So I watched 28 Years later the other day.
I have a lot of thoughts about it. I’ve become completely addicted to dopamine and online teaching and have not been able to do any creative endeavours. This is due to personal issues but I have as a bonus moved into a flat where I have a smart TV so I have been watching a lot of films.
Mostly Dune and Dune 2 to be honest, but also other films.
I have a way of watching films where I put on a very clever film, fall asleep halfway through, and then wake up, read about what happened on Wikipedia, and watch the film again drinking tea and looking at my phone. I’m reinventing cinema
Yes, it’s going to be that kind of review.
Weirdly with shit films I don’t fall asleep. I adore Denis Villeneuve because I can watch all of his films, I love the plots but I rarely make it to the end, I just feel comfortable and happy. Chris Nolan is wank lol
28 Years Later, Danny Boyle, I watched the whole film, it was interesting enough to see the whole thing, but not good enough to fall asleep. My ambition is to make this into a review of the three films, but I’ll just start with a review of the new one.
I’m from Northumberland, of course there is electricity and phones and stuff in real life, but it did capture how isolated it is, for better and worse. In the film there is only one village and the witch doctor 2 days away from the village, in reality the witch doctor is only about an hour of walking, but it’s a movie.
Everyone does live in villages and small towns though, but when you go out into the wider world you do go ‘holy shit’ because for us there is Newcastle, but in the South there are loads of mini cities like Newcastle but we’ve only got one. Even in Yorkshire, they have a bunch of cities. I may be just imagining my life was more interesting, just even going to see my friends or going to buy a CD was a big trek or a long bus ride.
It’s one of those things you don’t realise, like we lived next to a hill which was full of magic mushrooms, I remember there was a farmer who you had to ask to open he gate and he was always ‘don’t eat any of the mushrooms lads’. I used to go up on my own and get loads to pay for hash, and once I met this australian guy and he was ‘G’day’ ‘have you found any shrooms’ ‘ yeah, and I found a frog!’ he had a flask full of mushrooms and a frog in the flask
See if that had been in Brazil it would be so cool to me, but because it’s me it’s not as cool
I live in Vietnam and lived in China, a rural city in China has millions of people in it, not a lie. It doesn’t make the cities cooler, London is as cool as Shanghai because there are half as many people but that just means twice as many people working there and doesn’t increase the amount of well off people who are using their power for good
Ok the film. I’m just writing this assuming you’ve seen it and give a shit (talking to you Matthew!).
There was something about it, Danny Boyle is a working class guy from Manchester, I just looked that up and am surprised. He sounds posh, he’s a Catholic, I wonder if I missed a trick not having parents who believed in one of those big ones, they are just nominal atheists. I like his films, not mad about him or Alex Garland.
I was, but it’s a bit like Charlie Brooker, the world kind of caught up with them. In the 1990s when they were scrappy youngsters it was really like my imagination, they were older than me with the same sensibility but smarter because they were 10 years older, it was so good to be seen as low middle class white English boy etc.
Not total bullshit, there is this dominant culture that we are also excluded from. It was very difficult to express it back in those days because it was based on white men, but it was this weird rich American rich person thing.
A great example is the Alex Garland film Civil War. I liked that film, I will probably not watch it again, Alex Garland is another one, and I give him more of a pass because he’s a novelist. The problem with that flim was, they were photographers. The ‘treasure that was in us all along’ was the war photos. Apparently his parents were journalists and it is well intentioned, but it was released in 2024, there is this breakdown of law in the USA, it’s very believable, and very well done. But unfortunately by the time it was released, there was a genocide happening and we could all go on TikTok and Twitter and see the videos by Israelis and Hamas on their phones, so having a posh camera, ‘what are you on about you Hillary Clinton’
Adam Curtis did this interview where he said 20th century media is dead, cinema and pop albums are like novels or plays, of the old days.
I’m not sure about cinema, it’s a different thing, but I think that it’s at least kind of true, I haven’t read a novel this year, or seen a play. I am not against them, I am glad they exist, but it’s not a thing I do, I have to make a conscious effort to do that stuff, it’s like I don’t have to walk, I do walk, but you can’t walk as a useful thing. I walk to chill out or listen to podcasts or music, not to go to work. It’s too hot and far.
OK, so the film is about they live on The Holy Island, which is a real place, it’s a monastery that you can only visit during low tide. I don’t think that there is a village on there, but I only went as a kid, it’s nearby but Northumberland is full of old chuches and stuff.
They go onto the mainland where the zombies are now like Resident Evil where there are different ranks of Zombies including ‘Alpha Zombies’ . Oh it’s so fucking stupid.
There is a kid who is really empathetic and doesn’t like the village because his mum is ill and he wants to go on an adventure. It’s Fight Club level dumb, but it’s about being a good man not an alpha man or something, his dad is an alpha male in the village, but he’s weak because he is not able to resist the lasses who fancy him and is secretly putting himself before his family, although he doesn’t actually harm them, he’s shagging around.
It’s not a morality tale, the dad is a very sympathetic character except that he’s quite weak and he’s thriving in this post capitalism post apocalypse world and doesn’t face up to it on a deep level.
The kid finds out that his dad is just a guy, he tries to take his mam to find the doctor, it’s a two day trek so he should have died, but a Swedish soldier saves their life, then in the one bit of the film that actually annoyed me there is the zombie film morality death where he just loses his rag and is about to destroy the whole point of the film when an Alpha Zombie turns up and kills him.
Then they find the doctor who is Ranoph Fiennes being brilliant as the new Patrick Stewart. He is of course an Oxford kind of guy who loves the poor wee Geordies (we aren’t Geordies but we are to everyone except Geordies) and gives the young lad some knowledge and acts as a kind of voice of sanity despite being a complete nut. It’s Fiennes, he does it brilliantly. Where I’m from is one of the posh bits of Northumberland and we had a posh doctor, we have posh people too. Proper ones.
Having typed out this daft review, I quite liked the film. I just found it a bit subjective. I didn’t go into it, but in Danny Boyle style there is loads of in your face symbolism. I do have to hand it to him because he really can do symbolism. He’s not Dali level, but he clearly gets it on a level or two above me how you can subvert symbols if you understand them, it’s framed as Biblical and the villagers have a weird heathen Bible, and it’s all done with humour, like to be super pretentious the village is a comment on himself, they have this weird post future Christianity, which is what the film is.
Apparently Danny Boyle wants to make a trilogy about the kid who after surviving all of that goes off on an adventure on the mainland, I hope he doesn’t, I think that we are post-post-post modern lol. I mean he is a guy who has made a bunch of amazing films, and I’m a guy who has made a bunch of stuff people like but nobody listens to or watches, so what do I know, but I would like him to do something not about post capitalism. Koreans do great films about class conflict, that is the obvious silvermine for me, there is a hollowness to British culture on that kind of level because it has that thing that Americans love where it’s referencing the Greeks. But it’s not the Greeks, Americans think Romans had Shakespeare accents, but get offended when a non Anglo plays a Roman General. They are fucking idiots. Fuck them
So overall: I found it a rip roaring rollercoater of a movie 5/5
Idea for sequel: 28 Centuries Later. A galactic space thriller set in Space England
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