June 09, 2007
28 weeks later
So it turns out that the problem with zombie movies is symmetrical to the problem with war as such. War is so amorphously expansive and at the same time so socially powerful that it can cast its shadow on the most varied of films (and poems and plays and paintings...) so that they are each in turn seen to be "about" the war (one would need only to read the last couple years of film sections at the Gray Lady and the AltWeekly Formerly Known as the Voice to be exhausted by this fact).
Zombie movies (especially if one annexes vampire flicks) have, symmetrically, the broadest screens on which allegorical shadows might be thrown, aimlessly taking the penumbral shape of the social crisis du jour: now colonialism and now communism, now consumer culture and now AIDS. The receptivity of the zombie film may indeed explain why any notable changes in the genre (as in the recent trend of "fast zombies") is such an occasion for critical meditation, inspired perhaps by the hope that the films might take on a somewhat-greater specificity.
That's not to say that zombie films are no damn good. In fact, fast zombie films are on a roll — as enlightened viewers of 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead will attest — and the sequel to the former keeps things rolling. Its achievement is for the most part that it bridges the symmetry mentioned above; indeed, the presence of occupying US soldiers, Green Zone and quarantine is plain enough that, to rely on the ever-useful wisdom of Giles the Librarian, "the subtext is rapidly becoming the text." For a brilliant minute or so, it seems that the film's formal innovation will be to use recorded headset audio from the actual Green Zone (as seen on YouTube!) as the entirety of the dialog, and improvising the zombie movie around it. That would be audacious indeed.
However, that's unfair to what makes the movie appealing, which is not merely that it's a zombie movie about Gulf War 2, or a war movie with zombies. The kicks are largely in swift brutality, again shot not just for maximum aggression but also to disguise the highly relevant information of who's been bitten and infected). We get as well some shiveringly ambiguous moments: there remains no way to know why, exactly, Robert Carlyle's wife invites him to kiss her while she lies on a gurney in the med lab's panic room. Love, revenge, pure mephistophelian calculation. But on that kiss hangs the tale.
If war — and particularly insurgency — is contagion, the opening space of contagion in this film isn't Mesopotamia but Europe. The referent in that regard is no more Iraq than the French Revolution, which threw the Continent into a panic at the threat of ideological infection. And not just the Continent; no one, perhaps, was more repulsed than Edmund Burke, crafting his withering analysis while clinging to Britannia's splendid isolation. Here of course it's England where the insurgent plague, the "Rage virus," is birthed; situation is reversed. Can it be quarantined? As ever, it's a matter of carriers: a boy, a helicopter, the same pilot from The Matrix...
16) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
15) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
14) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
13) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
12) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
11) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
10) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
9) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
8) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
7) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
6) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
5) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
4) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)