28 Days Later / 28 Weeks Later

When 28 Days Later came out in 2002, it was perceived as a welcome breath of fresh air in the horror and science fiction genres which had become stagnant and predictable. It proved that in the best tradition of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Halloween (1978), the most effective horror films are made independently, and that they can scare us while also making us think. 28 Days Later is generally considered to be a post-apocalyptic science fiction film — after all, the premise involves Great Britain ravaged by a highly contagious virus and follows the adventures of four survivors. However, director Danny Boyle shoots his film in a way that shifts from ominous feelings of dread to outright sweaty-palmed terror reminiscent of George Romero’s zombie films albeit on speed.


28 Days Later struck a nerve not just among horror fans but moviegoers in general and was a surprise success. The inevitable sequel followed, but instead of going for an easy, quickie film that coasts on the reputation of its predecessor, 28 Weeks Later (2007) uses the effects of the virus outbreak and the government’s reaction to it as a commentary on real-life bureaucratic reactions to Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq. Even more impressively, 28 Weeks Later is a rare sequel that is as good if not better than its predecessor.

In 28 Days Later, Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a hospital 28 days after three animal activists broke into the Cambridge Primate Research Facility to free chimpanzees being experimented on but unwittingly released a virus known as Rage into British society. Unaware of what has transpired, Jim wanders the gloomily empty streets of downtown London trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Buses and trucks are overturned and abandoned while the normally clean streets are littered with trash and, in one instance, some money (although it’s pretty much useless now). Jim picks up a newspaper and quickly gets an inkling of what went down — the country has been evacuated as the Rage virus devastated the population.

Jim walks up the steps in a church and behind him someone has painted on the wall in large letters, “The end is extremely fucking nigh,” which sets just the right creepy tone. He walks into the chapel and it is packed with dead bodies like some kind of perverse variation on the Jonestown Massacre. He also encounters his first infected person as a priest rushes crazily at him and Jim barely escapes. In doing so, he encounters two other survivors who rescue him by torching a few infected people with Molotov cocktails but they keep on coming despite being transformed into human torches. Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris) fill Jim in on what has happened while he was in the hospital and how far the infection has spread. And so begins Jim’s quest to find other survivors and a safe haven to hold up until this epidemic plays out.

Boyle times his jolts well, like when Jim reflects on his dead parents in their home when suddenly two of their neighbors, out of their heads with the virus, come bursting in. Mark and Selena intervene but he gets some of the infected blood into a wound and that’s all it takes to become infected. She unhesitatingly hacks him to death with a machete in a truly horrifying scene. It’s not just the sudden nature of the attack but the brutal way in which Selena deals with Mark. She is a refreshingly practical character who lays it all out for Jim: “Plans are pointless. Staying alive’s as good as it gets.” When you’ve had to kill loved ones or watched them die, there isn’t much room for hope or romanticism and a survival instinct takes over.

Boyle wisely cast relative unknowns (at the time) Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins) and Naomie Harris (Miami Vice) who had no movie star baggage and weren’t linked to iconic roles yet. This gives 28 Days Later an unpredictable edge as we don’t know who will live or die. They are supported by veteran character actors Christopher Eccleston (The Others) and Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges). Eccleston, who appeared in Boyle’s first film Shallow Grave (1994), brings an edgy intensity to his role of a twisted military commander, while Gleeson plays a good-natured survivor with a daughter (Megan Burns) that Jim and Selena meet in London. Eccleston and Gleeson bring the necessary gravitas to their respective roles and this helps anchor the film.

Many reviewers mistakenly referred to the infected as zombies. They aren’t the lumbering undead; they’re infected — fast and very lethal. 28 Days Later was compared to George A. Romero’s Dead films, which, to a degree is apt because they both deal with post-apocalyptic societies struggling to survive against overwhelming odds. There are the obvious nods to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) with the carefree shopping spree in a deserted supermarket and the tense attempt to get gas at a seemingly deserted station. However, the Romero film 28 Days Later most closely echoes is The Crazies (1973) about a small community whose inhabitants are driven insane by a government created biological weapon. Boyle’s film is obviously on a much larger scale but some of the same ideas are explored, such as the disintegration of society as the result of government sanctioned experiments. As with Romero’s films, the military are not to be trusted as evident with Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) and his warped cure for the infected and the way he maintains order among the uninfected. He’s drunk on power, much like Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), the military leader in Day of the Dead (1985).

28 Days Later is a powerful statement about how easily societal order can break down bringing out the best and worst in us. It presents characters we grow to care about and become emotionally invested in. The film also delivers the requisite thrills and genuine scares that are strategically positioned for maximum effect. 28 Weeks Later starts off with a bang as a small cottage of survivors living outside of London is attacked by a horde of the infected with only one person managing to escape. Donald Harris (Robert Carlyle) abandons his wife (Catherine McCormack) to save his own skin — a split-second decision he deeply regrets and which will have serious repercussions later on. Shaky, hand-held camerawork captures his desperate escape from the infected with incredible, frenetic intensity that quickly establishes the film’s grim tone. Don makes it to safety and is reunited with his two children, Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) and Tammy (Imogen Poots), in London.

It is 28 weeks after the initial outbreak and all the infected have starved to death. The United States military have occupied London and are allowing refugees back in. Sound familiar? Shades of post-Katrina New Orleans anyone? Andy and Tammy defy the safety zone laws and return to their home to pick up some stuff. In the process, they are reunited with their mother who has been infected but for some unknown reason has not gone crazy like the others. In what will prove to be a fatal error in judgment, the military decide to study Don’s wife instead of destroying her outright. Once all hell breaks loose, Andy, Tammy, Scarlett (Rose Byrne), a doctor they meet, and Sergeant Doyle (Jeremy Renner), a soldier who helps them escape during the chaos of the new outbreak, try to find a way out of London.

The film is rife with references to Katrina. Once the virus breaks out, a group of refugees are herded into an underground parking garage for their “safety” only for order to break down a la the Superdome debacle. Later, as the refugees flee through the streets with the infected in pursuit, the military give up trying to target the infected and begin shooting everyone that eerily echoes the Northern Ireland massacre in 1972.

28 Weeks Later is one of those all-bets-are-off horror films where you really don’t know who is going to live and who is going to die. There are safety zones, such as big name movie stars, that often indicate who will survive, but not in this film which only enhances the unbelievable tension that the filmmakers create. It is very rare that a sequel is as good as or better than the one that came before it — The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Bourne Supremacy (2004) come immediately to mind. The filmmakers behind 28 Weeks Later are not merely content to rehash the first film. They build on it and go off in new and exciting directions, expanding the world that was created in 28 Days Later.

Inception

This review first appeared on Edward Copeland's blog earlier today. I've given it a few tweaks and a polish here and there.

Ten years in the making, Inception (2010) is the culmination of Christopher Nolan’s career to date. It mixes the ingenious plot twists of his independent film darling Memento (2000) with the epic scale of his Hollywood blockbuster The Dark Knight (2008). His new film takes the heist genre to the next level by fusing it with the science fiction genre as a group of corporate raiders steal ideas by entering the dreams of their targets – think Dreamscape (1984) meets The Matrix (1999) as if made by Michael Mann. While Nolan and his films certainly wear their respective influences on their sleeve – and this one is no different (2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Heat, The Matrix) – there is still enough of his own thematic preoccupations to make Inception distinctly his own. This film continues Nolan’s fascination with the blurring of artifice with reality. With Inception, we are constantly questioning what is real right down to the last enigmatic image.


Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team extract thoughts of value from people as they dream. However, during his jobs, he is visited by his deceased wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful femme fatale character that serves as an increasingly dangerous distraction from the task at hand. The film’s opening sequence does an excellent job establishing how Cobb and his team extract information from the dream of Saito (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese businessman, in a visually arresting sequence. He catches up with Cobb in the real world and offers him a new deal: plant an idea in Robert Fischer’s (Cillian Murphy) mind that will help break-up his father’s vast empire before it becomes too powerful, and do it in a way so that it seems like Fischer thought of it for it to work. This is something that has only been done once before and Cobb was the person that pulled it off but can he do it again? In exchange for completing the job, Saito will make the necessary arrangements so that Cobb can return home to the United States where his children live but where he is also wanted by the authorities in connection with his wife’s death. So, Cobb recruits a literal dream team of experts to help him pull off the most challenging job of his career.

Inception delves into all kinds of aspects of dreams as evident in a scene early on where Cobb explains how they work, how to design and then navigate them. While there is a lot of exposition dialogue to absorb during these scenes, Nolan also keeps things visually interesting at the same time. This is arguably the most cerebral part of the film as he explores all sorts of intriguing concepts and sets up the rules for what we’ll experience later on – pretty heady stuff for a Hollywood blockbuster. And when he isn’t examining fascinating ideas, he’s orchestrating exciting and intense action sequences. There’s an incredible sequence where Nolan juggles three different action sequences operating on three different levels of dreams that are all impressively staged while also a marvel of cross-cutting editing. He anchors Inception with the character of Cobb and his desire to return home to his children while also dealing with the death of his wife. It gives the film an emotional weight so that we care about what happens to him. It also raises the stakes on the Fischer job.

Cobb continues Nolan’s interest in tortured protagonists. With Memento, Leonard Shelby tries to figure out who murdered his wife while operating with no short-term memory. Insomnia (2002) featured a cop with a checkered past trying to solve a murder on very little sleep. The Batman films focus on a costumed vigilante that wages war on criminals as a way of dealing with the guilt of witnessing his parents being murdered when he was a child. With The Prestige (2006), magician Robert Angier is tormented by the death of his wife and an all-consuming passion to outdo a rival illusionist. Inception’s Cobb also has a checkered past and is haunted by the death of loved one. Leonardo DiCaprio delivers what may be his finest performance to date, playing a complex, and layered character with a rich emotional life. Cobb must come to terms with what happened to his wife and his culpability in what happened to her. DiCaprio conveys an emotional range that he has not tapped into to this degree before. There’s a captivating tragic dimension to Cobb that the actor does an excellent job of expressing so that we become invested in the dramatic arc of his character.

Nolan populates Inception with a stellar cast to support DiCaprio. The indie film world is represented by the likes of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy while also drawing from international cinema with Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy. Gordon-Levitt and Hardy, in particular, are stand-outs and their banter provides several moments of enjoyable levity during the course of this intense, engrossing film. And it wouldn’t be a Nolan film without his good luck charm, Michael Caine, making an appearance. As he has done in the past, Nolan plucks a once dominant actor from the 1980s, now languishing in relative obscurity – think Rutger Hauer in Batman Begins (2005) or Eric Roberts in The Dark Knight – and gives them a high-profile role. Inception gives Tom Berenger some well-deserved mainstream exposure after languishing in direct-to-video hell, reminding everyone what a good actor he can be with the right material.

Regardless if whether you like Inception or not, you’ve got to admire Nolan for making a film that is not a remake, a reboot, a sequel or an adaptation of an existing work. It is an ideal blend of art house sensibilities, with its weighty themes, and commercial conventions, like exciting action sequences. Capitalizing on the massive success of The Dark Knight, Nolan has wisely used his clout to push through his most personal and ambitious film to date. With Inception, he has created a world on a scale that he’s never attempted before and been able to realize some truly astonishing visuals, like gravity-defying fight scenes and having characters encounter a location straight out of the mind of M.C. Escher. It has been said that the power of cinema is the ability to transport you to another world and to dream with our eyes open. Inception does this. Nolan has created a cinematic anomaly: a summer blockbuster film with a brain.

Devin Faraci over at CHUD offers some great analysis and one of the best theories on what the film means. Over at Cinema Blend is a great visual guide that breaks down the various dream levels in the film. New York magazine has a fantastic interview with one of the film's stars and he offers some fascinating insights into the meanings of the film. Sam Adams, over at Salon.com has a great, in-depth look at the film that lays it all out in incredible detail. Finally, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell offer a fantastic, in-depth analysis of how Inception works stylistically on their blog Observations on film art.
 
Feel free to offer your observations, opinions, insights and theories on Inception in the comments section below.

Christopher Nolan Blogothon: Batman Begins

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Christopher Nolan Blogothon over at the Things That Don't Suck blog.

The fact that it took eight years for a new Batman film to be released illustrates how freaked out the studio was over the commercial and critical failure of Batman and Robin (1997). Warner Brothers gave the franchise a much needed rest while they quietly looked for someone to reboot it. At first, it looked like Darren Aronofsky and Frank Miller might be the ones to do it but the studio didn’t like their vision of the character. Then came screenwriter David S. Goyer and then up-and-coming director Christopher Nolan who decided to return the Dark Knight back to his roots. They wanted to explore what motivated Bruce Wayne to dress up like a giant bat and wage war on the criminals of Gotham City. By all accounts, their effort, fittingly entitled Batman Begins (2005), was a resounding success. The critics loved it and audiences flocked to the theaters to see it. So, what did they do right?


The casting. While anyone can disappear into the bat suit and look scary it’s playing Bruce Wayne that is the real challenge. To date, only Michael Keaton has pulled it off because he brought a complexity and a refreshing unpredictability to the role. Christian Bale, who has proven that he’s got considerable acting chops with an impressive resume, perfectly captures the essence of the tortured billionaire. Also gone are the obvious casting of marquee names like Jim Carrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger in favor of reliable character actors like Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy and Rutger Hauer. They bring sincerity and just the right amount of believability to their roles. The only weak bit of casting is Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, Bruce’s childhood friend. She’s just not believable as a tough prosecutor who works for the District Attorney. Holmes is also too lightweight of an actress and is unable to bring the gravitas needed for the role.

The story. Goyer and Nolan remain true to the spirit of Batman’s origins as depicted by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, right down to how Bruce’s parents are killed and how this torments him throughout his life. Their death will provide the motivation for what he will become and the filmmakers never lose sight of this. They understand that it is Bruce’s single-minded obsession with fighting crime and keeping the darkness at bay is what motivates him to become Batman and Bale embodies his character’s inner turmoil perfectly. The first half of the film is devoted to Bruce’s transformation into Batman and the last half sees him defend Gotham City against a plot to poison the city with a deadly psychotropic drug. And for good measure, they also throw in the threat of local mobsters and the wild card bad guy known as the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy). The screenplay is smart and well-written, hitting all the right emotional notes and thankfully keeping the cheesy one-liners down to a minimum.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Batman Begins is the League of Shdows, a secret society that trains Bruce and gives him the physical skills to fight crime. However, their overtly fascist philosophy repulses Bruce who believes that he can’t be completely ruthless when it comes to fighting criminals. Compassion is what separates him from them. It’s a key point in showing that amidst the darkness lies a spark of idealism in Bruce. He truly believes that Gotham can be saved from the criminals that wish to corrupt it from within.

The tone. The campiness of the Joel Schumacher films is gone, replaced by a darker, brooding vibe. Nolan brings an art house sensibility to a big budget superhero film which gives it more substance. He treats the source material with the respect that it deserves. Even more interestingly, he incorporates elements from the horror film genre. Early on, when Bruce Wayne as a young boy accidentally discovers what will become the Batcave, Nolan imagines the entrance as dark and foreboding, decorated with dangerous, jagged rocks. Then, many bats come flying right at the frightened Bruce. Meanwhile, the Scarecrow uses a hallucingenetic drug to induce nightmarish visions in his victims.

One of the reasons Batman Begins works so well is the choices Nolan makes, like sticking close to Batman’s origins in the comic book and filling in the gaps that the comics had created. Nolan and Goyer worked closely with D.C. Comics, picking and choosing aspects from various issues during Batman’s long run. For example, Nolan’s depiction of James Gordon (Gary Oldman) was influenced by Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One. Like in that comic, we meet Gordon early in his career as an honest police sergeant surrounded by corruption. Gary Oldman even looks quite similar to the way David Mazzucchelli draws him in Year One. Also, gang boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) is taken from this comic. Batman Begins’ primary villain is Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and his League of Assassins (League of Shadows in the film) is the creation of writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams. They returned Batman to his darker, grittier roots in the 1970s.

One of the main themes of Batman Begins is the power of fear. Bruce must overcome his before he can truly understand its nature and then bask in the fear of others. He learns to embrace the darkness and understand the nature of evil so that he will be better equipped to fight it. After the campy Joel Schumacher era, it is nice to see Batman return his roots. Nolan’s film even manages to surpasses Tim Burton’s first one. While Burton certainly got the look of Batman’s world and even understood the character’s tortured psyche, he injected moments of silliness that took one out of the film (i.e. the Joker shooting down Batman’s plane with a handgun?!). Nolan does not make this same mistake and created an excellent comic book adaptation that deserves to be ranked alongside other superior examples of the genre. What’s even more incredible is that he went on to top this film with the much superior sequel, The Dark Knight (2008).

For a more in-depth analysis of this film, check out Peter Sanderson's fascinating, exhaustive essay over at Comics in Context.