Picture this: a ruined country where violent death can come screaming out of the dark and the next second you’re gone. The American army has arrived with the best of intentions, established a barricaded “green zone” where people can makie a stab at a normal life (don’t mind the biohazard bags). Snipers watch through their rifle scopes as residents fight, masturbate and make love. When trouble comes, if it comes, there will be no way to tell friendly from hostile until he’s in your face and it’s already too late.
Yeah I know, the allegory is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. More on that in spoilerville. For those who haven’t already seen the movie I should emphasize that you expect slightly different things from American and European directors. Unlike Americans who punch you in the gut (assuming that they’re good enough to hit you there, which this is) and then apologize with a happy resolution, Euro directors wrap up by punching you in the gut again. American films advertise the death of a central character two and a half reels in advance. Most attach a cosmic meaning to every snuffed life, as if each runaway truck finds a pedestrian who had fiendishly cut the maintenance funding on his truck fleet just one week earlier. Cosmic justice! Euro directors want you to know that the fate gods are capricious bastards who really don’t care how attached you got to person X. Life-is-pain europhilosophizing, to coin a phrase.
Unlike some papers I could mention (cough LA Times) I won’t ruin the whole damned movie without a minimal warning. Skip ahead for more.
Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo makes such a scrupulous effort at realism (an Oscar for the sound designer who brought that Apache to life, please) that nitpickers like me have a conniption fit when things go a little bad and the yanks herd everybody from their safe, isolated rooms into a poorly secured parking garage. Sure, I’m the guy who could barely watch 300 after famously disciplined Spartans held their phalanx formation for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds before running out and lopping heads off willy-nilly, so maybe I’m not the best judge of this sort of thing. Still, for a minute the suspension of disbelief seemed pretty shot. Then I realized – green zone. Yanks occupying and trying to rebuild a broken country. Didn’t we disband the Iraqi army? Oh yeah, and we stuffed that other Green Zone full of bright-eyed ideologues who knew more about delivering pizza and answering phones at Bush/Cheney 2004 than anything about reconstruction. If the yanks had come up with some Joason Bourne solution that saved everybody and defused the situation, that would have been a stretch. Clever move.
Mixing europhilosophizing with the Max Brooks zombie books, by the end we wonder whether good intentions are enough, whether we really ought to be rooting for the people for whom the director has shamelessly set us up to support (moppets! moppets with a poignant family history that conflicts with utilitarian decisionmaking!), and whether in retrospect the ugly, near-genocidal Americans had a point. It seems safe to predict that you won’t see Bruce Willis in a Fresnadillo movie any time soon.
MNPundit
Actually the movie tells me to shoot the children, no mercy, that compassion only leads to painful and often deadly mistakes. In the beginning when he fled, things were, well not all right but better than they did after the guy’s compassion appeared.
MNPundit
The really depressing thing is, when the Bird Flu hits I will probably feel the same way due to the fear.
A disease that targets my demographic the hardest and will kill 30-50% of the species? Whew.
RSA
I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I did like 28 Days Later quite a bit. A nice twist on the zombie movie. I think it’s cool that so many of the best-known genre horror movies have had a clear social or political subtext, Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead being the most famous example.
Bombadil
How does it compare to “Children of Men”? Yeah, I know one has zombies and the other doesn’t, but your comments on the differences between American and European directors led me to the question.
norbizness
But Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) is a Mexican director, so I’m not sure how he’d help in an American/European comparison.
P.S. Was there actually a spoiler in there?
Bombadil
Oops. I thought Cuaron was from Spain.
His “directorial attitude”, though, felt more like what Tim described as Euro.
Halffasthero
I thought the movie was better than 28 Days. I don’t want to go into too much detail of what I had trouble believing about it without tipping off content but some parts seemed too convenient.
I did appreciate the fact that they got to the point they could not separate the sick from the unsick. What do you do by that time? And I like the fact that these were not zombies in the traditional sense. Fast moving, strong and rabid. Homosapien Cujo’s on steroids – unless someone can think of a better fit. It was a fun movie. Rumour has it they are going to make 28 Months.
Tim F.
For the gritty realism and mature storytelling (e.g., no handholding) yes, but it wrapped up on a tidy hopeful note. Although I think that Mexican cinema has influences from both continents, Cuaron definitely comes from the Americas. My reaction more or less jibes with Atrios – a well-made film, but the estate of Ayn Rand should sue for royalties.
The Other Steve
Why would I want to see another stupid zombie movie?
mrmobi
You can never have too many zombie movies. It’s one of our biggest problems. Just ask Zombie Santa Claus.
sglover
Er…. Considering the very last shot in the movie, I dunno that I’d call it a “hopeful” ending. Arguably tidy, though, depending on your misanthropy quotient.
Dreggas
I went and saw Shrek the 3rd with the wife though I definitely want to see 28 weeks later, thanks for not spoiling it, sounds even better now.
Of course I also want to see Delta Farce since it will be funny watching Larry The Cable Guy and Bill Engvall poke fun at the admin and such.
sglover
I liked the flick, though I liked “28 Days Later” more. I thought the sequel took some real liberties with basic logic, and that always puts me off a bit. Also, the *ahem* “unconventional” usage of the helicopter toward the end of the movie was seriously stupid. If memory serves, the last time I saw something like that it was in a James Bond shitfest.
Dreggas
I take it you haven’t seen the trailers for “Grindhouse” yet?
RSA
You probably wouldn’t; stick to the good ones. :-) Cemetery Man, for example, the original Romero trilogy, or the Evil Dead movies (for campy fun). And everyone who liked The Lord of the Rings should appreciate Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive.
sglover
Nope, nor will I, if I can help it. That shitbag Tarentino will never get a dollar from me again, ever. His entire body of work consists of polishing turds to a very high gloss. I think he might be the most vacuous, cynical “artist” in the world today.
Andrew
If only Aragorn had a lawnmower with which to fight the Ring-wraiths.
Bubblegum Tate
I fucking love that movie. There’s nothing about it that isn’t utterly awesome, from the Nazi veterinarian to the claymation rat monkey to the kung-fu priest (“This calls for divine intervention…I kick ass for the Lord!”) to the zombie sex to the utterly absurd bloodbath and all points in between.
Stu in VA
One of the guys I saw the movie with is a former US Army Blackhawk pilot. He confirmed this is a standard tactic regularly employed by Army helo pilots.
/sarcasm
Tim F.
It could be me, but I’d rather see Aragorn eat chicken soup with zombie grandma.
Tony J
In the cause of pointlessly anal exactitude, I should point out that this is technically no more a ‘zombie movie’ than ‘Rabid‘ was. The Infected aren’t dead and they don’t want to eat you, they’re just in a great deal of pain and eager to take it out on anyone who doesn’t sport a set of fetching red eyes. You would be too if you were coughing up your internal organs.
(Except for Zombie Santa Claus, of course, who hopefully got over his loss long ago.)
‘Sean of the Dead’ now, that was a zombie movie, and a very funny one. Jackson’s ‘Brain Dead’ wasn’t a zombie movie, but it did have the line “I got a chunky bit” in it, which to my knowledge no other movie, zombie or otherwise, has, and that’s obviously a pity.
Basically then, it’s not a ‘zombie movie’. It’s a ‘bio-horror’ movie.
Now move along.
Walker
God I hated this movie. And I love zombie films. After Max Brook’s excellent World War Z this year, it was clear just how stupid this military was.
They repopulated an area of London six months after the plague. Without having done any door-to-door sweeps in London much less other parts of England. The military do nothing but sit in defensive posture at all times, with no intel of the surrounding city. That’s just a class-A cluster-f*ck waiting to happen.
And why on God’s green earth do they need to pull the people in now? The rest of the country is not inhabited. So they have no agriculture and no industry. What you have is a incredible money pit as all supplies have to be brought in through high-level quarantine procedures (because of that failure to sweep door-to-door as I mentioned).
I don’t know about your theater, but in the one I sat in, everyone wanted that boy to die. That’s a bit of problem considering the whole narrative is geared towards your wanting him to live. And why didn’t the military officers tell him about his “condition”? If he had known, that would have gone a long way to averting the ending.
God I hated this movie.
RSA
“Your mother ate my dog!” is also memorably unique.
For fans of this genre, the trailer for the as-yet-unmade Worst Case Scenario is worth a look.
Tom Hilton
If you want to see a really good quasi-zombie Iraq allegory, check out George Romero’s The Crazies. Bio-warfare accident releases a virus that makes people violently crazy, army occupies the area to restore order…good times. (And yeah, obviously the idea influenced 28 Days Later.)
Matt
Also, don’t forget Homecoming, a real zombie movie, really about Iraq. You wouldn’t call it an allegory, exactly–the President goes on TV with a Cindy Sheehan-like mom and says, “If I could have one wish, one big wish, I would wish that your son could come back–I know he would tell all of us how important this struggle is for the safety and security of all Americans.”
His wish comes true, and all the casualties from Iraq come back to life in order to vote against the Republicans. It’s less subtle than 28 Weeks Later, for sure. And very, very funny.
sglover
Why, to claim the UK for the English-speaking Imperium, before the French pull off a “1066 — The Return” sequel. Jeez, do I need to explain everything?!?!
Geoduck
I believe there exists a bit of joke footage where Aragon prepares to charge into battle, and instead of a sword, Viggo Mortensen whips out a semiautomatic weapon and starts blasting away..