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RTÉ News
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Glory and gory be! 28 Years Later is
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland mix the gory with political allegory and a touching family drama in this riveting zombie thriller After great early promise in 2002 with 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle's zombie franchise looked like it was going to reanimate a moribund movie cliché but it all stumbled and shuddered to an ignoble halt with the delayed and frankly awful follow-up 28 Weeks Later. Now prefaced by much "is he/isn't he?" speculation about whether Cillian Murphy would reprise his role from the first movie (he isn't), Boyle is back at his maverick best with this deeply creepy return to form which reignites the twitchy paranoia and dread of the original. And glory and gory be - writer Alex Garland, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle also return, as does Murphy but as executive producer and not having taken his Oppenheimer diet to extremes to play a member of the emaciated massive. They have conjured up a fever dream of a film that somehow looks like a cross pollination of Mike Leigh realism, and the sickening surrealism of Straw Dogs and The Wicker Man. We are now on Holy Island off the northeast coast of England, 28 years after the accidental release of a highly contagious virus which caused the breakdown of society and turned infected folk into slavering maniacs with The Rage. Perfidious Albion is now in a state of not so splendid isolation and in quarantine patrolled by European vessels. Garland and Boyle do not hold back on gleeful commentary about the contemporary UK's perilous state, cut-off politically and culturally from the continent and muddling along with a sense of misplaced exceptionalism and proud independence. This post-apocalyptic vision of ye olde merrie future England comes shot through with the look and feel of the fabled lost 1950s Britain beloved of Reform voters and Brexiteers. So political allegory and gore is the order of the day; In the island's village hall a tapestry of a young Queen Elizabeth II in her coronation year takes pride of place and Boyle uses clips from Laurence Olivier's Henry V and wartime newsreel footage of the Blitz to underline the fortress Britain atmosphere. Later, we see the flag of St George in flames. Bow and arrows are the weapon of choice; everyone is dressed in ragamuffin chic and the island looks like it's devolved back to medieval England. Or maybe Féile '90. Wrapped in that grim tableau is a touching family drama concerning 12-year-old Spike (a very impressive Alfie Williams) and his parents, Isla (Jodie Comer - great as usual), who is suffering from a mysterious illness that causes huge trauma and grief for her doting son, and Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a scavenger and survivalist given to flashes of his own type of rage. We first meet Spike on what will be a big day for him. He is about to be taken across the causeway that connects the island to the still contaminated mainland on his first sortie among the infected; a rite of passage that will test his mettle and see him take his place within the village hierarchy. Once across the causeway, the action clicks with an unforgiving ferocity and father and son barely make it home after a gripping moonlit dash back across the causeway as the tide goes out. As we have seen from the first two movies in the series, these zombies are not the shambling husks of B-movie lore but fleet of foot savages who pose a genuine threat. However, Garland and Boyle also introduce two new breeds of zombie - obese, sluggish creatures who forage about on the forest floor and have a nasty talent for creeping up on their prey, and Alphas, muscular pack leaders who take a lot to kill. When Spike hears about the mysterious Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), an eccentric former GP who has remained uninfected and choses to live on the mainland, he sees him as a salvation for his sick mother and so he spirits her back across to the mainland much to the anger of the island's elders and his stricken father. Once we are back off the island, the movie takes on a semi-mystical air with impressionistic riddles and symbols and spiritual ceremony surrounding Dr Kelson. He is clearly the Col Kurtz of the piece, a shamanic witch doctor of sorts, who tends to his very own bone orchard and has his own way of dealing with the infected marauders. The sense of loss is everywhere. There are haunting and very moving glimpses of Anthony Gormley's Angel of the North sculpture rearing starkly from the landscape like the Statue Of Liberty in The Planet of The Apes and a very poignant shot of the now felled tree in the Sycamore Gap at Hadrian's Wall. A brief appearance by Edvin Ryding as a sardonic Swedish NATO soldier, who has been shipwrecked off the coast, adds another dose of dark humour to a movie which is surprisingly funny as well as disturbing. Scottish band Young Fathers provide a pumping but abstract soundtrack for what is a multi-layered, poetic and lyrical movie but with plenty of the comic book gore beloved of fans of the franchise. Arrows fly and slice through zombie flesh and that mad dash across the causeway is exhilarating. Full of strange images and taut action scenes, Boyle has said he wanted a sense of "suffocating intensity" to the film and he really does achieve it The bravado closing sequence, which strangely reminded me of some groovy sixties rock `n' roll flick starring Oliver Reed, includes a crowd-pleasing cameo and sets things up smoothly for the next instalment. If it's as good as this acrid, kerosene-choked thrill ride, we're in for another treat.
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- The Guardian
AI promises to free up time. But what if it spares us from learning, writing, painting and exploring the world?
As much as I have the general vibe of a luddite (strange hobbies, socially maladjusted, unfathomable fashion choices, etc) I have to hand it to automation: it's nice that computers have made some boring things in our lives less boring. I side with the writer and philosopher John Gray, who in his terrifying work of eco-nihilism Straw Dogs balances the fact that human beings are a plague animal who are wrecking the biosphere that supports them with the idea that we have made our lives easier through technology. Gray, in particular, calls anesthetised dentistry an 'unmixed blessing'. I would add some other unmixed blessings to that list: I like watching videos of cool birds on YouTube; I'm happy when my phone gently reminds me that it's time to get up and go for a walk after I've watched too many cool birds on YouTube; and I have no problems whatsoever with the printing press. But one of the many things about the so-called 'AI revolution' that makes me want to run for the hills is the promise that AI will simplify things that should not be simple – that I would never want to be simple. In matters of technology, I operate on one guiding principle: I give my computer the work that I do not want to do, and that I gain little by doing myself. The ideal model of the computer, I think, is the calculator: if I sat there with a piece of paper and a pen, I could probably do most of the sums myself that I ask my calculator to do. But that would take time, and I'm a busy man (lots of cool bird videos to watch), and so I give it to a computer to work out. What I am not happy to outsource is most of the things that AI is desperate for me to outsource. I do not want a computer to summarise texts sent by my friends into shorter sentences, as though the work of being updated on the lives of those I love is somehow strenuous or not what being alive is all about. I do not want Google's AI feature to summarise my search into a pithy (often incorrect) paragraph, rather than reading the investigative work of my fellow humans. I don't want AI to clean up the pictures that I take on my phone that are rich and strange in their messiness. And I certainly do not want AI to write my books for me, or paint my pictures. Not only would the work be terrible: it wouldn't even be work. As all creatives know, there is limited joy in having written a book – as soon as it is done, most of us are onto the next thing. The thrill, the joy, the beauty, is in the writing of a book. If you outsource your creative work to a computer, you are not a creative. Someone who merely churns out product is not an artist – they are a salesperson. The artist is the person who makes, not who has made. Simply put: I don't know where this endless march of shortening the act of living leads us to. AI promises to free up time. But if what it spares us from is learning from our friends, writing, painting and exploring the world, then what, actually, are we meant to do with that time? It's increasingly clear that a computer could live my life for me, all while I atrophy, never going outside. But if I reduced my existence to a series of ChatGPT prompts, the act of my living is only shorter, not better. And despite what tech bros tell me, those are not the same thing. Joseph Earp is a critic, painter and novelist. His book Painting Portraits of Everyone I've Ever Dated will be published by Pantera Press on 29 April 2025
