28 Days Later
This is much lower budget and esoteric than I remembered. Some of the images are simply timeless, like trashed and empty London, the zombie on a leash, or the Christmas lights on the apartment.
This is technically an origin story, but it only takes 5 minutes. Some kind of Peter Daszak is studying some virus, when ecoterrorists break in and provoke a lab leak. A couple weeks later, it’s pandemonium, civilisation collapsed, there’s no running water, power, the government and all institutions have fallen.
Our protagonist wakes up in a hospital, naked, starving, but alive. The city is deserted, he walks around yelling but he sees nothing. Not even religion can save him, as he enters a church, the priest and the congregation attack him viciously, and he’s saved by two people in masks, chucking Molotov cocktails and blowing petrol stations.
Those people bring him up to speed, then guide him to the his parents’ house, when our protagonist fuck ups and make his newfound mate bite the dust. The girl immediately hacks him to smithereens, that’s how she rolls. She just wants to survive, nihilism took hold of her.
As they come back, they see the Christmas lights and meet the father and teenage daughter team with a plan to follow some radio broadcast directing them to the north of Manchester, quite a long way from London. The nihilist girl needs convincing, but off they go, in their road trip up north. They pass a supermarket and stock up on supplies, then nearly die in a tunnel where the irresponsible cabbie blows a tire. The teenager does a mean F1 pit stop and off they go.
Life is great, they find some secluded place to have a picnic and pass the night, Better Living Through Chemistry kicking in. The nihilist girl gets a bit less nihilist, and feels the loneliness, envious of the companion father and daughter. Our protagonist think this is great, she is coming around to the bright side of life.
Alas, it only takes a while. They reach the rendezvous, but it’s empty. The stench of death covers the place, but maybe they were close? The father snaps, and in his despair gets infected, but manages to avoid contaminating anyone, before being killed by the soldiers.
Yeah, the broadcast was real, but the “institution” is some delusional major with about ten soldiers, food, ammo, hot water, and landmines. They lack a purpose, and indiscipline is rampant.
The real purpose of the broadcast is to lure girls to an estate filled with horny soldiers. They want the pussy, plain and simple, they won’t take no for am answer, but the girl is not enthusiastic about a non-consensual gangbang.
The new age sergeant believes in kooky stuff, like non-infection truther body. Maybe he’s right about the social experiment stuff, this seems absolutely a test. Our protagonist rescues his companions from rape, by going full Commando or Predator. The new nuclear family runs away, but less nihilistic than before.
Alex Garland must have cribbed the opening from The Walking Dead comic, right? Unless both stole it from somewhere else. This is not so esoteric as Annihilation and friends, nor vague and too down-to-Earth as Civil War.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.