Stormbreaker part 10 All Rights Reserved

Stormbreaker part 10

All Rights Reserved. A fter a string of films of geometrically declining quality, Danny Boyle strips down his urge to bloat with the decidedly low-fi, digital video, creatures-of-the-id zombie flick 28 Days Later. Apocalyptic in a way that reminds of Geoff Murphys The Quiet Earth and legendary British novelist John Wyndhams The Day of the Triffids end-of-days ethic, the picture resolves ultimately as something of a forced morality play and a cautionary fable about mans inhumanity to man. Its opening image of a chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch archival footage of riots and lynchings is paralleled with our first glimpse of a human hero, strapped naked to an operating table, marking the picture as affecting, if not terribly high on subtlety. Still, the rise of a new, animal culture to supplant the old guard a staple of the genre since Wyndham, George Romero, and Richard Matheson manages to hold interest, particularly in times where there arises again a paranoid separation between western leadership and its proletariat. Jim Cillian Murphy wakes from a coma to find England deserted save Mark Noah Huntley and Selena Naomie Harris, survivors all of a viral plague that causes folks to devolve into a state of perpetual homicidal rage. Discovering Frank Brendan Gleeson and daughter Hannah Megan Burns as they trek across the wasteland, they find themselves in exile with a pocket of military survivors lead by pragmatic Major West Christopher Eccleston, holed away in an old mansion in the English countryside. Like a bad nature reel, the culprit of the piece doesnt reveal itself to be the predators, but mankind in all its supercilious aggression. Murphy makes for a well-fleshed protagonist; his evolution from innocence to experience including the loss of parents, the acceptance of responsibility, and the reunification of the family unit provides the structure for a film that feels at times like a series of coming-of-age vignettes, including a sexual awakening for young Harris by way of the time-honored tunnel metaphor. The always-reliable Gleeson represents the death of traditional family structure, and Ecclestons military chief the same for social structure, while Murphy and Harris represent the hope for reason post-infection. In this way, with its embrace of a fable of reconstruction, 28 Days Later is a more optimistic look at rage and its fallout than Ang Lees less honest Hulk. The early scenes, with Jim wandering the debris-littered streets in scavenged hospital scrubs, lend freshness at last to overused shots of Parliament on the Thames the sort of poignant reinvention that the picture finds again in the joyous looting of an abandoned supermarket, but that it cant maintain. After springing a particularly nasty Bosch-ian tableau in a looted church, 28 Days Later demonstrates an anarchic energy that marks its first half as a fever dream that its second half feels compelled to justify. The problem with the film is that urge to proselytize to offer the kind of Lord of the Flies coda favored by screenwriter Alex Garland author of the similarly-themed novel The Beach that proves condescending to a savvy horror-movie audience prepared to draw its own conclusions particularly when the conclusions are as timeworn as the ones in 28 Days Later. Still, the picture makes interesting choices, such as its decision at the end to switch from digital to film stock, marking the grit of the film as a canny artistic choice similar to, if not on a par with, Hitchcocks decision to film Psycho in black-and-white. The future of digital cinema may lie in the intimacy it affords B subject material, lending a documentary feeling to myth and allegory Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, 24 Hour Party People, The Blair Witch Project that grounds archetype in the muck of mendacity. More to the point, the use of handheld digital can be unsettling and frightening in its rudeness; and when 28 Days Later decides to frighten, which it does often, it manages to do so with a kind of ugly vigor. A model of thematic economy, the picture ultimately suffers, like so many new horror films, from too much self-awareness turning its smarts into something that sometimes feels suspiciously like superiority. Yet the seriousness of its approach to horror, the respectful presentation of its dark fairy tale through genre conventions, identifies 28 Days Later as a picture worthy of a look, and the compliment of discussion. Walter Chaw trained in British Romanticism and Critical Theory, and is now the chief film critic for Syndicated weekly in 32 small print journals, he is a nationally accredited member of the Online Film Critics Society. His previous reviews in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. To contact Walter, email by Jeter, reviewed by Brendan Byrne by Jacques Tardi, reviewed by Chris Kammerud by Jean-Christophe Valtat, reviewed by Adam Roberts by Iain M. Banks, reviewed by Abigail Nussbaum by Jillian Weise, reviewed by Niall Harrison by Douglas Hulick, reviewed by Alexandra Pierce The Search for Philip K. Dick The King of the Elves: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume I by Frances Hardinge, reviewed by Martin Lewis by Karen Russell, reviewed by Chris Kammerud The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Volume 1 reviewed by L. Timmel Duchamp by Carol Emshwiller, reviewed by Paul Kincaid by Carol Emshwiller, reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller Intensely violent science fiction thriller about a handful of survivors including Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris struggling to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic England decimated by a powerful virus that turns infected humans into rabid, bloodthirsty maniacs. Despite an on-screen blood-and-gore level teetering on the excessive, director Danny Boyles hard-core horror film raises interesting questions about mans capacity for inhumanity, while offering some genuinely scary moments. Much graphic violence, recurring rough language and profanity, as well as fleeting full frontal nudity within the context of medical treatment. A-IV adults, with reservations. R 2003 A powerful virus that transforms those infected into rabid, bloodthirsty berserkers is unleashed on England, leaving only a handful of survivors struggling to stay alive in the intensely violent science fiction thriller 28 Days Later Fox Searchlight. Echoing cult classics like Dawn of the Dead and The Omega Man, director Danny Boyles stylized hard-core horror flick offers viewers food for thought about mans capacity for violence, while ratcheting up the bloody carnage to a level teetering on the excessive. The film opens as a band of animal-rights activists raid a primate research facility, where they come across a lab full of caged chimpanzees, some forced to watch monitors flashing ultraviolent images. Turning a deaf ear to a technicians dire warnings that the simians are infected with a deadly virus called rage, the activists begins to free the chimps, which immediately attack their liberators with vicious ferocity. After a fade-to-black ellipsis, the action resumes 28 days later in a hospital room, where a bicycle-messenger, Jim Cillian Murphy, wakes up from the monthlong coma he incurred in a traffic accident. Getting out of bed, he finds that not only the hospital but all of London is a virtual ghost town, adorned with hauntingly mysterious memorials suggesting some cataclysmic disaster. Drifting bewilderedly through the eerie post-apocalyptic landscape, he wanders into a church where he discovers a chapel piled to the rafters with corpses. He is attacked by a priest literally foaming at the mouth. The scuffle alerts other rage-positive infectees to Jims presence. Panicking, Jim rushes out into the street with the anger-management candidates hot on his heels.