28 Years Later Part 1 review

I say "Part 1" because this movie is the first of a planned trilogy. The movie doesn't announce that anywhere explicitly -- I had to read about it on Wikipedia -- and if you don't know this, you'll be confused and annoyed by its final minutes.

I give this movie a strong 3 or weak 4 out of 5. If you like this sort of movie, you'll enjoy this one, and you may enjoy it even if you don't normally like this sort of movie.

Thematic summary

This guy is desperately trying to find healthy masculinity

I don't remember anybody's names, so I'm going to call them the kid, the mom, the dad, the grandad, the alpha, the Swedish soldier, the doctor, and Jimmy.

The kid is presented with several conflicting archetypes of masculinity, all of which prove unsatisfactory. He rejects them and leaves society to establish his own values.

In more detail: the kid goes on a rite of passage hunting trip with the (his) dad. He thinks he has failed to act properly and feels like a fraud when his father recasts his activities as successes. He is disgusted with the town's celebration rites and his father's apparent disdain for the mom, who is mentally and physically unwell. He leaves society with the mom and takes on a pretend-father (really grandfather) role. He meets several dangerous circumstances and diverse archetypes of masculinity. He grows up a bit, but not too much, and is unwilling to resign himself to any established model of masculinity. As he realizes this, he tries to live alone in the wild while he thinks things over.

Thematic geography

The island is society. It's flawed, and subject to historical-material circumstances, but it's ours. The mainland is a wasteland but also unbounded possibility. Ruins on the mainland are (with one exception) just props for fun camerawork and combat choreography. The doctor's fire is literally a light in the distance, hope. The bone temple's meaning is spelled out in the movie, no need for analysis.

When warriors leave the island for the mainland they symbolically die, they cannot be saved, and when they return they are celebrated, they have risen from the dead. (None of this is explicit in the movie, I'm adding it in based on my knowledge of "warrior culture".)

Masculine characters

Pros of the dad: he's nice and understanding most of the time. He offers praise and criticism in a balanced fashion. He can forgive violence towards himself. Unfortunately he has been swallowed up in his newly-formed warrior culture and he is training his son to be a child soldier and develop PTSD. This may be a useful survival strategy but it is not good, it is a tragedy.

Still, as far as warriors go, these aren't too bad. They don't kill child zombies (contrast the soldier) and they are interested in quick, clean kills. (Contrast the zombies, who are interested in quick, messy kills, and Jimmy, who is interested in slow, messy kills.) They are self-sacrificing; they put their bodies on the line (to what higher end? unclear, see below) and the dad is happy to go without bacon so the kid can have some. And the kid inherits the dad's bravery and self-sacrifice: he gives his bacon to the mom, and risks his life to try to save hers.

The dad has no time for silliness. (He can party hard, as befits a warrior who has returned from death.) He does have time for partying and pussy, both of which could be seen as a warrior's just deserts, but which make the kid recoil.

The alpha is a big strong smart zombie with a big dick. He is an archetype of primordial, id-driven masculinity, a pure appetite. Actually all the zombies are like this, so it would have been fine to leave out the mythology of an "alpha" and just let us have an individual big zombie.

Anyway the alpha leads the zombies. The alpha's archetype is not appealing. No need to show the kid considering its merits.

The mom talks about the (her, probably) grandad, whom we do not meet. In her delerium she mistakes the kid for the grandad, and calls him father. The grandad is playful, patient, and deep. His only flaw is that he is not present, and so the kid has to be a sham-father in his place. The kid does a bit of fathering for the mom and the baby, but he really is not ready for it, and he knows it. At the end of the movie, he gives up the baby; he's still a kid, he can't have a baby.

The Swedish soldier is older and better equipped than the kid, and more knowledgeable about modern human life, but is in fact more callow, selfish, and cowardly than the kid. The soldier is just a modern dude thrust into a warzone. He has no sense of duty, but he's not cruel. He'll go out of his way to help people, but he's not happy about it and would like to have a reward. Meanwhile he dreams that he's a viking, or even a berserkr! He had no idea what he was getting into, and now that he knows, he wishes he could leave. Meanwhile every single other character in the film accepts their circumstances without complaint.

The soldier isn't particularly appealing. His masculinity is shallow and fake, like his girlfriend's fake lips. (This was a mean-spirited bit. What kind of asshole scriptwriter feels the need to comment, unprompted, on Botox lip enhancements?) Unlike the other masculine archetypes, he is totally lost when he meets real masculine aggression in the form of the alpha.

The doctor is some kind of nonviolent ascetic, practically de-sexed. The kid says he's not crazy, and the movie wants you to agree, but in fact nonviolence is insanity in these circumstances. Even if the movie doesn't know the doctor is crazy, it knows he is not a viable part of society. Nobody suggests he return to the island, and it's not possible for anybody else to live with him long-term.

The doctor teaches him to accept death, and in particular the death of the mom. And when his mom dies, so does his childhood. (Remember back when he gets into bed with her during the party? And when he's hugging her after the dad hits him? That's when he's retreating to childhood. Once she's gone, he can't do that anymore.) Of course he's not an adult yet, but he doesn't have to be, he can still take some time to figure things out.

Ralph Fiennes (is that spelling right? idk) as the doctor. Tbh I thought he played the head soldier in the first movie so I was really surprised to see him return in a different role. Looked it up after and they're different actors, they just look a lot alike.

The kid, like the doctor, leaves society behind, temporarily at least, to make sense of things. Hopefully his conclusions will not be as paralyzing as the doctor's were.

We don't know much about Jimmy, except that he's a pompous, vain, sadist. Presumably the next movie will show the kid falling under Jimmy's spell in the first act, rebelling against him in the second, and facing the consequences (Jimmy's gang attacking the island or some other precious location?) in the third.

Missed opportunities

In roleplaying I've found myself saying, "Let's slow down, explore this in more detail".  Most of my criticisms of the movie are like that. I wish it had gone slower in certain areas to make its themes stronger.

The island didn't read as particularly British to me, though apparently they had signs up showing some old dead queen, and the movie is trying to tie the islanders to Ye Olden Britain by cross-cutting to scenes of medieval British warfare and giving everyone longbows. Maybe a Brit can speak up if they recognized any icon cultural artifacts on the island. (Who am I kidding nobody comments on this blog.)

I wanted to see literally anything about the role of religion on the island. As it stands I assume the islanders are atheists, when I'd prefer to get a shot of a church, a quick cut of a holy man blessing the hunters before they leave the island, etc. I only consider this because of Jimmy's religious background and upside-down cross; if we didn't have that, I wouldn't need the movie to bring up religion at all.

I wanted to see the zombie fuck. If the zombies were a real herd, and the alpha were their herdsman, fucking and shepherding and feeding everyone, then the inclusion of the alpha mythology would have been really deserved. -- Imagine if we had got a scene where the zombie herd takes down some prey, and the alpha gets first dibs and then doles out parts to the rest. This would make a great contrast with the cooking scenes with the dad; the dad doesn't eat much, giving the lion's share to his son. And imagine if we got a sex scene, where the alpha is a bull among sows, fucking lots. This again stands as an object of comparison with the dad, who is unfaithful to his wife.

I wanted to see the hunters perform some economic function in the town. In real life societies with dedicated warriors fight to control territory and other resources. I can buy the existence of a warrior class of hunters on the island if the hunters were expected to retrieve meat, or batteries, or had an extermination mission where they brought back toes from every dead zombie. Since we don't see anything of the kind, the hunters feel like a middle-schooler's dream of a fantasy feudal society: "And there are all these hunters, and they're super cool and everybody loves them, and they go out and kill zombies! Yeah!". Then we could evaluate the warrior's place in society. As it stands we can't, because their role is too abstract and fanciful.

I wanted to see more about sex on the island, and the way the traditionalist warrior culture fucks people up sexually. We got to see how being a hunter makes the kid and the dad sexually desirable, but we didn't get to see how a warrior society hurts the women who desire warriors. (Yeah, we get the mom, but she's not hurt because she's a woman, she's hurt because she's disabled.) I wanted to see some mom scheming to get her daughter to hook up with the kid. I wanted to see boys trained to shoot bows while girls get trained to sew.

I wanted to see the alpha kill somebody without ripping their head and spine out. It was cool once but it's weird if it's his "thing" that he always has to do. 

Misc praise

There's plenty of great detailwork still that really sell the themes. For instance the dad tells the son "two-man drill, just like we practiced" or similar, and that's exactly how people talk and think about this kind of thing. (In civilian life anyway, dunno about the military.) There's signs for children showing the jobs in our society, some of which are handmade. There's artwork showing the zombies as children and society see them.

We get great music every once in a while. I've already talked about Boots , the poem that gets read in part in the beginning. "There's no discharge from the war." We are stuck, toiling away, forever.

I love the scene with the alpha charging down the causeway. Of course you know exactly how it is going to play, beat for beat, in the first 5 seconds or so, but it's so damn effective you don't mind. The song is the prelude to Rheingeld by Wagner. It's also in a great scene from Nosferatu the Vampyre.

 Here's the Nosferatu scene, which also has some chanting by a modern band at the beginning.

Gaming

I want to play a game about gender in the apocalypse, when every value is up for reevaluation. (That's the thematic heft of the apocalypse, by the way. The old values have lost their justification but they still persist in some measure, while most new values (or faux-old values by reactionaries) are unsatisfactory. How should we now live? How can we now live?)

Maybe Apocalypse World is right for this? It seems to be post-gender in terms of rules, but I'm sure we could focus play on that topic if we wanted to. -- Or maybe we should play it with the heartbreaker/D&D-style rules, but a vastly different creative agenda.