I'll Watch Anything

It’s scary to think that the modern zombie cycle, currently moving into the realm of parody with Ruben Fleischer’s hilarious Zombieland, is less than a decade old.  There have been so many zombie films released in the past seven years that movie viewers may feel, quite appropriately, trapped at the multiplex fighting off the undead hordes, as if they were in their own personally hellish version of Dawn of the Dead.  Yet while many of the contemporary zombie pictures fall within the remake cycle currently terrorizing – and re-animating – every popular or even semi-popular horror franchise, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves that the modern zombie film received its reboot from a work of stunning originality.  28 Days Later…, directed by the eclectic, award-winning Danny Boyle, with a script by playwright Alex Garland, certainly goes for the throat, but it also goes for the brain, and not just as a gooey snack.  Indeed, 28 Days Later…skewers the deeper meanings that movie watchers and critics alike have enjoyed reading into the zombie film since George Romero released his masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead, in 1968.  28 Days Later… is political, certainly – it’s as strong a cultural critique of mediated violence as is Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 Strange Days.  Boyle’s film also serves up some deep insights into the British militarist machine, questioning how those in positions of power conceive of a functional society in the post-familial future, and includes some cinematic riffs that revel in the fleeting joy of pointless consumerism (instead of heavy-handedly setting the entirety of their film in a shopping mall, Boyle and Garland are content to include a whimsical scene where the four main characters, attempting a foolhardy escape from the post-apocalypse, raid a grocery store, leaving a useless credit card on the counter behind them – a visual flourish that finds great joy in the apparently mundane).  But above all, 28 Days Later…is an art film that flies under the radar, disguising itself as horror.  Individually animated frames of film, sequences that recall musical numbers, a unique shooting style where visual revelations hang on the edge of the frame, and a climax that emotes both untarnished anger and moves toward the purely fantastical, denote the endless possibilities evident when a talented director plays with a genre, as opposed to simply living in, or resuscitating, what has already been done before.  Let Michael Bay and his bloody pool of horror classic remakes sit up and take note.