How I Feel 28 Days Later
A little while ago, I got absolutely obsessed with certain parts of John Murphy’s score for the movie “28 Days Later“. Girl One hadn’t seen the movie, so this obsession prompted me to watch it again with her.
I enjoyed the movie the first time I watched it, but something about it wasn’t quite right, to the extent that I couldn’t recommend it, and it almost made it into my dvd cull of last year. However, watching it a second time gave me a chance to reappraise it, and it’s still a pretty good, intense movie. I did manage to put my finger on what my problems were with it, though.
The first feeling you get for the film is that the pacing is all askew. Any discussion of the movie seems to cover the first twenty minutes or so, and how stirring and unnerving the sight of an empty London is, but then falters badly, barely acknowledging the middle act at all, and seemingly undecided on the build-up and climax (the “bit with the soldiers”). It certainly seems that the movie goes from striking and assured, and then doesn’t know what to do with itself for about an hour, before wrapping up in an exhaustingly contrived, jerky and beyond the point of “what has gone before” battle sequence.
A closer look, though, and you notice smaller scenes, and underplayed nuance in the script, that suggest that what has actually happened here isn’t a badly paced movie, so much as film direction and scripts that work badly against each other.
What I’m suggesting is that, in making such a fucking astounding impression with the sequences of Cillian Murphy wandering through a silent London, leading up to the petrol station explosion, Danny Boyle has started out telling a much larger, more visually and emotionally impressive and expansive story then was told by the Alex Garland script.
The story that you get if you strip out almost all of the visuals and gorgeous direction, is actually a very insular philosophical debate about the nature of modern humanity, that takes it’s key points from the very first scene in the research lab, threads through the reactions of the soldiers, holed up and scared of the future, and culminates in Jim’s descent into brutality.
It’s possible that Boyle didn’t have anywhere much to go with this script, beyond focusing on the bits that really interested him visually, or that he believed wholeheartedly in Garland’s vision and just couldn’t quite pull it off cinematically- it’s difficult to tell whether the inward-looking aspects of the story would have stood up to clear scrutiny. At times, it feels a little like the script is delivered by Garland with po-faced seriousness and the gravity of someone who believes that no-one has ever explored these weighty ideas before, or the uncertain touch of a writer that doesn’t know quite how deep to bury their subtext.
(My experience of Garland’s work bears this out – “The Beach” was a really enjoyable and occasionally insightful read, but his follow-up book, “The Tesseract” was just too wrapped-up in it’s own cleverness entirely, to the point that it rendered itself utterly obscure and far too much work, for almost no reward. Garland’s own script for “The Beach” movie adaptation added some of this forced intellectuality to the already fine story, trying to inject further meaning to the extent that the film is another curiously lumpy mix of beautiful and sometimes hip visuals, and heavy-handed philosophy. Garland has a great way with prose, and a good sense of character, but certainly with these earlier works, he needed a stronger internal editor, or a clearer self-awareness.)
Whatever the case, as a chap who pays quite close attention to the films I watch, I had remembered that there was an overdone and largely redundant bit at the beginning of the movie, in a research lab, but had entirely wiped any memory of the details of that sequence, let alone the meaningful ambiguity of what the Rage infection really is, beyond the point that everyone in it was annoying, and it “got good” soon afterwards. Most people seem to have forgotten even that much, without prompting.
Further to that, I’d remembered that things went pear-shaped when our survivors got to the army fortress, but was hazy on the details of how events had broken down during that, and in fact, because of the lumpiness of the film, I think I’d taken many of the clearly pertinent lines that the Major delivers, and the vital details of Jim’s rescue attempt, as being at best, quirky, and at worst complete non-sequiturs.
(This was further scuppered by some pretty poor acting on the part of everyone except Murphy… it’s clear that this is what you get when you ask RADA-trained actors to act like ordinary people… and in fact, how Boyle managed to get such an unconvincing performance out of the normally exceptional Christopher Ecclestone, I have no idea.)
With all that said, second time around I found a lot more to like, and to think about, in “28 Days Later” (although I still think that the sequel, “28 Weeks Later“, was a little more consistently put together, and was paced a lot more assuredly.) The visuals and scenes that stick with you really stick with you, and it has some of the best music, and sound editing, that I’ve heard in a movie before or since.
