Life After Deaths: 28 YEARS LATER and28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland wisely understood that the most interesting part of returning to the world of their 2003 zombie picture 28 Days Later for 28 Years Later is to see how a society has reshaped itself in the wake of a devastating, isolating event. In the world of this series, a zombie apocalypse has left the island of Great Britain cut off from the rest of the globe to prevent the spread of the “rage virus.” Talk about Brexit. Picking up the story so many years after the original’s inciting incident gives Boyle and Garland a chance to show a people re-forming, finding a deeper need to cling to family and to ritual, new and old. The older folks can remember the world before zombies roamed the countryside and the uninfected live in small fortified villages or lonely domiciles in the wilderness. But 28 years is a long time, and for the younger folks this is all they’ve known. They were born into this world. What reads to us as post-apocalyptic is, for them, merely the world. It’s humbling to be reminded that, throughout history, generations have lived through what might’ve felt like an end, not surviving to see descendants emerge into a different world not knowing any different. 

It’s grief that animates 28 Years Later. It’s a small troubled family story seen through the eyes of a tween boy in the British isle’s tradition of naturalistic films about just such a subject, like Kes and Ratcatcher. But it’s one turbocharged by its genre premise promising violence and gore. It finds young Spike (Alfie Williams), a sensitive boy who lives in a small community sealed off by fort walls and even further isolated by a land bridge that disappears at high tide. He has a sick mother (Jodie Comer) and a rough father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). His dad thinks it’s time he takes the boy zombie hunting on the mainland. His mom disagrees, but is feverish and bed-ridden and confused, and so father and son head out, armed with bow and arrow, into a survivalist horror movie. Its moves might not be all that surprising—jump scares and splattering fluids—but the characters encountered are vivid, striking, memorable. We see new iterations of zombies—most ominously, an imposing Alpha (Chi Lewis-Parrry) and his pregnant mate (Celi Crossland). We meet a stranded Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding), proof that the world beyond the country is very much ours, and a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who has made a towering memorial to the dead out of their bones, proof life in this country is very much not like ours. And yet both are reflections of mankind’s reaction to mass death, those who would make austere peace with its heavy import, and those who’d turn a blind eye until it’s very much in their face. Between them is the boy, lead into this world by a father and a mother whose interactions with danger will inaugurate him into the heavy decisions of life in these times. 

Boyle delivers it all in elegiac tones that bolster the intensity of its life-or-death stakes. It’s grief for things that aren’t any more, and never will be again. It’s grief for the mournful facts of life that never change. And yet it’s just as muscular and jumpy as any of his hard-charging films. He shot the original on chunky pixelated consumer-grade digital video, and here trades it for an iPhone. Its images are both prosaic and painterly in the hands of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. He gets a eye-bogglingly intense green and blue in the landscapes, and an eerie blackish red in the blood. It’s always both hyper-real and intensely stylized, never more so than a swirling star field over a body of water like a mirror. These images are then cut together with Boyle’s usual frenetic montage and stutter-step editing, tableaux of gorgeous pixelated saturation and ugly spectacle occasionally layered with stock footage and references to Kipling and Shakespeare. It’s an extension of the script’s interest in sci-fi devastation exposing what’s essentially human at root, a stripping away that reveals continuity with British pastorals and Romantic ideations of national identity. And because Garland is interested in societal procedures and human frailty (Ex Machina, Civil War), and because Boyle is interested in social dynamics and the ways in which our surroundings and our relationships shape us (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting), this new picture is a triumphant apotheosis of their intermingled thematic concerns. It’s prickly, propulsive, unexpected, and, amazingly for a movie about the undead and dying, viscerally alive.

What’s just as amazing is that they can hand the director’s chair over to Nia DaCosta for a sequel a mere six months later and get a new movie that continues those ideas while finding ways to jolt and surprise that are all its own. The action moves to Ralph Fiennes’ neck of the woods for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. There he’s working through some experiments to see if he can calm the zombie beasts. He doesn’t have a cure, but he’s got some theories. In a quiet moment, he admits to another that the world used to feel certain. We have a sense that he’s a compassionate man of science who misses the certainty, and in fact clings to a kind of dignity and respect for all life that allows him to maintain a steady center. And yet, coated in disinfecting iodine, living in an ossuary, and stalking the fields with a tranquilizing blowdart mumbling Duran Duran lyrics to himself, he cuts a figure that, from a distance, approaches madness. He scares people, but he’s the most sensitive to their pain. It’s that tension of a sensible man in insensible times that gives the character such a beautiful charge, a patient bedside manner with a dash of danger. 

The Bone Temple slowly draws him toward climactic confrontation with a dangerous, feral gang we met briefly in its predecessor. They’re a roving band of Satanist Teletubbies fans. (That phrase alone signals what mad imagination is on display here.)  They all call themselves Jimmy in tribute to their leader, the self-proclaimed Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), and wear shaggy white wigs in honor of a British TV personality of the same name (who, in our timeline, was revealed to be a sex criminal). They represent death and easy destruction; the doctor represents life and stubborn hope. Of course they’ll collide. The movie takes its time rooting itself in characters (including some carry-overs from the last one), drawing out their perspectives and tensions, and then winds up the plotting with tension until it snaps. It’s just as nasty a violent picture as the others, but this one ends ecstatically with fire, and religious imagery, and a last-minute dash toward a better world. These movies are incredible feel-bad horror efforts about holding on to the faintest glimmer of light in the darkness, even as you—and society—bleed out in the mud. 

Where the Boys Are: WARFARE

The soldiers burst into a house and shuffle the civilians to the side. The civilians don’t even become characters. This is a movie about the men with guns. They set up a stakeout shouting jargon and tersely staring down the barrel of their guns. They talk over their radios. They look warily out the windows. They wait. This is Warfare, a movie set in Iraq in 2006. It tells a very small story. There are a handful of military men—boys, really, with fresh faces and dewey eyes and a sense that, if not for their training and ranks, they’d be in the club. The opening scene shows them bopping around to the electronic dance hit “Call On Me,” a very mid-aughts reference. That’s also the only scene of happiness. The rest of the film is about fear and futility. They’re hunkered down in this random home, a place of shattered domesticity. The enemies are encroaching. A trap is set. Suddenly, they’re pinned down, with danger on all sides. A few are wounded, screaming in agonizing pain. Others’ pain is internal, mental. Still others are dead straight away. They all wait as the minutes tick by, with an agonizing wait filled only with fumbling attempts to help each other survive, and with desperate counting down the time elapsing before reinforcements can arrive. This spare, stripped-down war movie is advertised as coming from actual memories of service members who lived through these moments—a few harrowing hours in a larger conflict.

In its telling, it becomes the story of the entire Iraq War in miniature. It begins with invasion easily accomplished, then a difficult stay that grows violent and scary, before ultimately ending with a messy withdrawal leaving all the worse for wear. (The final shots of Iraqis carefully stepping through the debris of their neighborhood are an especially sharp closing note.) The film proceeds in extremely precise moments calibrated for experiential momentum, both the long stretches of procedural waiting, and the sudden thumping terror of gunfire and explosions. The characters are a blur of familiar and unfamiliar faces, and some familiar faces that are barely recognizable in their combat grimace and anonymizing uniforms. Boyish young actors including Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, and Charles Melton are totally enveloped in their roles. They form a tight unit as characters who fall back on training, with flickers of personality subsumed by the urgent need to do the next right thing. Writer-director Alex Garland, with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza serving as his co-writer and co-director, has made a technical and even clinical war movie that succeeds in conjuring a hellish look at what the monotonous unpredictability of war does to a body. Garland’s usual interest in the fragility of men and of systems, through movies like Ex Machina and Civil War, here finds another gripping expression. Here’s the story of a whole war in just a few well-observed stretches of chaos rushing in where control falters.

Point and Shoot: CIVIL WAR

A tense provocation, writer-director Alex Garland’s Civil War has sequences of frightening violence wherein the logic of action movies is turned inside out to make us root for the shooting to stop. Our lead characters are photojournalists courageously and recklessly charging after the action. The bullets fly and we flinch with them as the action charges ahead. We see bloodshed as intimate, personal—bodies hanging in an abandoned car wash, piled in mass graves behind farm houses, pulled apart by machine guns. The movie imagines a near-future America devolved into sectarian warfare, rebel troops amassing outside Washington to take on a fascistic president who has, in his third term, disbanded the FBI and shoots protestors. This isn’t the queasy-making romance of a lost cause, or a wishful thinking, that’s been burbling up with Civil War nostalgia for 150 years. If the United States were actually to fall into an all-out second Civil War it would look like this—balkanized, radicalized, individuated, dangerous and unpredictable. It’d be three backwoods guys with AR-15s guarding their local gas station. It’d be a random militia holed up trying to overpower and execute soldiers. It’d be insurgents storming the capitol.

Garland doesn’t worry overmuch about how we get there. The movie starts years into the conflict as we get the sense the war is drawing close to a climactic point of desperation. Dialogue has some free-floating allusions to past massacres, controversies, and realignments. We get the gist. The screenplay never announces the policy positions of its combatants, although a reasonably intelligent viewer could pin down the overarching particulars of the state of play. Instead, it stirs up its political intensity with immediacy of intent. It communicates clearly and directly, and with great force, ideas about the hell war puts all people through, and of the complicated natures of the specific people who make their mission the witnessing of it. This is a bleak vision of how some people are just waiting for an excuse to revel in chaos, and the movie plays it off with a throughly muddled sense of rooting interests. Of course we want our main characters to survive; that’s movie logic. But by stripping out actual specific policy or parties, we see only the tension between chaos and order. Stopping for speeches or debates that lay out the stakes might serve to soften the walloping dread and loud gunfire of sectarian violence and its rippling collateral damage. It’s a portrait of society in free fall, a little nervous about how plausible it could be.

Garland has often been a filmmaker interested in the fragility of the human body. Look at the time-warping drugs of Dredd or zombified rage that can infect from merely a drop in 28 Days Later. Or see the blurry lines between man and nature in the haunting alien landscapes of Annihilation and between man and machine in Ex Machina. With Civil War, Garland takes that investment in how fragile people are and pushes further into how that fragility is inextricable form the systems and institutions we build. It finds that larger perspective in sticking small and personal amidst the national ramifications. It’s confined to a picture of photographers dutifully witnessing while getting a charge out of following along—and it makes them vulnerable, too. Some (Kirsten Dunst) are disillusioned about the value of their job; her slow bleeding-out of conviction is a marvelously controlled and subtle performance. Others (Wagner Moura) gets a sick thrill out of the danger. Still others (Stephen McKinley Henderson) are tired veterans of the business, while a young newbie (Cailee Spaeny) gets a shock to her system as she enters the fray. All of them are shaken and stretched, with their fragility drawn out to the movie’s sick, cold conclusion that’s as inevitable as its central dialectic: guns and cameras are both point and shoot. The power of a still image is juxtaposed with the moving image—weaponizing a grainy freeze frame silence in the flow of clinical digital filmmaking to feel the etching of history and the foreshortening of context in each stuck frame—as it creates a tension between its creation and the chaos that breeds it. We’re left with the empty pit-of-the-stomach worry, and the wonder at what’s more powerful than fragile people rushing into history with a gun and a camera shooting in tandem—revolution written with or driven by a photo op.

Body Talk: MEN and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

Screenwriter Alex Garland is steadily building a directorial career of high concept genre projects interested in showing misogyny as a social prison we desperately need to escape. There’s the tech bro compounds in Ex Machina and Devs, and the lonely toxic wilderness of Annihilation, all twisted around a need to control and objectify and watch as the victims either are subsumed or seek revenge. Chilling stuff. His latest goes one step further into making his meaning quite literal. It’s called Men. Enough said, right? It starts with a woman in mourning. She asked her husband for a divorce and he almost immediately jumped to his death. A shocking start to a movie, to say the least. She (Jessie Buckley) is off to the countryside, where she’s rented a house in a tiny village. She’s going to be by herself a while and recover. That’s the plan, anyway. Alas, the village is seemingly entirely populated by creepy men of one sort (insinuating landlord) or another (unctuous priest) or another (bratty teen) or another (naked drifter). She encounters them (all played by Rory Kinnear in a procession of wigs) one after another. This is not the trip she needs. Garland makes good use of the rural quiet and empty natural spaces. When a silhouette suddenly stands at the end of a tunnel and runs toward our lead—and us—it’s frightening. Same when the nude drifter is suddenly lurking behind her, peering unnoticed in a picture window, or when the priest somberly listens to her testimony of trauma and priggishly asks: you must ask, why you made your husband kill himself? Yikes.

The tension builds until a long, gory, completely fantastical climax. Here Garland’s tight, atmospheric little horror movie nosedives into allegory its metaphorical scaffolding can’t support. There are three great shivers-up-the-spine moments, but then it becomes a morass of soupy, bloody imagery that stretches itself in an elaborate symbolic gesture that makes a rather simple point early and often. It’s not difficult to clock its pseudo-religious folk horror intensions from the start. What happened to her husband? A fallen man. What does she do when she arrives at her rental home? Eats an apple from the tree. She’s surrounded by verdant garden imagery. So it’s a movie about sin and consequences, who begets them and who gets blame. I like all of that, but Garland never gets any deeper than the peel, leaving the core untouched. Once we’ve gotten the sense of Buckley’s emotional state, an impressively on-edge performance, and seen an increasingly unsettling creepiness in every encounter—both overtly upsetting and sinister underlying subtext—the ground is set for a fascinating freak out. Instead, Garland only provides a tedious unfolding of symbolism that’s, by the end, somehow both easy and inscrutable, as one toxic man births another and another and so on until the end of time. And then woman inherits the earth.

Leave it to David Cronenberg to make the truly upsetting, and atypical, horror movie of the moment, all the more unsettled for playing like a gross drama, never stretching for obvious scares. He hasn’t made a film in nearly a decade, and not one so overtly engaged with the body horror of The Fly or Videodrome for longer than that. This new work is a relaxed and confident idiosyncratic vision, an old master showing us how it’s done. Crimes of the Future is a sickly melancholy movie that looks about at our current states, imagines a dim, dirty, empty future, and feels queasy. We’re evolving to survive on trash, to digest garbage and call it sustainable sustenance. That’s quite a provocative thesis for this fascinating and disgusting movie, a picture of bodies in revolt, and revolting bodies cut open. In this future world, humankind has stopped feeling pain. This has led to surgery becoming a form of entertainment—“Surgery is the new sex,” one fan purrs—with performance artists willingly getting outré and novel plastic surgeries—new gills and folds and flaps and ridges—for the benefit of appreciative audiences. One scantily clad man whose body is covered in decorative ears dancing somberly to pounding club beats in a dank basement proscenium is typical of this new art scene. We meet characters who propose to shock people with an autopsy, and others who fear what all this messing with physiology might mean for human evolution. Either way, it’s a grim vision of attempting to control others’ bodies, and one’s own, and the futility of it in the face of biological inevitabilities and vulnerabilities. Maybe society is as doomed to decay as we are? How grim.

The best of the bunch in this future art scene is a performance artist (Viggo Mortensen) who is literally growing new and unusual organs inside his body, and then his surgeon (Léa Seydoux) cuts them out on stage. What an act! The surgeries, of course, happen without anesthetic, and with the use of a complicated mechanical sarcophagus that’s full of intestine-like wiring and run with a fleshy remote. The reception afterwards features the organ of the day on display. It gives new meaning to the typical artist small talk: so, what are you working on? It’s not difficult to see this as metaphor for Cronenberg himself—a master at contorting the human body for his horror films, here confronting the material that made his name, wondering if he has it in him to pull another out for our amusement. Mortensen grunts and coughs and moans, staggers and limps, is clad in black with a hood pulled low in public and a cloth over his mouth. He cuts a figure like one shambling straight out of a Universal monster movie. The sound of a fly buzzing sometimes follows him around—one wonders what this movie smells like. He’s fascinating because he’s not one simple metaphor—he’s an artist gestating new and unusual ideas, ripping himself open for an audience’s judgment; he’s an aging man whose body is changing in uncomfortable ways, a fact over which he has little control; he’s a tortured man who isn’t sure if he should change with the times. He has further entanglements that are unfolded as the movie proceeds, but the core is his artistic and romantic relationship with his surgeon. There’s a queasy scene where they bond, cuddled up, for some mutual self-harm. In a world without pain, what does it mean to feel?

Here’s a film full of rich and puzzling characters—a grieving father with some sick plans (Scott Speedman), a bureaucrat who wants to set up a new organ registry (Don McKellar), his assistant who is twitchily drawn to this underworld (Kristen Stewart). Throughout there’s a sense of a society in flux, fluid definitions of what’s expected and where to go next. All are in some kind of discomfort. Some take pleasure in that state. It’s a film of open wounds and tumorous growths, of slippery internal organs and gooey foodstuffs, of sticky drool and singed skin. It’s a gross world. People buy skeletal chairs that adjust their spines to better digest meals. They gawk in backroom surgery shows. Their bodies are who they are. It’s matter-of-fact, though by the end it’s small comfort to know some sights will still shock them. Cronenberg’s vision here is one of a future driven by this sense of biological change, a world caught mid-shift, where new generations may be inheriting the garbage of their ancestors and irrevocably changed by their bodies’ attempts to process it. What a haunting idea of sins of the old inescapably passed on to the new, physicalized and embodied by the grotesqueries we see. But what hope we find in the beauty of the human body, and its capacity to survive even this. By the end, the story is even edging toward an epiphany—man’s capacity to make peace with his body, and embrace what it needs. The film moves with Cronenberg’s typical icy deliberateness, the better to ruminate on these themes and wonder about these characters. It’s complicated and unresolved, alive to the protrusions and pustules of messy life.

Man v. Machine: EX MACHINA

Like the best sci-fi of the seductive, suspenseful, smart variety, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina explores heady questions of science and progress in a gripping entertainment. It locks us into a deceptively simple concept and proceeds to get deeper and creepier, turning up unexpected developments, at once great surprises and, better still, utterly inevitable in retrospect. A film of sleek surfaces, silent astonishments, and quiet terror, it’s a beautifully unsettling thought experiment about the speed with which technology might outpace mere humanity, and our matter-of-fact folly in outsourcing so much trust in our lives to the whims of the tech geniuses among us.

Mad scientists these days aren’t the lab coat-wearing, wild-haired eggheads of yore. Now they’re more likely to be billionaire tech moguls, eccentric, brilliant, mysterious, with unlimited resources and unparalleled access to our lives. Oscar Isaac plays one in Ex Machina, using his likability as smarmy charisma. Holed up at his futuristic mansion/research facility in the middle of nowhere, he’s working on a top-secret artificial intelligence project and needs an outside opinion to test it. Enter Domhnall Gleeson, a programmer in Isaac’s vast company. Thinking he’s simply won a trip to this mysterious rich man’s outpost, the programmer is forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement, then shown the object of study: Ava, a humanoid robot with womanly curves, exposed fiber-optic panels, and fleshy face and hands. It’s uncanny, a mechanical person metallic in long shots, persuasively real in close-ups.

The inventor wants the programmer to study his creation, testing the limits of Ava’s consciousness. Is she experiencing real emotions, real thoughts, or is she only coded that way? Garland sets up the film as a series of interrogations between man and machine, normal dialogue turned uncanny by the inescapable sci-fi mysteries simmering underneath. The man tests Ava, is drawn into her reality, her personhood. When the camera pulls close to her face, we can see how real she looks. The more he interacts with her the more she becomes a character to which we can ascribe motive, interiority. But should we? What’s she up to? And, for that matter, can the man trust his host’s intentions for this experiment? The film’s score underlines unease with a constant digital hum murmuring suspense.

What makes this dynamic effective is the striking, complex work of Alicia Vikander, who supplies the robot’s face and, with eerily convincing special effects, fluid movements with a trace of electronic gears in her gait. There’s a bit of Maria from Lang’s Metropolis in her build. It’s a chilly performance with a hint of warmth – of life – behind her eyes that is contextually fascinating. Such a totally credible fusion of writing, acting, and effects, I almost immediately stopped admiring the creation and simply believed. Her expressions seem normal, but carry a dash of suspicion. What does it mean to smile? Is she mimicking? Is she manipulating? Or is she actually emoting? It remains a tantalizing open question for the audience and for the characters. What is she capable of? I’m sure there’s some satiric point in a story of men who literally build an objectified woman. It’s complicated, and yet unsurprising.

Of course the mad scientist has secrets. What else could you expect when his massive building has power outages, doors swooshing shut, unpredictable keypads, hidden rooms, dark corridors, and rows of locked cabinets. And of course the true subject of the experiment is up in the air – who studies the other, the robot or its creators? But Garland, making his directorial debut after a career scripting great sci-fi features like 28 Days Later and Never Let Me Go, creates of the expected plot points a nervy story that proceeds logically and methodically through its twists. It makes great use of a shifting protagonist. Who will escape this increasingly claustrophobic setting, painted in cinematographer Rob Hardy’s darkly smooth surfaces? Who should we root for? Rather than sticking with one rooting interest – our everyman entry point, or the enigmatic mogul, or the compelling robot – it questions aims and intentions of each in turn. Who will escape? My answer shifted with the film’s reveals, as it packed familiar but profound implications in small gestures and artful pulp.

All Rise for the Honorable Judge: DREDD

Whither the recycled-food robot? He roamed Mega City, the post-apocalyptic metropolis in Judge Dredd, the otherwise terrible 1995 Sylvester Stallone adaptation of the cult comic. His sole duty was mechanically reciting his great sales pitch: “Eat recycled food. It’s good for the environment. And okay for you.” Irresistible. Such levity would be much welcome, if entirely out of place, in this new iteration of the Judge. The approach this time around is signaled by the new title: Dredd. Shorter, simpler, it’s a blunt, violent, grimy smear of an action movie. Director Pete Travis, working with Danny Boyle regulars screenwriter Alex Garland and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, creates a brute-force sci-fi thriller, a confined, claustrophobic din that pounds forward with an ugly relentless energy.

The conceit of this fascist futurist pessimism involves the law officers of this concrete wasteland of high-tech weaponry and low-tech social unrest. They’re known as judges, but really they serve as judge, jury, and executioner. They wear tight leather suits with dull gold badges and heavy helmets with dark shaded visors that obscure the eyes entirely, the better to fix a gaze unknowable at their impending victims while fiddling with voice-activated guns that can shoot all manner of projectiles. They’re basically Robocop without the winning personality.

Our hero, such as he is, is known as Judge Dredd, of course. He’s played by Karl Urban who, after playing charismatic supporting characters in all sorts of sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters from The Lord of the Rings to Star Trek, uses his leading role to speak all of his lines in a growly monotone. Even when he gets to utter the character’s famous tagline, such as it is, his line reading of “I am the law!” feels strangely underplayed. Still, he fills the suit and seems menacing enough, I suppose. The plot concerns one day in the life of this futuristic lawman. He’s given the task of letting a pretty young psychic (Olivia Thirlby) tag along. She applied to be a Judge, but failed the exam by only three points. Why a psychic would fail an exam is beyond me, but that’s the case. Anyways, the higher-ups give her the opportunity to go out judging with Dredd and see if she can perform in the field.

It’s a bad day for that. A routine drug bust in a 200-stories-high slum goes horribly wrong when the tough gang leader who runs the building (Lena Headey) decides she’d rather not have her drug-dealing operation discovered. She puts the tenement-turned-headquarters in lockdown and orders her underlings to kill her some judges. When this happens, the psychic asks Dredd “What’s going on?” You think she of all people would know. If you saw the action film The Raid: Redemption earlier this year, you’ll recognize the broad strokes of this movie. The two movies are built upon essentially the same shootout-up-and-down-a-skyscraper structure, although this time around there are way more future guns and little to no martial arts.

The movie’s best visual trick is the representation of the high offered by the gang’s future-drug. It’s called Slo-Mo and makes the user feel like time has slowed to a crawl. Travis and Mantle use it as an almost clever riff on modern action filmmaking’s love of using slow motion to amp up would-be super-cool moments. When a character plummets from a large height and falls very slowly for a very long time, it’s a funny little visual flourish. Unfortunately, that’s the best the film has to offer. The rest of the time, it’s just running and gunning in ways that quickly grow tiresome. Rather than using the plot’s confinement to the advantage of the fight choreography, the whole thing grows dimmer and uglier as it goes along. The violence is amped up beyond all reason, especially when it spills out in grotesque slow motion splatters. The terse characters grow only more uncommunicative and monosyllabic finding less and less time for their flat exposition and unworkable one-liners.

Now, I’ve never read the original comic books about Judge Dredd, but based on the evidence of two films now, maybe he just doesn’t work cinematically. The world is interesting, a wasteland of brutality and mutation that’s held barely in check by a brutal police state. And yet Dredd himself comes across as such a dud. He’s a bland action figure posing his way through feats of elaborate CGI violence and destruction. Stallone’s version was too goofy and nonsensical. This time around it’s way too dour, with monotone simplicity taking the place of narrative interest and characterization of more than the barest kind. The concept screams for propulsion, but at its core this movie’s all about slowing things down and taking it to its lowest possible levels of simplicity. It should work far better than it does.

Rage Against the Dying of the Light: NEVER LET ME GO

Screenwriter Alex Garland’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s wonderful novel Never Let Me Go is a literate, moving screenplay that derives as much of its power from the pauses between the lines as it does from what characters say. The story of three young children growing up in an imposing, strict, orderly boarding school tucked away in the British countryside has a great deal of power and mystery. The rules are strict for a very specific reason. The secret behind these circumstances is pure science fiction, but this is not a film of blinking doo-dads, slimy creatures or flurries of jargon. This is a film that considers its subject deeply and seriously. There are great depths of emotion here, hidden just beneath the calm rhythms and hushed tones.

Picking up on the spare, suggestive emotionality of the writing, director Mark Romanek, last seen directing 2002’s One Hour Photo, creates a chilled, artful mood that feels patient and foreboding. This is a film filled with beautiful dread and calm menace. This is a deliberate film with not a single wasted shot. It’s a sort of zen sci-fi, with compositions and words so finely tuned and chosen that it becomes a film of intricate beauty, an exquisitely structured and affecting piece of mood and style.

When we first see the school, Hailsham, it appears as an imposing brick-and-stone structure set in the middle of a clearing. Within its walls are hundreds of seemingly typical children who are eerily composed and disquieting in their poise. They have the bearings of ones who have been carefully trained, skillfully regimented. This is, after all, a prep school prepping the kids for a very specific purpose. Presiding over the school is the regal headmistress (Charlotte Rampling) who knows more than she tells.

Still, when we meet young Cathy (Izzy Meikle-Small) and Ruth (Ella Purnell) they seem to be very normal preteen girls. They discuss horses and gossip about their classmates. Cathy has a crush on Tommy (Charlie Rowe), a misfit who is emotional and creative, but awfully insecure. These are children who, despite their appearance of maturity, are quite naïve and stunted. We don’t entirely comprehend the rules that govern their lives at Hailsham, but then neither do they. But still, this school is all they’ve ever known. Even when a well-meaning new teacher (Sally Hawkins), wrestling with her conscience, tells the students the true nature of their futures, they don’t quite know what to make of it.

When we catch up with the kids some years later, in their late teens, they are still grappling with their fates, struggling to make sense of their place in the world. Ruth and Tommy, having grown up to be Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield, seem, at first glance, content to live in the moment, covering up their knowledge with their youthful optimism and cautious exploration of the adult world. Cathy (now the luminous Carey Mulligan) finds her future more unsettling. She’s lonelier than her friends, more serious. Though she doesn’t ever really open up to those around her, emotions and urges are powerfully stirring within her. She’s quietly accepting her lot in life, but she’s hardly happy.

Mulligan’s brilliant performance is a quiet one filled with meaningful looks and the smallest of facial expressions. It matches the deliberate tone of the filmmaking in the way the sparest, most economical gesture can suggest so much. This is a film of quiet and solitude, of uncomfortable facts and sad realizations. This is a film that is concerned with matters of life and death. But there are no hysterics. There is little sentimentality. This is a film of grace and beauty that is serenely overwhelming.

Romanek’s work here is gripping, emotional filmmaking. It’s melodrama stripped of embellishment. It’s sci-fi in name only, stripped of its standard accoutrements. It’s a film that’s both a startling, small-scale exploration of scientific ethics and a beautiful story of unrequited love. It’s a study of love and mortality that grows deeper and lovelier with each passing scene. It’s subtle power sneaks up and overpowers. The surface beauty and the finely crafted performances are commanding, but the depths of the feelings beneath them are even more surprising, nuanced and devastating. There’s an awful yearning at the center of the film, a sense of a horrible void in these characters’ lives that can never be filled.