The numbing of the beast
Saw The Bone Temple and thought it far better than the first movie. No, I'll go further: in my book the best by far 28...Later movie to date. No, I'll go even further; best film of the entire franchise, and yes I haven't seen the as yet nonexistent third installment-- calling it here and now, a year or so early.
No-- backtrack. I'll go even further than that: Bone Temple is the first movie in the entire franchise that I actually like.
(WARNING: bits of plot discussed in explicit and bloody detail)
Dafuq? You heard me. Not a fan of the patented Boyle style, the frenetic editing, the often unsteady cam; not a fan of the blowhard in-your-face smash-n-grab filmmaking that steps right up yanks you by your lapels up close and insists on its importance-- loudly, in your reddening left ear.
O wasn't always like that. Shallow Grave with a veddy veddy young Ewan McGregor and slowly unhinging Christopher Eccleston (MVP being Kerry Fox as a very fatale femme) was pulpy stylish fun-- presumably the director was fresh and underfunded and didn't have the time or experience or money to develop the Boyelisms he would be known for later in his career.
Trainspotting was fairly impressive not just for the coolly nihilist attitude (mainly taken from the Irvine Welsh novel) but for the on-location low-tech look and the nightmarishly surreal sequences that approximated drug-induced hallucinations (fitting as the film dealt with heroin addiction).
A Life Less Ordinary was... unsatisfying. The angels felt like an arbitrary insertion and the ending-- if you've seen Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday you'll have an idea of my problems with it.
The Beach... well it had a nice location, though there are hidden gem beaches in the Philippines that could give its sandy stretch a run for its money.
With Sunshine started to sour on Boyle: the science in this fiction (by Garland) was dumb (rekindling the sun by bombing it?), the effects (particularly the distortion lens used on the creature) laughable. Might forgive this in a Roger Corman production but the film had a budget of $40 million-- and the ending! If you disliked A Life Less Ordinary's you might like this conclusion even less.
You see the trend: Slumdog Millionaire (which won a Golden Buttplug for Best Picture) might be the kind of urban fantasy Raj Kapoor or Guru Dutt could pull off with proper conviction (Dutt would likely give the story a darker more bitter spin); 28 Days Later introduced zombies so insecure they have to sprint for their dinner; 127 Hours was ninety minutes of camera acrobatics when one wanted to see a man pinned to a rockface hour after hour for days on end. Maybe the one recent Boyle I liked was T2, his sequel to Trainspotting-- mainly because the drug-fueled characters of the 90s had dried out enough in the late 2010s to gain some depth, or at least self-awareness.
So when Boyle presented 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple you can imagine my sigh of relief. Why? Because he didn't direct. Instead we have Nia DaCosta, who showed such promise in Candyman, giving the film a sense of lyricism and sidelong-glanced horror that Boyle at his goriest never could touch. The death match between Spike (Alfie Williams) and Jimmy Shite (Connor Newall) comes to mind: the combination of exhaustion and desperation shown not just in Spike's expression but his gradually slowing movements; the sense that poor Spike is outmatched but must still somehow outthink his taller stronger more skillful opponent. Later in the barn with the captive family... DaCosta starts us with an explicit amuse bouche earlier in the film (a man's head and spine pulled out of his torso); with the audience prepped, she only has to suggest what is going to happen-- a bit of blade, a few drops of blood-- for audiences to seriously flinch, imagining what is to come. DaCosta's point however-- the true horror she wants to convey-- isn't the 'charity' the Jimmys inflict on the helpless family, but the fact that a member (pregnant Cathy) is watching helplessly, unable to make a sound.
A sidenote: Jack O'Connell's Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal is a keen disappointment; having been so vividly set up in the earlier film's bloody opening, and being re-introduced in that same film's silly Power Rangers finale, when we see his character arc fully laid out before us it feels sadly underwhelming-- yet another tinpot religious leader, following his inner voices to senseless mayhem. I would have hoped for better, or more interesting, or at least more ambitious from Garland and Boyle.
The main setpiece of course is The Bone Temple, where we learn that Ralph Fiennes' Dr. Ian Kelson isn't just another mad scientist but a canny survivor with sharp deductive mind; opposite him is Chi Lewis-Parry's Samson, perhaps the biggest Alpha in the United Kingdom, and Kelson doesn't just handle Samson's repeated attacks, he deduces that the creature is actually after something, and the result of this line of reasoning I assume will form a crucial link that develops Garland's overall concept.
Fiennes and Lewis-Parry make a fine mismatched pair, clever prey to oversized predator, but if I'm not as enthusiastic about their storyline that's not the actors' fault, or DaCosta's (she guides them deftly through sequence after fine sequence, like a song number from Duran Duran of all things, and a quiet moment where Samson nibbles on berries): it's just that I've seen this done before and in my book better, in George Romero's still underrated Day of the Dead, where Richard Liberty played mad scientist with more unsettling ambiguity (at one point crossing a line between genius and sanity that Fiennes' Kelson refuses to approach) and Sherman Howard shows us the delicate dumbshow humor-- and surprising poignancy-- in his undead Bub.
Otherwise yes did like. Hope to see more from DaCosta-- hopefully an original project, and not part of some undead franchise.
No comments:
Post a Comment