The Other Postman. Unleash the hounds.

Last night, I made one of the classic movie-watching blunders: forgetting that it is directors, not writers, who have the final say on the end product. Eric Roth and Brian Helgeland are excellent screenwriters, but when you're writing for a director whose primary obsessions are epic scenery, gratuitous and very realistic sex, and the American Civil War, there's only so much you can do to help.

The Postman, by David Brin, is one of the greatest reads ever. The Postman, directed by and starring Kevin Costner, is just a few steps shy of being sufficiently over the top to qualify as a Hapless Shitstorm, a genre coined by my friend Andre to describe Baz Luhrman's Australia. The Postman is not just a bad movie, it's an empty one. That's the best description I can come up with: empty. The Postman lives up to its legendary reputation for dullness and then some. Very little happens in its 178 minutes, which I suppose is an impressive feat in its own way. On top of that, Costner forced the story into an epic Civil War allegory, a baffling move that can best be described as a critical failure. Even if you don't take into account its source material and consider the film as a distinct story in its own right, it's still a story that doesn't make any sense. Ignoring everything that made Brin's story interesting, filled instead with said nonsensical allegory and lots and lots of scenery, and basically given the Paul Verhoeven treatment, a condition in which a director reads part of a great book and decides that it would be a way better story if he completely missed, ignored and/or discarded the book's theme, thesis, and message, and replaced it with his own, The Postman is as boring as it is pointless.

(Paul Verhoeven got hired to direct a film version of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, by his own admission read only the prologue and thought it was too boring to read any further, and then went on to make what I would crown the king of Hapless Shitstorms (disclaimer: I have not seen Australia) whose cherry on top is the fact that its theme, message, and portrayal of the military are in every way the antithesis of Heinlein's. Costner's Postman is similar in structure, except that instead of being an antithesis, it's just more or less nothing at all. As I said, empty. I have no idea whether or not Costner read all of The Postman, but the film's content suggests that he never made it past chapter five.)

Avoid at all costs.