The Postman

While falling flat on its face, Kevin Costner's film The Postman is an exhausting movie to watch. This week, we'll be discussing The Postman including Tom Petty's cameo, analyzing the characters and cast of The Postman, and how The Postman final battle fails to deliver a lack of a climax. Stick around to learn about how ridiculously long this film is and other gripes we at Force Fed Sci-Fi identified and/or listen to the full episode on The Force Fed Sci-Fi Movie Podcast!

Brief Synopsis

This film was based on a 1980's novel with the same title written by David Brin, and we will touch on that in the next section, but essentially this film is a world that has gone post-apocalyptic. The year is 2013 and society has broken down with no infrastructure and no government. At least in one part of the United States, a militia known as the Holnists reigns the nearby settlements with fear. Then comes a con-man who transforms himself into a revolutionary hero to stand against the Holnist militia and give the nearby settlements hope, which eventually spreads across the country to help organized society evolve again.

Pre-Production and Surprising Facts You May Have Not Known



It is rumored that at one point, this film was intended to be directed by Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. We believe though that the story was going to have been changed quite a bit if the development involved these two Hollywood legends. Again, it is rumored that one of the original screenplays involved the moral message of the novel being reversed (which, David Brin did not take kindly to). Could this have been the direction the film was heading with Ron Howard and Tom Hanks? I guess we will never really know.

However, Kevin Costner ended up as director, producer, and star as the main character for this film. Apparently, David Brin was happy that Costner became involved with this film and that the screenplay changed to portraying people missing organized society if a post-apocalyptic world were to occur. While this may have worked somewhere on paper, we at Force Fed Sci-Fi believe Kevin Costner did not succeed at this, in part because, while the novel was dubbed as a science-fiction book, the film was far from being a sci-fi film.

The Postman Book vs Movie

We think it's important to at least briefly mention the differences of The Postman book vs The Postman movie. Which, if you aren't familiar, the book was a highly acclaimed science-fiction novel when it came out in the 1980's.

The Postman book, unlike the film, actually had science-fiction elements in it! There are reasons given to the reader as to why a post-apocalyptic world has presented itself and occurred. The novel explains that the fall-out of civilization was the result of several electromagnetic pulses and bio-weapons which led to the destruction of major cities. In addition, there is an encounter of what appeared to be a sentient artificial intelligence in the novel!

Unfortunately, we get none of this in the film. It seemed like Kevin Costner wanted to take all of the sci-fi elements the book contained out and wanted to turn The Postman movie into a western-like film. While Kevin Costner is decent at starring, producing, and directing western films, trying to turn a sci-fi film into a western with The Postman failed terribly. It seemed to us that he really tried and forced his efforts to successfully do this.

His films <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Range_(2003_film)" target="_blank"...