Huuuge fan of 28 Days Later, the rest is still decent, without too much scrutiny, but.

28 Years Later has an amazing soundtrack, almost entirely written by the Young Fathers. And they do GY!BE’s East Hastings at the end. So that was certainly very pleasant.

But I couldn’t shake off the feeling, maybe biased by looking at the state of the UK these days, that this is a movie by a dying culture for a dying culture. Which is in its own way poetic and beautiful, considering it’s a zombie movie.

28 Days Later was about people, and how bad (or good) they can be, not about zombies. And in this new one, it’s cool music, and cool camera work, and Ralph Fiennes covered in iodine, but it’s just death, death, death for its own sake. It really stops making sense toward the end unless you’re into euthanasia. Just a strange cult and a memorial to death.

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    26 days ago

    I kinda dug it. it was weird and felt disturbing, the same way I felt walking out of the theater after 28 Days Later.

    Days was a shocking movie at the time. like an art house zombie flick, a genre that it helped recharge, where the zombies were faster than they had ever been, and the infection was somehow even faster. it was a story about how the old institutions were poison and the only hope was to build something new.

    28 Weeks Later was basically a rehash of all the commercial, big budget zombie movies. the entire story was paint by numbers and we all knew where it was going.

    28 Years was something new and unsettling. a world that isolated Britain and went on about the business of modernity sacrificing the minimum of resources and men to tie off a fetid wound, allowing it to go dark and become strange, an array of quasi compartmentalized petri dishes devolved and mutilated… making it weird and familiar, atavistic, timeless, and haunted by a new natural law. seriously, wtf was with the birds and herds, seemingly commanded by the alphas.

    the world has no interest in cleaning this wound and actually eradicating the threat, rather contented to mostly ignore it… which feels way too real, because that means the threat for what is happening on Britain to expand outward persists.

    the way it was all bookended with the Jimmys gave it a frame story vibe. I didn’t care for their parkour-ish ultra violence, but my assumption is that they represent the surreal ultraviolence of the last generation raised on television during the collapse, like some kind of critique of media saturation. the opening scene was one of the most unsettling, the parents locking their kids in with the Teletubbies and keeping them ignorant as everything is clearly going to shit.

    supposedly there’s a Part 2 to this one that may flesh all that out more.

    anyway, all that said, it felt like a return to form in the sense that it was not paint by numbers. it had a surreal, dreamlike quality that picked at the scabbed over wounds of our world the way 28 Days did and left me feeling… weird and disturbed at its conclusion.

    full disclosure, I am a big fan of when Boyle and Garland work together and think Sunshine is their opus. it’s a high concept Sci Fi/horror that is executed with far more complexity and poignancy than its basic premise would have under anyone else.