it’s just death, death, death for its own sake

The key is how the boy learns to confront death (and life) through his father contra his mother.

To his father, it’s a “kill or be killed” kind of world. He tells himself that living is about survival, thriving on the violence it necessities and the glory that comes with it. Outside, he confronts death as a means of survival; at home, he avoids it.

The village they live in is built on the same principle. They have their own mementos to death, but these mementos, like the rituals around hunting, exists to ensure them that death, through violence and isolation, can be kept at bey.

When the boy arrives with his dying mother at the skull temple, he has to confront death in a way that his father and the village has ceased to do. In the village, the only graves we see are simple crosses near the gate; they’re not so much in memory of the dead, as they’re a warning of the danger that lurks outside the village. The temple, on the other hand, is built on remembrance: not of death as an end to life, but of the dead as living human beings.

Memento mori, Memento amoris.

I think it’s basically about maintaining some semblance of humanity in a world that, having grown accustomed to death, has embraced barbarism thinking it’s the only means of survival.

I kinda dug it. it was weird and felt disturbing, the same way I felt walking out of the theater after 28 Days Later.

Days was a shocking movie at the time. like an art house zombie flick, a genre that it helped recharge, where the zombies were faster than they had ever been, and the infection was somehow even faster. it was a story about how the old institutions were poison and the only hope was to build something new.

28 Weeks Later was basically a rehash of all the commercial, big budget zombie movies. the entire story was paint by numbers and we all knew where it was going.

28 Years was something new and unsettling. a world that isolated Britain and went on about the business of modernity sacrificing the minimum of resources and men to tie off a fetid wound, allowing it to go dark and become strange, an array of quasi compartmentalized petri dishes devolved and mutilated… making it weird and familiar, atavistic, timeless, and haunted by a new natural law. seriously, wtf was with the birds and herds, seemingly commanded by the alphas.

the world has no interest in cleaning this wound and actually eradicating the threat, rather contented to mostly ignore it… which feels way too real, because that means the threat for what is happening on Britain to expand outward persists.

the way it was all bookended with the Jimmys gave it a frame story vibe. I didn’t care for their parkour-ish ultra violence, but my assumption is that they represent the surreal ultraviolence of the last generation raised on television during the collapse, like some kind of critique of media saturation. the opening scene was one of the most unsettling, the parents locking their kids in with the Teletubbies and keeping them ignorant as everything is clearly going to shit.

supposedly there’s a Part 2 to this one that may flesh all that out more.

anyway, all that said, it felt like a return to form in the sense that it was not paint by numbers. it had a surreal, dreamlike quality that picked at the scabbed over wounds of our world the way 28 Days did and left me feeling… weird and disturbed at its conclusion.

full disclosure, I am a big fan of when Boyle and Garland work together and think Sunshine is their opus. it’s a high concept Sci Fi/horror that is executed with far more complexity and poignancy than its basic premise would have under anyone else.

more like 28 dicks later

Momento Mori messages feel pretty off coming from a culture in the midst of implementing various methods of eugenics.

The music really set the mood, and I appreciated the sense of creeping anxiety that it had. It very much felt like a movie adaptation of The Forest and Sons of The Forest games, though. The ending with the blondes was really weird, and kind of unnecessary unless they’re making another movie. I kept thinking that

Maybe I’m just overthinking it. Still enjoyed it for the most part.

Should I watch 28 weeks later first or can I skip that one?

It really stops making sense towards the end unless you’re into euthanasia. Just a strange cult and a memorial to death.

Overall I appreciate Danny Boyle’s work but he stumbles with endings.