Some of your universe's critics are unkind to In the Year 2889. For example, reviewer preppy-3 writes, "The script is just dreadful.... The lines are just stunningly stupid." Reviewer lambiepie-2 calls the film "a great example of crap-crap-crappity-crap-crap-crap." And reviewer mark.waltz writes (admittedly cleverly), "This movie is not red hot with radio activity. It's freezing cold with complete boredom thanks to the most absurd of plot set-ups, hideous acting and absolutely rotten production values."
Read on for a full appreciation of In the Year 2889...
The film opens dramatically with a nuclear explosion. In voiceover, a deep-voiced God intones, “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise and the elements shall melt with fervent heath. The Earth also, and the works that are therein, shall be burned up.”
After several minutes of footage of explosions, we see a man using binoculars to survey the area around his house while a radio announcer says the radio studio is showing six times enough radiation to kill a man. “The whole world has been silenced,” the radio announcer says calmly. “Three billion people murdered by a thousand nuclear bombs and the lethal fallout.”
The binocular-wielding old man, Captain Ramsey, is relatively safe at his house with his daughter Joanna. “I planned it right, Joanna. Our house out here, miles from any city, the cliffs, the updrafts of air to fight back the radiation. And provisions for the three of us for months.” The third person he is referring to is Joanna’s fiancee Larry, who they assume has perished in the nuclear holocaust.
Suddenly, there is a noise at the door. It is not Larry but a man with radiation burns. Perhaps unwisely, Joanna opens the door and he falls down inside the house.
Of course, Captain Ramsey gets his Geiger counter and exclaims, “Seven hundred and forty roentgens? And he’s still breathing! Why, he should be dead!” (Frustratingly, everyone in the film incorrectly pronounces the unit “roentgen” with a soft g.)
Dramatically, a young man enters. “Don’t touch him! He’s my responsibility.” The newcomer explains his name is Steve Morrow and the irradiated man is his brother Granger.
Again perhaps unwisely, Joanna invites the two young men to stay in the house, giving them a bedroom and getting them water and clothing. Captain Ramsey does not object, but he is clearly frustrated that his place of safety has been breached only minutes after the nuclear holocaust.
Shockingly, there is yet another knock at the door! In a suspenseful framed sequence, a man with a handgun enters slowly, and Captain Ramsey, also holding a handgun, stands behind the door to surprise him.
The captain invites two newcomers into the house, a couple named Mickey and Jada. Of course, Joanna basically turns the safe house into a hotel, inviting the couple to stay in another spare room.
Finally, a seventh survivor emerges from the forest, a bearded drunk in a cowboy hat named Tim Henderson. He is overpowered by Mickey but explains he is a local rancher, so Mickey escorts him to the house. They are blocked by Captain Ramsey. “No! He can’t stay!” Then the elderly military officer immediately relents. “Oh, let the worthless old coot stay. We’re all gonna die anyway.”
At dinner, everyone discusses the gravity of the situation. Jada asks, “How long before we can leave this museum?”
“Yeah,” her boyfriend Mickey says, “I got some things working for me in L.A. Big things.”
Sensibly, Joanna counters, “There is no Los Angeles.”
“No Los Angeles? You’re kidding. I don’t believe you.”
Helpfully, Captain Ramsey uses a homemade model of the valley to explain why they are safe from radiation, as long as it doesn’t rain and bring in fallout.
Later, Steve tries to make time with Joanna, unaware her fiancee is missing. She has an uneasy feeling that someone is calling her, but this thought is interrupted by the captain, who asks Steve to accompany him around the property checking for radiation. “Do you know the real force of the atom has never been fully calculated?” the captain asks.
Steve quips, “Well, I think it reached its fulfillment yesterday.”
Captain Ramsey replies a bit confusingly, “Yes, but only as we know it affects our present form of life. Or life as we knew it, before this nuclear inferno covered the earth.”
“You think some other form of life could have survived?” Steve asks, though he is surrounded by lush trees and bird songs.
“I’m only saying that its true force has never been fully understood.” The captain explains that he commanded a ship involved in a nuclear test explosion using animals. “The outside world never had a true account of that test.”
Later (possibly at night, though it is difficult to tell), something stalks through the forest…something hideous.
Meanwhile, Steve’s brother Granger wants to eat raw meat, but Steve says he can only have the canned meat in the captain’s supplies because eating wild game will kill him. Later, Captain Ramsey reveals that Granger has been sneaking out of the house at night. “He’s a mutation, Steve. Face it. He’s a freak of this new atomic world of ours.” (One might argue with the captain’s logic and assert that the mutated Granger is in fact a normal part of the new atomic world, while Captain Ramsey and the other “normal” people are now the freaks.)
As Joanna continues to hear things, Granger continues to hunt outside at night. He traps a rabbit, but he runs away when he hears the mutant monster approaching him. When Steve and Captain Ramsey find the remains of the rabbit, they assume Granger ate it. Steve theorizes that Granger is mutating rapidly. “I’m afraid there are more Grangers out here. And even worse than him.”
“You mean we all may become like your brother?” asks the captain. “Stalking these woods at night? Eating raw meat?”
Steve says his brother used to look for answers in the Bible, which he said contained the solutions to every problem, so Captain Ramsey starts reading the Bible allowed to the other survivors in the house. Steve goes into the forest to look for his brother, and he soon finds him, but Granger is acting more strangely than usual, afraid that it will rain.
The next day, the women go swimming in what is described as “a spring-fed pool near the cliffs,” which is actually just a concrete swimming pool with a diving board.
Jada confesses she is jealous that Mickey is attracted to Joanna, so Jada threatens her not to flirt with her boyfriend. They hurry back to the house when they hear someone or something moving in the bushes.
Later, Mickey finds Joanna and starts to hit on her. “What’s the matter with me?” he asks. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and once I even gave some money to a drunken bum…my old man! Come on, don’t give me that hard-to-get stuff. Come on.”
When he pushes himself on her, she pushes him away. “Don’t! You belong to Jada.”
“I belong to me! Me!”
At night, after Steve sees Granger climb up a mountain trail and walk through a presumably radioactive cloud of fog, Captain Ramsey shows Steve some sketches of the atomic bomb test that he commanded, which exposed animals to radiation. He shows Steve a sketch of a mutated chipmunk.
“That’s a million years of evolution with one bomb,” Steve marvels.
“You know,” says Captain Ramsey, showing remarkable character development, “I started this thing just to stay alive. But you’ve given me a deep responsibility toward the welfare of mankind. Our kind.” He adds, “I’ll tell the girls first thing in the morning.”
“The girls?”
“Yes. They should bear children as soon as possible.”
Steve simply walks out of the room to go to his bedroom.
Later, however, Steve catches Mickey, who appears to intend to kill a sleeping Captain Ramsey by bashing him on the head with a knick-knack. “Now, Mickey, we’ve had enough of you,” the captain says. “Get your things and get out of this house.”
“You wouldn’t do that to an animal, Dad,” says Joanna. “He stays.”
The next day, Captain Ramsey sits down with Joanna. “A sea captain can perform the marriage ceremony in case of an emergency. Joanna, I want you to marry Steve. I want you to have…children.”
“There’ll be no wedding, Dad, and no children.”
“You have a responsibility to the future.”
“What would Mother say? And Larry? What would he say?”
“They’re both dead.”
She shakes her head and relents. “I’ll marry Steve in a week. If he’s still alive. And if I am.”
In the forest, Steve and Captain Ramsey encounter a stumbling, rag-wearing man who has climbed over the mountains into the protected valley.
“Don’t touch him,” Captain Ramsey warns. “He’s hot.” (His hotness, it must be said, is open to interpretation.)
The mutated man mumbles, “Food. They wouldn’t give me any.”
Captain Ramsey says, “They? There’s more of you up there?”
“Stronger. Much stronger.” Then the man dies. Steve and the captain find footprints close to the house and conclude that these other mutants are getting closer to the house every day.
Captain Ramsey concludes, “We’ll have to take turns standing guard, Steve. I’d use Mickey, but we can’t trust him with a gun in his hand. I know his kind. Spawned in bilge water.”
Later, Rancher Tim runs away into the nuclear fog after Captain Ramsey breaks his last jug of alcohol (the captain also breaks a vinyl record of stripper music to which Jada dances—it is unclear why the captain has a record of stripper music). Also, Steve and the captain find a dead Granger in the woods.
As the film nears its thrilling conclusion, thunder is heard as Mickey assaults Joanna on a bridge, but he is stopped by Jada, who calls him a child molester (clearly Joanna is old enough to have a fiancee but too young to have sex). Joanna runs away. Mickey yells at Jada, “You are your dime store stuff! You’re cheap! A cheapie!”
Even though it is nighttime, Jada reacts to Mickey’s aggression by changing into her swimsuit and swimming in the pool. Unfortunately for her, Mickey follows her, then drowns her in the pool, which of course takes about three seconds.
After Joanna has gone to bed, she hears a voice again. In a trance, she walks downstairs and gets the picture of her fiancee Larry. Then she walks outside. She encounters the mutant, screams, and faints. It picks her up and carries her into the forest. Steve, hearing her scream, takes a gun and chases her into the forest. He finds her quickly. She wakes up and runs to a pond as Steve shoots the mutant, though the rounds have no effect. Joanna realizes the mutant is afraid of water, so she tells Steve to join her in the pond and the mutant runs away.
Rain begins to fall, but back in the house the captain tests it and it is not radioactive. “That’s it!” he says. “Water! It’s afraid of water!”
The rain kills the mutant. Steve and Joanna smile, embracing each other as the rain drenches them. Joanna tells Steve that she knows, telepathically, that the mutant was Larry. “What killed him?” she asks.
“He was created to live in a contaminated atmosphere. I guess the rain must be pure. He couldn’t stand it. I guess that means that all the other people like Larry will be killed in the rain too.”
“Then there is a future?”
“Yes, Joanna.”
In the house, Captain Ramsey shoots Mickey and the film abruptly ends with the closing title “The Beginning.”
In the Year 2889 includes all the ingredients of a fine end-of-the-world story, with its isolated location and cadre of mismatched survivors all converging on a single location minutes after nuclear bombs annihilate civilization. It is its quirks, however, that make it a classic. For example, the finely drawn character of Captain Ramsey is fully developed, a naval officer who feels so guilty for leading a mission to irradiate a veritable Noah's Ark of animals that he skillfully sketches pictures of their mutations so there is evidence of what occurred--and a man so artistic he creates a scale model of the valley in which he lives so he can show it at dinner parties. While the other characters might not be so well developed, it is exciting to watch the interactions of these archetypes -- the stripper and petty gangster, the captain's daughter, the hick rancher, and Steve (whatever he may represent).
When one realizes that the title In the Year 2889 is not literal, that it is taken from a Jules Verne story that Roger Corman had already decided to use as followup to another Verne-titled film (1961's Master of the World), and that the film is actually set in the late 1960s, the brilliance of this film becomes clear. In fact, the film could be set at any time and still have the same impact. As in the previous Corman film Teenage Caveman (1958), time is a cycle -- civilizations develop, then are destroyed by nuclear holocaust, then develop again in a very similar manner. In the Year 2889 can therefore be seen as a comment on the absurdity and futility of hope worthy of Samuel Beckett.