The Postman (1997)

good back-story, and good acting

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This movie is like watching history long past as Lithuanian. When my country was divided between Prussia, Austro-Hungarian, Russian Empires they banned Lithuanian language and literature, they wanted to wipe us out of existance. Then men called Knygneshiai - book bearers appeared. They brought books and letters from Prussia which even though had our land didn't want us gone. These were brave men who risked their lives, many did, to protect and preserve our fathers and mothers memories alive. I give this movie a solid 10, because this reality is more real then people might think.

This movie was panned by critics and largely shunned by audiences as well, a fact I always found confusing because to me it has always been inspirational and uplifting.The movie takes place in an unspecified year, although if you use clues in the movie you can infer a date of somewhere around 2015 or so. Set in an alternate future where the United States has fallen after an un-specified war/disaster, the population of the country has reverted to an agrarian, old-west inspired collection of city- states.The unnamed 'Postman' (Costner) is a drifter who scavenges what he can and performs Shakespeare for food and shelter when he passes thru a friendly town. After discovering a crashed US Postal Service truck, the Postman dons the deceased driver's uniform and hatches a scheme to get free food and lodging from walled-off towns by concocting a story about a restored US government that is re- starting postal service.What he underestimates is the power and inspiration the simple idea has to the populations of these towns that live in isolation from one-another and in fear of a wandering conscript army led by a brutal warlord that grows by parasitically feeding off their resources. Without his knowledge, his deception inspires an actual re-birth of postal service, with deliveries performed by an inspired younger generation of voluntary carriers that revere the larger- than-life image of him passed along in stories from town to town.What's fascinating to me about this film is how it highlights the power of something we largely take for granted in this day and age: communication. Not too long ago the majority of humanity lived and died within the place they were born. Information from outside their town or village was brief and sporadic, typically limited to what information you might glean from traveling merchants and the like. Technology and infrastructure upended that, and fortunes were made feeding our intense human interest in communicating and learning about the world around us.In our modern world, even those who live and die within a few square miles typically receive news from across the world with casual ease; radio, television, phones, newspapers, etc. And even those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder can afford to place a telephone call or write a letter or email to family thousands of miles away. It's easy to forget that for the vast majority of human history the ability to communicate with people more than one hundred miles or so from where you lived took weeks or even months, if it was even possible at all. Before the telegraph, the pony express was vital because it reduced communication over a few thousand miles to 10 days.Against a backdrop of dangerous wilderness and a violent militia, people who would brave these risks to bring communication back to the world is inspiring, and that is what I always think of when I watch this movie. To me, it's a caution not to take the wonders of the modern world for granted and a reminder of the power of communication to enrich our lives. And, I suppose, a story about how one person at the right time and place can inspire change that affects thousands or even millions of others.I've heard critics say that the movie plays as cheesy or maybe that it plays to Costner's ego or something. Good and evil are clearly differentiated here; the film doesn't challenge you with complex ethical questions and definitely plays as an epic hero story, but that didn't bother me. I guess it comes down to whether you think the story is over-idealized to the point where it becomes simple minded and child like; to me it does not.

Kevin Costner's second post-apocalypse movie in the same number of years after WATERWORLD is a real yawner of a film, simply because the limited story does not fill three hours of screen time. An hour and a half and this might have made a decent movie, but at three hours the pacing is a crawl and the film difficult to sit through without losing interest. As an adventure, it's also seriously lacking in the kind of action these films require, and the minimal battles and fights that do exist are rather mundanely portrayed and uninteresting. Instead, it appears that Costner is interested in the moralising, the sentimentality, and the occasionally pretentious storyline about an everyday drifter who pretends to be a postman and invents a story of a new government in order to bring hope to the post-holocaust masses.It has to be said that the story is original and interesting (a rarity these days), but the endless padding and cheesy romance between Costner and Olivia Williams seriously drags things down. Costner is adequate in the role as the hero but seems unsure of himself at times, just giving vague expressions instead of acting when he has to. Instead of the clear-cut heroic roles of his past, instead he's portrayed as a pacifist and occasional coward who only fights after being hunted down by the enemy. His thunder is somewhat stolen by the superb and underrated Will Patton as the bad guy, General Bethlehem, who gives an in-depth and multi-layered performance as the intelligent villain and has a great screen presence - it's a shame this man doesn't get leading roles. Larenz Tate is also good as the young patriot, but Olivia Williams and her corny romance belongs in another film. The supporting cast is littered with the familiar faces of James Russo, Daniel von Bargen, Tom Petty, Giovanni Ribisi, and Joe Santos, but nobody gets a look in much and the only developed characters are Costner, Tate, Williams, and Patton.Without a doubt, THE POSTMAN has some great cinematography in places, especially in the sweeping vistas and magnificent landscapes it often uses as a backdrop. Yet the special effects are kept to a bare minimum, thus alienating the young thrill-seeking crowd, and after the blood-and-thunder of the likes of Mel Gibson's BRAVEHEART, audiences weren't expecting this off beat, slow-paced and preachy epic. I didn't hate it as much as some, but I did find it hard to keep up the energy of watching it in places. Probably the best aspect of the story is its originality, but this frequently means taking the tale into unsatisfying areas. Not a total failure, but that running time is a real killer for this kind of story.

Any movie based on a successful book never lives up to the book, that said, Kevin Costner never failed to convey the principles laid out in David Brin's excellent novel The Postman about social responsibility and how fragile a thing civilization is. People criticized The Postman simply because the bottom line of it is that you can't wait for someone else to solve your problems for you and that you must consider a greater good beyond yourself and in-turn take the brunt of things on oneself at times. Not a terribly exciting twist I know,but a fundamentally under-realized reality of not just this movie but life itself. When Costner's character first arrives masquerading as a postman on behalf of "The Restored United States" the people of the village bombard him with questions about "the Marines" or "the President" or other institutions in which they'd believed to which he responds by saying "we've all got to do our bit".He begins as an actor drifting from place to place and simply dons the outfit of a postman by chance, invents a back-story to support his new role and goes through the motions of delivering letters in exchange for sustenance i.e food and shelter. He has the initial luck on the way when by chance there just happens to be a letter in his stolen mail bag for someone in the village he arrives at-but not an implausible amount. From this beginning however his example inspires at first one young man who goes on to recruit his friends who now, because of Gordon, have something to believe in. This movie manages to convey a message of hope that one person can change the course of things dramatically by taking responsibility and daring to challenge established sets of values.