The Postman is not a great movie. In fact, Kevin Costner's pet project won Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Actor. But how often do you see a piece of post-apocalyptic media that isn't about mere survival but about coming together for a purpose much larger than themselves? This silly movie from the late nineteen-hundreds may still have plenty to say about our current moment.
The story is that in the distant future year of 2013, the world has faced some unspecified calamity (plural?), which caused three years of nightmarish winter and at least ten years of general misery afterward. An unnamed forty-something (Kevin Costner) travels between towns to perform Shakespeare for food and shelter. Then forty minutes of bullshit happens in which our protagonist is conscripted into the army of the evil Holnists, led by the evil General Bethlehem (Will Patton). The Holnists follow the teachings of Nathan Holn, a sort of proto-Jordan Peterson, who strongly believes that might makes right. (The actual guy's dead, though.) Once the unnamed Costner has defected from conscription, he stumbles upon a US Postal van where he steals the uniform of a hilariously pristine skeleton and stuffs a travel bag full of mail from fifteen years ago. In the next town over, he makes up some bullshit about being ordained by a reformed United States Congress to deliver the mail. The people are wary of this weird stranger until, by a stroke of luck, he pulls out a letter addressed to an elderly resident. The people give him food and shelter, a very weird sex scene happens, and his bags are stuffed with fresh mail to deliver to the neighboring towns and villages. This sets a chain reaction in motion that ultimately topples the feudal society set up by the Holnists.
An important point to address is that, at 2 hours and 45 minutes, this movie is entirely too long. Somewhere in this bloated corpse of a story is a very tight 90-minute movie desperately trying to get out. But this is nothing compared to the book it's based on, David Brin's The Postman, which I've also read. The screenplay successfully turned a meandering book that gets stranger with every chapter into a surprisingly tight (in comparison) story about resilience in the face of adversity and rallying under a common banner. Seriously, in the book, the titular Postman still gets his uniform off a corpse, but he encounters a community that worships machine intelligence, allies with a tribe of Native Americans led by a super soldier experiment, and the final battle is between two of these super soldiers. The Holnists are pricks in the book too.
What I like most about this movie is that the main character is explicitly based on a lie. No evidence is ever shown that the United States Congress still exists in any shape or form. But again, the idea of centralized mail delivery is so powerful to these disparate communities that a teenager immediately runs with it and forms a whole organization around it. When the protagonist later returns, he finds a bustling community of postal workers running mail between communities, sewing their own uniforms, and adopting a new version of the US Postal Service motto as an oath they take extremely service. And I think this is exactly what people would do in this post-apocalypse; once the big problems like food and shelter are solved, we need to have something more to live for.
David Brin suggested that he wrote his book to rebuke the celebration of mayhem in the post-apocalyptic genre, particularly Mad Max. And in that regard, I really believe his story succeeds.
I rate The Postman (1997) two stars out of five.
