28 Years Later
A Bildungsroman, an allegory about fascist Others, and a pure action zombie film, struggling between one another to get to the front. They cannot decide if the zombies are allegorical immigrants or mindless monsters – the synthesis of that idea is simply repugnant.
The Bildungsroman follows the main character, a kid who lives with his family in an isolated island community of white people. He does his coming of age routine, going to the mainland kill zombies, then get back to party like crazy. The father is a dumb flannel-shirt manly man, but he protects him from physical harm. He keeps lying, not satisfying his curiosity, and after boozing up, he gets to know some married carnally. Abandoning the mother is what hurts more, since she has some weird mind sickness.
That father figure is discarded, particularly after he learns one of the lies is about a old-timey doctor, from the before times. So he causes a fire, so he can take the mother to the doctor, zombies be damn. She seems to be dying anyway…
Before they can reach their destination, a group of Swedish soldiers is ambushed by deaders, only one guy is left. That soldier rescuers our protagonists, and travels with them for a while. Until they are ambushed in a train, where one of the pregnant infected produces a “normal” baby. The soldier is Predator-ized and they are saved by the doctor.
Said Doctor was supposed to be a nutter, but he is a very sophisticated hermit, burning bodies for decades, and synthesising morphine(!) and other hardcore shit. He also builds a monument to the dead, feels like that Holocaust monument in Berlin. Good thing he was a GP, because he diagnoses the mother with metastasised cancer. We then turn into Million Dollar Baby, before our protagonist gets back home with the baby.
But there’s a final twist! The baby is left in the island, and a message to dad telling the whole story. Our protagonist roams the land, eating fish, until he is picked up by some weird dudes in fluffy tracksuits, and suddenly it’s northerners massacring zombies. The tone is absolutely shattered.
Wait, the boy from the prologue is the Irish Sinners dude with a stupid tracksuit? Not the dumb father? This is a pure sequel bait, what’s this, Marvel?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.