London Falling

Saw 28 Weeks Later last night. Few explicit spoilers follow, but much can be infered from what I write below. If you haven't seen the movie yet, and you intend to, you may want to skip this entry.

Released at the start of the summer blockbuster season: going up against Spiderman, Pirates, Shrek, Die Hard, Silver Surfer, and any number of other big-bang, uplifting, heartwarming, adrenalising affirmations that Good Triumphs Over Evil Because It's Nicer. And what does 28 Weeks Later put on the table against such adversaries?

Characters invested with such humanity that you know, according to the rules of Hollywood, that at the very least they'll make it to the final reel — only to see them felled like red-shirted extras before the halfway mark. Families tearing each other apart (no, that is not metaphor). Rooftop snipers stamped from neither Stormtrooper nor Top Gun molds, decent shits with real honest-to-God consciences, indiscriminately shooting civillians in the street to spare them the napalm that takes their unluckier mates ten minutes further on.

And worst of all, this movie delivers a viewing audience that knows, down in the bone, that there's nothing else to be done, that the massacre of innocents is the only strategy that holds any hope at all — and that even that, ultimately, may not be enough.

In the summer popcorn season? This movie has balls the size of fucking grapefruits.

I'm even willing to forgive the supernaturally-absurd rate at which the rage virus propagates. (Sure, you can go from swapping spit to full-blown eyeball-haemorrhageing psychosis in 35 seconds. All you need is a bug that reproduces two hundred times per second). I can forgive it because I am so sick of tepid Hollywood movies (Outbreak comes to mind) that pretend to grapple with the no-win scenario only to pull some third alternative out of their asses in the third act, movies whose sacred trust is to reassure skittish moviegoers that See, there is a way to avoid killing all those innocent infectees. All we have to do is stop the Evil General Who Won't Listen To Reason!

Back in the day, Disney kiddie movies had more hard-eyed maturity than crap like Outbreak. Bambi's mother died, irrevocably, because that's what parents do in real life. You just gotta deal with it. But not today. Today, Spielberg rewrites history and arms ET's containment forces with walkie-fucking-talkies to protect the delicate sensibilities of the world's children (yet another example of the cognitive impairment that seems to accompany parenthood, btw.)

But not 28 Weeks Later. Here's a movie that doesn't even offer us the cold solace of a no-hope scenario. There is hope, you see. There is hope, and there are decent people trying to do the best they can in dire circumstances, and there are no villains — only victims and vectors.

But most of all there is hope. There is at least the glimmer of a solution. And decent, well-intentioned Human stupidity squanders it anyway.

You can have your Spiderman and your Silver Surfer. Watch the pretty explosions. Eat your pocorn. Suck your thumbs.

As for me? Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I watch 28 Weeks Later.