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intertribalSuch is the fate of 28 Weeks Later, the movie that I want to see alone in a theater, having been obsessed with 28 Days Later and seeing that alone in my dorm room.
This usually does not happen. Usually, the Journal Star (our hometown paper) gives okay grades to bad movies that may still appeal to a mainstream audience, while the New York Times will bash it. This is what happened to Spider-Man 3 - the Journal Star said it's a "popcorn movie masterpiece" that's "never even close to boring" and urges viewers to see "your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man". But the Times said it's "Aesthetically and conceptually wrung out, fizzled rather than fizzy... just plods and plods along". The Journal Star will also give high grades to most indie movies, documentaries, foreign films, and deep dramas - not because its reviewers think that the movie is actually good, because they probably did not understand it, but because they think it looks like a movie they should give a high grade to. The New York Times is more cynical with those movies as well.
My dream last night said that 28 Weeks Later got four stars, and I was amazed. Well, when I opened the movie review section, "Ground Zero", this morning, I saw that 28 Weeks Later had instead received 1 1/2 stars. The review was actually stolen from The Orlando Sentinel, because they don't have the staffpower to see every movie that comes out, apparently, and it says, "another Hollywood killing machine, brutal and heartless", apparently not fond of the central message of the movie: "here's a movie that comes out on the side of genocide. Sympathy is weakness. Empathy - for children, innocent civilians, parents and your own offspring - will get you killed", and also criticizes the familiar whipping point of the first movie: the "jaded attitude about the coarse and callous U.S. Army".
The New York Times, however, denotes the movie a "critic's pick", an extremely rare honor. Chief reviewer A. O. Scott says of the movie, "brutal and almost exhaustingly terrifying, as any respectable zombie movie should be. It is also bracingly smart, both in its ideas and its techniques". To Scott, the central message of the movie is: "To the soldiers and survivors alike, there are only bad choices, and doing what seems like the right thing - firebombing an open city or rescuing children from the bombs - can turn out to have horrendous consequences." It also points to something I agree with - the ability of the zombie movie to serve as grand allegory. Here it's the war in Iraq - Americans occupying a ravaged land in order to return stability to it, then destroying it to save it, etc. Benevolence is punished, but for the Times, that's a political point.
Incidentally, 28 Weeks Later has a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the Cream of the Crop reviewers giving it 88%. (Spider-Man 3 has a 61% rating, and a Cream of the Crop rating of 45%)
The reviews lend themselves to issues I'd like to resolve for myself: the good Samaritan issue, the overkill issue. Along with who are the sympathetic characters, why does anyone do what they do, how are the zombies dealt with - standard zombie movie questions. My impression is that whereas 28 Days Later was post-apocalyptic, this movie is apocalyptic - it's about breakdown, not the survival of a few in an already broken world. And anything that concentrates on the breakdown itself is bound to be more depressing than that which concentrates on the perseverance of survivors. I guess that when everybody said 28 Days Later was smart and meaningful, it was only because the embedded message (or so they thought) was the triumph of the good guys. If that's not the message, simple minds get uncomfortable.
But I would like to see it myself. Alone in a dark theater.
This usually does not happen. Usually, the Journal Star (our hometown paper) gives okay grades to bad movies that may still appeal to a mainstream audience, while the New York Times will bash it. This is what happened to Spider-Man 3 - the Journal Star said it's a "popcorn movie masterpiece" that's "never even close to boring" and urges viewers to see "your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man". But the Times said it's "Aesthetically and conceptually wrung out, fizzled rather than fizzy... just plods and plods along". The Journal Star will also give high grades to most indie movies, documentaries, foreign films, and deep dramas - not because its reviewers think that the movie is actually good, because they probably did not understand it, but because they think it looks like a movie they should give a high grade to. The New York Times is more cynical with those movies as well.
My dream last night said that 28 Weeks Later got four stars, and I was amazed. Well, when I opened the movie review section, "Ground Zero", this morning, I saw that 28 Weeks Later had instead received 1 1/2 stars. The review was actually stolen from The Orlando Sentinel, because they don't have the staffpower to see every movie that comes out, apparently, and it says, "another Hollywood killing machine, brutal and heartless", apparently not fond of the central message of the movie: "here's a movie that comes out on the side of genocide. Sympathy is weakness. Empathy - for children, innocent civilians, parents and your own offspring - will get you killed", and also criticizes the familiar whipping point of the first movie: the "jaded attitude about the coarse and callous U.S. Army".
The New York Times, however, denotes the movie a "critic's pick", an extremely rare honor. Chief reviewer A. O. Scott says of the movie, "brutal and almost exhaustingly terrifying, as any respectable zombie movie should be. It is also bracingly smart, both in its ideas and its techniques". To Scott, the central message of the movie is: "To the soldiers and survivors alike, there are only bad choices, and doing what seems like the right thing - firebombing an open city or rescuing children from the bombs - can turn out to have horrendous consequences." It also points to something I agree with - the ability of the zombie movie to serve as grand allegory. Here it's the war in Iraq - Americans occupying a ravaged land in order to return stability to it, then destroying it to save it, etc. Benevolence is punished, but for the Times, that's a political point.
Incidentally, 28 Weeks Later has a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the Cream of the Crop reviewers giving it 88%. (Spider-Man 3 has a 61% rating, and a Cream of the Crop rating of 45%)
The reviews lend themselves to issues I'd like to resolve for myself: the good Samaritan issue, the overkill issue. Along with who are the sympathetic characters, why does anyone do what they do, how are the zombies dealt with - standard zombie movie questions. My impression is that whereas 28 Days Later was post-apocalyptic, this movie is apocalyptic - it's about breakdown, not the survival of a few in an already broken world. And anything that concentrates on the breakdown itself is bound to be more depressing than that which concentrates on the perseverance of survivors. I guess that when everybody said 28 Days Later was smart and meaningful, it was only because the embedded message (or so they thought) was the triumph of the good guys. If that's not the message, simple minds get uncomfortable.
But I would like to see it myself. Alone in a dark theater.
