all sorts of crazy in the post-apocalypse. You get crazy cannibal rednecks. You get crazy motorcycle gangs. You get crazy god-complex dictators. And somehow Danny McBride is all of these things. But there’s something special about the crazy military guy.
For a start, they can monologue like no one else. Take Woody Harrelson in War for the Planet of the Apes, it takes longer for that man to get to a single point than it takes for him to make dinner and coffee. Literally the only thing that can shut him up is a virus that reverts his brain to an animal-like state. General Bethlehem in The Postman straight up loves the sound of his own voice, no matter what’s coming out of it, be it Shakespeare quotes, military dogma, or his own backstory.
These monologues often reveal grand philosophical ideas about their situation, resulting in a twisted justification for committing atrocities, like 28 Days Later’s Major West feeling oddly at home amidst a zombie apocalypse. They don’t need to be smart to monologue, though. Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead will go off at every opportunity, and the basic gist is that the world has ended, he has no idea what’s going on, and the only way he knows how to solve problems is by shooting them.
And that’s one of the main draws of the archetype. Out of everyone, soldiers are some of the most likely to survive an apocalypse, thanks to their survival skills and familiarity with hostile environments. But at the same time, they’re probably the worst people to be in charge, especially when all the rest of the world’s infrastructure has fallen apart. Soldiers are trained to obey orders and wage war, they’re not trained to manage a democratic society. In an army, you do what your superior tells you or you’re out, and in the post-apocalypse, out usually means dead. The coldly rational and self-sacrificing soldiers in World War Z are a rarity. Your best case scenario is probably a brutal martial law like in The Last of Us.
It’s important to differentiate crazy post-apocalypse military guys from post-apocalypse military jerks. The jerks are simply less fun to watch. I’m talking about those two twits in the second and third Matrix films. I’m talking about Jai Courtney in the Divergent films. They make all the same stupid, obstructive decisions, but without the defence of the insanity plea, like Michael Ironside’s character in Terminator Salvation threatening to kill the best soldier in the human race, ordering people to bomb human prisoners, and getting the entire leadership killed by falling for the most obvious trap that was ever trapped.
The jerks aren’t threats, they’re nuisances, they’re mosquitos, wasting everyone’s damn time with their nonsense. Usually they get absolutely dunked on by the protagonists by the end of the story, or straight up killed. They’re just so obviously wrong about everything, it’s a bit laughable they’re still allowed to be in charge.
The crazy ones are also simply more entertaining to watch. They’re almost always overacting in the best ways, and their never-ending splurge of dialogue just means more opportunities to bug out and chew the scenery. They do insane things like going out in this weather shirtless or feeling threatened by a gun they literally just watched be emptied. Frankly there are some post-apocalypse military jerks who should have been crazier; just take a look at John Malkovich in Warm Bodies. I mean you’ve got John Malkovich on board, how the hell do you make that boring.
But all of them, the crazies and the jerks alike, do have one thing in common – their power in the post-apocalypse is that they truly believe what they say, there aren’t many people still around that can stop them, and they have an already-established unit of equally dangerous people that have been conditioned to blindly obey. Where civilians might struggle to trust and cooperate with one another after society breaks down, for a soldier that might be the time to close ranks and say ‘yes sir’ to whatever order you’re given.
The devotion to a single view of the world gives the crazy military guys power, but it’s also usually their fatal flaw. They can’t adapt, they can’t change. They didn’t really change when the world ended, the world just changed in a way that affirmed their preconceived notions. But the world continues changing and evolving, bringing them into conflict with that change, be it intelligent aliens, intelligent zombies, intelligent apes, or sometimes in particularly on the nose examples, the power of nature itself.Where the crazy ones are at their absolute best, is in their defiance in the face of absolute futility, like General Hein blowing himself up with his own orbital laser in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, despite warnings that exact thing would happen, because he hates the spirits so goddamn much, and in their complete lack of limits. They profess to have humanity’s survival in their best interests, but no-one and no thing is too big for the crazy post-apocalypse military guy to sacrifice on the way to victory. It’s the complete blindness to any other option, that the only way out is to kill or be killed. Nothing will dissuade them from that thought, right up to the very end. No doubt, no regret, and they will use their last breath to curse out their killer. And no one does this better than Captain Rhodes.
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