Oct.13-19 - More Returns and Changes

The Beast Who Shouted "WHA?!" At the Center of the Weekend

The wee (wee wee, all the way home) hours of Sunday morning, Mother's Day, and I'm finding it difficult to focus on much of anything. It's not that I'm tired -- I crashed early in the evening and slept for a few hours -- I'm just unfocused and harried by various matters, none of which I'll be writing about.

Saturday morning, after finally doing some banking (I had checks and a deposit slip folded up in my wallet for a couple weeks), Nick and I caught the first showing of the day of 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to the 2002 outbreak of the rage virus in the U.K.

Eh.

My thoughts while watching it and immediately after was unpleasantness followed by stupidity and a hope that they either won't do a third film in the series or that if they do I won't reflexively go out to see it. It's all perhaps a little more harsh than the film fully deserves -- the core plot's fine and the performances aren't bad -- but even more than was the case with 2002's 28 Days Later the film maker's style was both formulaic and irritating. I don't know if they have a stock name for the video effects - Franti-Cam or Palsy-Cam would fit, assisted by editing software patterned after a study of ADD. Add a tendency to also take some shots too close, too. All the lurching around whenever any action is in progress was irritating to start and only became moreso. I understand that the idea is to convey the confusion of the scene, possibly to keep it from being too cleanly cinematic and instead to bring the viewer into the action as part of the chaos, but it failed for work for me. It loosely reminds me of someone holding a flashlight under his chin in a dark room in the hopes that it'll make his story spooky. This is worse, though, because the guy with the flashlight isn't whipping it back and forth under his chin figuring that creating a strobe lighting effect will be scarier still.

Another irritating - and similarly increasingly irritating as it was used again and again - tactic involved the score. In order to convey a sense of building menace even in some spots where nothing else really indicates it, there's a bit of music that is part of a bass line but is predominantly four, rising notes, which were cycled over and over again, with incremental increases in volume. After a while it made John Carpenter's Halloween score a major musical work by comparison.

The plot of the film itself is fine, as it follows down the timeline of the previous movie. We meet a small group of survivors living in a boarded up cottage for we don't know how long. A new survivor, a boy of 11 or so, inadvertently leads the raging infected to them, and all Hell breaks loose as the not-quite-zombies break in. The lack of preparation by the people was probably the first, small point of aggravation for me, though I could see how they might have easily shifted from a need to simply keep quiet to a sense of false security.

A 30-something husband and wife are part of this crew, and when the wife's move to help the new arrival keeps her from moving with the husband to possible safety he's forced to choose between staying and helping or saving himself. A decision made in a few seconds, he chooses the latter.

Now, to be fair, had he stayed and tried to help he would have almost certainly been infected within a minute or two. Indeed, I was struck by how if the film appeared to have a message it was that Compassion Kills. Attempts to save or help people leads to death. In other words, we're not talking about inspirational fare -- not that one would go to a movie such as this in search of something inspirational. In the world of 28 Weeks Later heroism is worse than a fool's game, it's heavily punished by the Fates. This is in contrast to 28 Days Later, where there was an ultimately more hopeful tone. It's worth noting that the Fill-in-the-blank Days Later franchise, such that it is, must be a studio property; neither the director nor screenwriter of the earlier film had anything to do with this new version.

We pick things up a bit later, where the contagion appears to have died in quarantine and a US-led NATO force has established a Green Zone where carefully screened, returning Brits can begin to reconnect with surviving family members and begin a new life. The husband who saved himself and is tormented by the last, pleading looks and cries from his wife, along with horrible nightmares of what he imagined happened to her moments later, turns out to be the father of two teens who are among the early Brits being repatriated, and the first children.

I won't lay out the entire movie other than to say the past comes back to haunt their dad more concretely, the kids turn out to be central to matters, and to reiterate that if you're looking for a positive message for and about humanity then this ultimately isn't your film. We do see some heroism, but in the end it's not only for naught - not merely a sucker's bid - it leads to a worse fate for all.

Okay, I will also add that the film stands out for Most Moronic Use of a Night Vision Scope - part of a scene late in the movie.

Let me pose the question to you: You're trying to navigate through the pitch blackness of a deep tunnel, including going down a long stairwell, you have two kids with you and you have an automatic rifle with a night scope on it. How would you decide to navigate? Now, me... I would take the lead, get kid one to hold onto the tail of my shirt and get kid two to do roughly the same to kid one, and I'd be looking down through the tunnel ahead at least part of the time to make sure there's no sign of movement from one of the infected. Sure, I'll have to look down part of the time because there are largely skeletal remains strewn on the stairs and the tunnel floor beyond, but I'd be more concerned about what I'm walking towards.

What I'm sure I wouldn't do is keep the kids ahead of me, where they can't see anything, and - worse still - spend most of the time pointing the gun at their faces or feet and never down into the long darkness ahead. Presumably it was done because the director thought it looked cool, the kids terrified faces in shades of luminescent green, because there's not much else of a reason for doing it.

Getting back to the rest of Saturday, we opted to take my wife out to lunch (that also became early dinner because we brought so much home with us) for Mother's Day a day early. As we'd done back near her birthday, we went to her local choice - El Cancun. They were busy - quite a few diners, including one huge, extended family affair - but we were in no rush and they kept us well-supplied with drinks, chips & salsa while we waited.

A decided summer-like day, it was pleasant while the breeze was blowing and the sun was obscured by clouds, but take one or both of those mitigating factors away and add in the persistent humidity and I'll reiterate that I'll take an icy February over a sweaty August in an instant, no questions asked. Summertime is not my time. Staying in with the AC is the way to go, and that's just what we've been doing especially with such a fierce pollen season underway. People who've not hitherto had any allergies to speak of have been suffering flu-like symptoms this year, from nasal and lung congestion to persistent sinus headaches.

Friday brought my latest pack of comics from Westfield, and I've gone through nearly the stack, but if I choose to write about that (and I really should, not the least because it'll also create material for part of my June Legends zine) it'll be in a separate post. Perhaps sometime Sunday.

Just in case I'm slow in getting back -- Happy Mother's Day!