I don’t have any real attachment to 28 Days Later except through an amusing memory. I saw it in high school, where it was screened after school as the first installment of a film club organized by a nerdy AV teacher. I was one of maybe four or five kids to attend, and I didn’t know any of the others. This only moderately dampened my enthusiasm. The rest of the dampening came as a result of the film. It’s not that I remember disliking it, but I do remember how the energy in the room soured at its increasingly bleak turns. Everyone came into that room ready to have a good time at the film club. By the time the female leads were taking drugs to numb themselves for their impending rapes, the vibes had gone off pretty irrevocably. This memory is my abiding association with 28 Days Later. For 28 Weeks Later it’s just that opening scene where the dad abandons his whole family. Not a duology that made much of an impression on me. That I loved 28 Years Later so much (you may have noticed it got the coveted full five stars on Letterboxd) made absolutely no sense to me.
If you know me, you know the elephant in the room here. I have never liked Alex Garland. In the fall of 2012, I was convinced to go see Dredd in theaters at a time when seeing any movie in theaters required an hour-plus bus ride across the entire state of Rhode Island. It did not move me. I was tricked into liking Ex Machina because I saw it at the first film festival I ever attended. It did not hold up. Annihilation was okay but I felt like Garland’s script clashed with its visuals, too often choking and sputtering when the imagery threatened to evoke an emotional response on its own. Men was unforgivably bad. Civil War was moronic. And the guy always seems so insistent on presenting himself as a respectable intellectual, a serious artist among genre juveniles. Alex Garland is one of our preeminent hacks, one of the best examples in modern cinema of a guy who is simply not as smart as he thinks he is.
Early on in 28 Years Later, I felt that impression being confirmed once more, at least at first. But at least Danny Boyle was going off. My little vulgar auteurist heart was enraptured. As cinema has become more and more a digital artform, it’s done a lot of work to try and hide that fact. I don’t mean that it’s trying to appear analog—rather, it’s trying to appear as a kind of pure image-object unfiltered by medium. Digital art is more obviously artificial, so its works have swung hard in the opposite direction, saying “This is reality, seen through your own eyes, not filtered by a camera.” That is the central illusion perpetrated by higher and higher resolutions, by cleaner grain-free images, by hyperrealistic special effects. There’s almost an implied embarrassment associated with watching a movie, as though we should be ashamed of watching something that is not as literal as possible a reflection of the (or at least a) real world.