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. 

Mac Man: STEVE JOBS

Steve Jobs was a brilliant designer and a difficult person. He was a free-thinking creative and a prickly perfectionist. He was partly responsible for some amazing technological innovations and an often unrepentant jerk. This is not only the conventional wisdom about the man who co-founded Apple Computers. This is the sum total of insight Steve Jobs, a handsome but empty Hollywood prestige picture, brings to the table. Here was a man full of contradictions, who oversaw the creation of the Macintosh computer and the iPod, and yet in the process of being an insufferable genius got fired, and then rehired, by the company he helped create. A mystique about him as a cool figure, a Silicon Valley guru with crossover appeal lingers. All that is interesting, but the film breaks down the story into obvious binaries – work and family, art and commerce, intellect and empathy. It’s overwritten, obvious, and thinly developed.

At least it’s not a conventional biopic like 2013’s Ashton Kutcher-starring Jobs, which blandly recounted the broad strokes of his life. Aaron Sorkin has written a predictably wordy script rather thrillingly, at least in theory, structured around three product launches: the 1984 Mac computer, the 1988 NeXT cube, and the 1998 iMac. Each represents a phase of Jobs at Apple. The first shows us the man at his early peak, right before he sets in motion the events that’ll lead to his dismissal. Next, we see Jobs in exile, struggling to make a computer with enough buzz to reclaim his tech genius status in the industry and the media. Lastly, we see his triumphant return, launching the product line that eventually leads to the iPod and iPad. Michael Fassbender, in a deftly chatty but mostly unconvincing performance, plays Jobs as a man always performing, dominating a room with his outsized expectations, willing reality to distort to his desires.

Each segment takes place backstage before a press and shareholders event, Jobs pacing, contemplating his speech, and focusing on last minute details. Each time, the same sets of characters run up to engage him in conversations that are exclusively variations on the same exact themes. Jobs’s assistant Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet in a slippery accent) runs behind him fixing problems and treating him with tough maternal concern. Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) shows paternal interest, sagely contemplating his colleague’s flaws before erupting in frustration. An engineer (Michael Stuhlbarg) wants Jobs to go easier on him. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) wants more public recognition for his department’s contributions. And Job’s estranged ex-girlfriend (Katherine Waterson) and their daughter he refuses to acknowledge (as a teen, Perla Haney-Jardine, pre-teen, Ripley Sobo, and at first little Makenzie Moss) have emotional appeals.

It sure is convenient they all showed up to have similar arguments before these three different big moments, and it’s tedious to watch the repetitions develop. (The best scenes break out of the structure in flashbacks, like a dramatic board meeting backlit by a rainstorm, and an early argument in the company’s garage origins.) I don’t care one bit if the movie’s conceit is true to the real events or real people involved. I only care that it doesn’t work emotionally or dramatically to reduce everyone down to a monotonous need expressed repeatedly and in too-similar ways. Sorkin’s vision of Jobs is a surface level expression of deep contradictions, juxtaposing him through lengthy walk-and-talk dialogue with characters representing differences in business, technology, or family, and watching him clash with them to get his own way. There are small fluctuations in his personality, but by the ending, with a swell of music, slow-mo, twinkling lights, and meaningful glances, I wasn’t entirely convinced he arrived at new understanding about himself any more than we had a better understanding about him than we had in the first five minutes.

This Jobs is very much a Sorkin figure. He’s whip smart and successful in his chosen profession, able to speak fluently and elegantly about his ideas (like The American President, The West Wing, and so on). He’s a distant prodigy who wants to help people in the abstract, but has difficulties in interpersonal relationships, and who thinks he can fill a hole in his heart with impressive invention (like Zuckerberg in the brilliant Social Network). The man’s been shoehorned into Sorkin’s old tricks without the overarching narrative interest or emotional specificity to excuse such tired troubled-man-of-greatness tropes. The movie says a lot, pages upon pages of monologues and diatribes spoken well by a talented cast. But for all the metaphors and cute turns of phrase, they’re really not saying much at all. What more do we know about who these characters are, or what they feel, or what they mean to their industry or to our times? Not much.

Director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours), one of our most reliably visually eclectic and propulsive filmmakers, leaves most of the pyrotechnics to the screenplay’s verbal loop-de-loops. But he, with cinematographer Alwin Küchler, makes sure to indulge his interest in color and texture – lingering on a table with brightly colored notes reflected in Jobs’s glasses, setting a confrontation in a cavernous room crowded with overturned chairs, or throwing faded archival footage illustrating a metaphor on a blank wall behind a character. He has sharp blocking and canted angles cut together with pep from editor Elliot Graham. But there’s none of Boyle’s usual constant forward movement, excitement, dread. It’s curiously inert: a somnambulant approach that matches the strained profundity of the overall picture. Steve Jobs is at least trying to be something different, but it’s still the sort of movie that ends its big emotional climax with a man looking at his daughter’s Walkman and promising to invent a way to put 1,000 songs in her pocket. The movie is too clumsy and obvious for its own good.

You're Getting Sleepy: TRANCE

Trance is an unusually twisty heist movie. I think that’s supposed to be the entertaining part. But in practice, the plot twists end up collecting so quickly and consistently, undoing the impact of the ones that came before, that the storytelling left me only thoroughly unengaged by the images flickering in front of me. It’s the kind of movie that starts complicated and only twists from there. In fact, by film’s end what has happened has shifted so substantially from what, at the beginning, appeared to be happening, that I’m hesitant to tell you much at all about the plot’s specifics. It’s the kind of movie that grows sillier the more it divulges. In this case, Joe Ahearne and John Hodge’s script seems to be a textbook example of how to overwork a flimsy premise.

But you didn’t come all this way just for me to tell you nothing, so all I’ll say is this. The film starts with a seemingly mild-mannered, everyman auctioneer (James McAvoy) at a London art gallery. During bidding on a nice-looking Goya, the auction is broken up by intimidating intruders. McAvoy finds himself confronted by thieves intent on making a much more forceful bid than anyone was expecting. In the ensuing drama, a nicely directed bit of action, the painting goes missing. That’s a suitably compelling – and simple – start to a would-be hypnotic thriller, but wait, there’s quickly more (and more, and more).

The thieves, a motley crew led by great French character actor Vincent Cassel, make away with a bag they think contains the painting, but, upon opening it, discover they only got the frame. Shame, then, that McAvoy was hit in the head during the heist and can’t remember where he stashed the Goya for safekeeping. Enter a hypnotherapist played by Rosario Dawson. She promises that she can unlock the secrets that amnesia has conveniently locked away, although at first McAvoy doesn’t tell her that A.) he’s there under duress and B.) can’t remember where he’s hidden a stolen painting. From there, the film cannot be said to contain a plotline so much as a plot pretzel with nearly every sequence undercutting the facts – and more importantly, the emotion – previously established.

It’s directed by Danny Boyle, a hyperkinetic stylist who specializes in jump and smash cuts, off-kilter angles, and shifts in the colors and textures of the image. Here he’s a bit more restrained than his usual jumpy, borderline manic style as seen in the likes of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, and 127 Hours. He also managed to achieve a living version of that energy when he choreographed the stunning opening ceremony at last summer’s Olympics in London, but with Trance his style feels sleepier, or maybe exhausted. It’s not that it’s sedate, exactly, just that the energy is a bit too relaxed for the level of acrobatic strain the plotting is putting the characters through. It’s as if the movie itself has fallen into a trance. For all Boyle’s skill at on-edge unease, he’s rarely done a straightforward thriller. But here it is, a film in which genre is the only straightforward thing about it. The thing about situating characters, and the audience, on-edge, is that there must be some awareness of an edge. There’s no mooring here when anything and everything is potentially thrown into doubt by the next twist.

I don’t mean to say the movie is confusing, at least not on the level of what happens, but it is confused. That is to say, it’s always clear what is happening at any given moment, even when we go inside minds under hypnosis for casually surreal dream states that reveal themselves with great meaningless import. What is increasingly muddled is why anyone should care. I felt bad for the actors, who are uniformly good, but trapped giving performances that are totally committed to nothing but the confusion of it all. (Dawson, especially, makes herself vulnerable in unfortunately unnecessary ways.) By the end, though it’s repeatedly explained, changed, and explained again, I wasn’t entirely certain what any of the characters wanted and what they would do if they got it. The last scene of the film features a character debating whether or not he will make a choice to literally erase from his memory the events of the entire film. Boyle cuts to the credits before the character makes the choice and, indicative of my level of interest and understanding, I neither knew nor cared what was decided.

Quick Look: 127 HOURS

One of Danny Boyle’s greatest skills as a director is his ease with unease. Through his throat-grabbing jump cuts and frenetic cinematography (mostly, as of late, from Anthony Dod Mantle), he summons up great dread. It’s not just his horror films (28 Days Later) or druggie portraits (Trainspotting) that utilize this skill. Even his most crowd-pleasing Slumdog Millionaire is a film with characters perpetually on the edge of potential destruction. Now, with 127 Hours, Boyle once again utilizes unease to maximum effect in telling the true story of Aron Ralston, the hiker who found himself alone and pinned to the side of a canyon in a freak accident when a boulder landed on his arm. James Franco, as Ralston, brings a laid-back charm to the opening scenes that nicely complement the dire circumstances he soon tumbles into. He’s a compelling screen presence, easily entertaining even in an increasingly desperate situation. Naturally, the film progresses with its protagonist trapped in one location, but Boyle surrounds him with a cacophonous visual and aural collage. It’s electrifyingly busy filmmaking that uses the character’s excruciating pain and increasing claustrophobic isolation and hopelessness to fuel a hallucinatory stream of consciousness with imagery and sound. After five days, when Ralston decides that the only way to be free is through self-amputation, it’s a highly charged moment of gore and viscera followed by a denouement of overwhelming, transcendent release. While the thematic elements of the film feel a bit schematic at times, the film’s pulse of emotion, deriving its power from the unceasing visceral unease and tension that course through the movie, leaves an undeniable impact.