As you all well know, my countrymen, I’m never one to shoot crooked. And when I recount those wretched quarter-hours I was forced to endure the blazing desert sun and the Survivor-esque melodramas, I honestly cannot put my finger on just one single, solitary sign that would have foreshadowed the putridity I would be inevitably wallowing in. You heard me right. Not a single one. For there were several, comrades! Several.
I suppose I should’ve been forewarned right at the outset when not one, but two different planes arrived at our oil-well site to carry us back to civilization. Jimmy Stewart’s landed first; Dennis Quaid’s landed later. That right there should’ve tipped me off to the impending catastrophe. And if that signal didn’t work, I don’t know how I missed the diversity Speed-bus vibe. We had WASPs, blacks, one woman, an Arab, a Scotsman, and a Hispanic; even Dr. House was passing himself off as a Brit. Everyone knows a melting pot is a recipe for disaster.
Another sign I missed was when the red shirts started doing what red shirts do. Two right at the very outset. One got himself sucked out when the plane’s back door came ajar, and I don’t remember how the second guy bought it because it wasn’t like he, as a human being, was terribly important to remember. The third got what was coming to him when he tripped over a dune. Bang bang bang…one two three, right off the bat the Very Extraneous are cut from the Pretty Much Extraneous Too. Normally, I find myself more excited when the value of human life is this low. But this wasn’t a zombie holocaust. Hell, we hadn’t even started cannibalizing yet!
So there we were. Dying of dehydration and boredom. There were occasional signs of gun-totting bandits, but they didn’t really come into play until much much later. We kept ourselves busy squabbling amongst ourselves, sizing each other up for possible consumption. Could my thirst be quenched by a Quaid brother’s blood? I found myself pondering. It was getting all 12 Angry Men (and one woman) for a little while there, until we finally decided to rally behind a brilliant plan. I can’t speak for the other plane, whether or not the German acted anything like Hitler or not. But boy howdy, Ribisi had das Feuer down cold lemme tellya. (And while I have time to speculate on the other plane, I also wonder if they actually went into the German’s back-story ‘cause they only managed to hint at Ribisi’s.) Quite a leader! He was pretty demanding on all of us. The joke was on him though. What he didn’t realize was that all that extra water he drank while designing the new plane…let’s just say when you’re that thirsty, you’ll drink just about any clear liquid someone like myself passes to you as “water”.
Hey, but he let us dance! I’ll never forget our little flashback-to-the-Eighties where every movie had almost a mandatory “whistle while you work” scene. I hadn’t heard OutKast’s “Hey Ya” enough while I was back in “the world”, lemme tellya. We overplayed that shizznitt out in the desert too! And there’s nothing like watching Dennis Quaid rock out to a non-Jerry Lee Lewis song.
So anyway, we got the hell out of there with the bandits hot on our tails and the runway going off a cliff and everything. I think the total death count came to four, I forgot to mention the little squabble we got into with the banditos. I probably forgot because I slept through the whole ordeal. Hey, but if you missed it like I did maybe you can catch it on the documentary sequel! Maybe you can catch some scenes with me in them too!
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