A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Monday, October 20, 2025

28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later

Cast: Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Edvin Ryding, Chi Lewis-Parry, Christopher Fulford, Stella Gonet. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle. Production design: Gareth Pugh. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: Young Fathers. 

Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later is an installment posing as a sequel, so no wonder it frustrated many who were expecting a self-contained film. The next installment, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, is due in January 2026. But although this installment begins and ends with a character who gets very little screen time, there's a nice coherence to what Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have put together, centered on young Spike (Alfie Williams). It's a coming-of-age fable about living up to society's idea of manhood, in which Spike is initiated by his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on a hunt for the infected, the zombiefied humans introduced by Boyle and Garland in 28 Days Later (2002). Spike's disillusionment and loss constitute the plot of the film, which is also a satire on post-Brexit Britain posing as a monster movie. Good performances, especially by Williams and by Jodie Comer as his mother, suffering from an illness that the post-apocalyptic community in which they live is unable to diagnose, carry the installment as far as it was designed to go. On the other hand, it's not a movie that left me hungry for more.  

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