Morning Patrol (1987)

I wanted to but couldn't!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

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

Blade Runner meets Stalker. It's an unique, poetic, fascinating Sci-fi movie , which few viewers will appreciate. In an post-apocalyptic desolate world, a woman wanders trying to survive from the dark, the desolation and the morning patrol. The viewer will wander by woman's side to dark city's narrows and to beautiful landscapes, inspired from atmospheric music and pictures.

If you are lucky enough to find this film, do not loose the opportunity to watch it. Do not loose the opportunity to devour its powerful mesmerizing darkness. Intensely majestic, scary, impressive, unique, exceptional, this 80's Greek film will certainly leave you speechless. She lives in a post-apocalyptic city. A city that is abandoned, a city that is dark and in ruins. A city where you see dripping ceilings, basements with pods of water, staircases partly blocked and humid. What makes this canvas even darker and scarier is that the lights are on, TV sets are also left on by the people who have fled, a cinema still plays a film noir...So much dark there is that even daylight seems to have left or has already packed and is ready to leave, since it is almost absent. Leaving this city is her goal, like many people have done already. She is not in a good health, she looks weak and speaks with Herself a lot, narrating Her few remaining memories. She is chased not only by "remnants of people" but also by the Morning Patrol. They move around the city, kill the people who are left behind, and the ones that try to leave, heading West to reach the Sea...like Herself. She will come across Him, one of them, a killer but someone that is suffering exactly the same, and deep down inside feels Her deeply. Together they will march towards the desirable salvation...

That this masterpiece is so unknown - undistributed throughout all the world, as far as I know, besides Greece - is nothing short of criminal. In terms of tone, it's most comparable to a slower, more elegiac Blade Runner - there's the same pervading sense of despair, of a deep, dark curtain coming down on the world. Exit stage right.It follows an unnamed woman wandering through a postapocalyptic wasteland. The people she comes across generally try to kill her, if she doesn't try to kill them first. Communication seems to fallen by the wayside and all the dialogue we get is the woman's internal monologue, a haze of sentimental memories and a longing for a better time.She works her way into a city, where food, shelter, and water are comparatively plentiful. It's every bit as much a wasteland as the outside world, but of a very different kind - abandoned technology makes its presence known constantly, including a memorable scene where the woman sits alone in a movie theatre, but for the unseen assailants slowly climbing and crawling over seats, working their way toward her.She meets a guard of the morning patrol, a kind of taskforce that has taken it upon itself to kill everyone it becomes aware of. Their job is more a mercy in this kind of world, and although their technological, inhuman precision marks them as the bad guys, they're practically saviours when life itself becomes an enemy.I won't go farther that on the off-chance that you're given a chance to see it - but either way, the plot is far from the point and doesn't unfold much differently than you'd expect it to. What does matter is a connection established between two nameless, faceless people floating in a void of memory and space, a timeless land where life and death blur together and the hope for a new horizon outweighs the need to exist. Alive or dead, it hardly matters.

It's the near future, and a catastrophe (plague, war, who knows?) has let the few survivors to wander aimlessly in the wild. One of them, a woman, wants only to "go West, to the sea" where she believes life could be better but in order to achieve that, she must go through a ghost city which is guarded by the Morning Patrol (Proini Peripolos).Proini Peripolos is really far from Hollywood movies or blockbusters. It's just an artistic movie with slow pace and it's real power is the setting with grim pictures, atmospheric music and isolated landscapes. Try to find it if you can although the language (it's in Greek) will be a problem for foreign audiences.