IGN‘s YouTube channel posted up a short film version of the comic sensation Y: The Last Man written by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra for Vertigo Comics comics. The series lasted for sixty issues and was a huge hit with fans, mostly because of its well written description of a dystopian future where all the men have died and women run the dying planet. Watch the short movie below.
If you did not grasp all the plot points in this short then here is a very brief description of the series. Much like he is here, Yorick is the only survivor of a man killing virus that destroys anything that has the Y chromosome, aside from Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand. Agent 355 is given the task of keeping Yorick out of trouble and getting him to Doctor Allison Mann, a cloning expert in the hope he holds the key to rebuilding the male population, and thus saving human kind from extinction.
What I liked most about this short was the way it showed the panic and tension of all the males dying at once in quite a brutal manner. It really added some gravitas to the piece and made the reality of this situation very bleak and shocking. What was entertaining about the piece was the character interactions. Yorick acts like he does in the comic, leaping into situations without thinking of the consequences of his actions, while 355 is then forced to help him out.
Commenting on negative parts of the film, I don’t think we needed the film device of making every guy look a jerk just so Yorick looks better by comparison (and even he comes off slightly jerky). It made it seem like men died out because they were sexist pigs or insensitive screwballs. That’s probably the case with some males of the species, but not all of us!
I am a relative newcomer to this world of Y The Last Man, but the characters seemed faithful enough to me. All the people you see in this short appear in the comic (The Daughters of the Amazons, Yorick’s sister Hero, 355 and Ampersand the monkey). I did not hear of any mention of Beth, Yorick’s girlfriend who is a big driving force behind his actions in the comic. It seemed his sister Hero took the role of keeping Yorick moving in this short.
This plays out more like a teaser to a possible series, it’d be interesting to see if this ever gets extended into its own series as there is great potential for it to. There has been talk over the years of this comic series becoming a television show, but it has so far never come to fruition. There have also been rumors of a feature film trilogy for quite some time now. This is a fine example of how it could be done and done right.
Grizzly Bomb 