‘28 Years Later' and ‘F1' prove that excellent films are still possible during the summer blockbuster season

Malay Mail

a day ago

JULY 5 — It's been a while since I last felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices available in Malaysian cinemas during the summer blockbuster season.
The last time I felt this way was probably before Covid-19 hit and changed the way people consume movies and how Hollywood studios distribute theirs forever.
When you combine the post-Covid effects of movie consumption with the Writers Guild of America strike in 2023, which pushed the production and release of quite a number of big Hollywood movies by at least a year or even more, the lack of excitement during the summer blockbuster season in the last few years is quite understandable.
This year, however, has seen that excitement back with a vengeance, with plenty of big titles and surprise hits making their way into local cinemas, with 10 out of the top 20 worldwide box-office hits of the year consisting of summer movies like Lilo & Stitch, How To Train Your Dragon, Thunderbolts, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Final Destination: Bloodlines and Ballerina.
The newly opened F1 is already at number 11 in the worldwide box-office charts at the time of writing, and will surely climb up further in the next few weeks.
What really got me excited, though, is the surprising quality of quite a few of these summer blockbuster hits, especially the two titles I'll be talking about below.
Even the genre hits like Final Destination: Bloodlines and Ballerina have delivered exactly what they promised with great quality and craftsmanship.
28 Years Later
The first two movies, 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, were very different from each other, and it is only fair that this new movie, which has been announced to be the start of a new trilogy, is also different from the previous two.
Yes, this one also involves fast zombies (or infected, as the movie calls them) and uses different types of consumer and professional grade digital cameras (including iPhones here), but director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have decided to give us what is, first and foremost, a coming-of-age film instead.
Taking place 28 years after the Rage virus first spread, Britain has now been entirely cut off from the rest of the world by a strictly enforced quarantine (echoes of Brexit, anyone?), with neighbouring countries doing patrols around British waters to ensure that the quarantine remains in place.
The movie focuses on a community of uninfected survivors living on an island that's connected to the mainland by a causeway that disappears during high tide.
A rite of passage within this community involves young men being sent out to the mainland to kill at least one infected.
This is where the movie's main character, a 12-year-old boy named Spike (a beautifully nuanced performance from Alfie Williams), and his family come in.
Boyle and Garland put the audience in Spike's shoes as we experience everything from his point of view, from the trauma of his first journey to the mainland, to his eventual decision to sneak out his mother (who suffers from a mysterious disease that leaves her in and out of lucidity) from the island to search for the fabled Dr Kelson (Ralph Kelson) to help cure her.
There are still plenty of scary and unforgettable encounters with the infected here, but the movie takes an unexpectedly beautiful turn once the third act arrives and it becomes a hugely moving meditation on the inevitability of death. And once you hear the way the movie plays with the phrase memento mori (which means 'remember, you must die') and introduces the phrase memento amoris (which can be interpreted as 'remember, you are loved'), there will not be a dry pair of eyes in the cinema.
Definitely one of my favourite movies of the year.
US actor and producer Brad Pitt poses on the red carpet upon arrival for the European Premier of F1 The Movie, at Cineworld Leicester Square, central London. — AFP pic
F1
I was not as impressed as many were by director Joseph Kosinski's previous film, the well-reviewed and very well-received (by audiences) box-office hit Top Gun: Maverick.
I thought it was a decently made piece of hokum, but there was just too much cheese in it for my liking.
Kosinski has delivered another piece of hokum with F1, but this time I'm fully on board as it just gets every single thing right.
It's a story that's been told many, many times before; an underdog story about a reckless/wily veteran mentoring a younger version of himself.
The underdog veteran in this case is Sonny Hayes (played by Brad Pitt), a former F1 prodigy who met with an accident and watched his life go off the rails courtesy of a gambling addiction, living in a van and chasing his rush of adrenaline as he moves from one motorsport to another, before getting recruited by his old F1 racing buddy to mentor the talented but hot-headed rookie Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris) in his struggling F1 team APXGP.
Like I mentioned before, we've seen this story told many times before, even in the Pixar animated movie Cars, which is exactly why what Kosinski has managed to achieve here is so impressive.
Like Barbie, this is a movie that's been directly licensed by the brand, and Kosinski has taken full advantage to give the audience, even those without much knowledge of Formula 1 racing, a first-class seat to witness the inner workings of this highly profitable world.
It's a feel-good Hollywood movie that hits every single narrative beat you'd expect it to, but it's delivered in such a professional manner that you can't help yourself from cheering for these underdog characters all the way to the finish line.
This one's the very definition of cinematic comfort food.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.