Context: at this moment, Film Twitter (gross) is caught up in a scandal about some guy being called out for using AI to write reviews over a period of several years, which has led to his dismissal from the publication he wrote for but also a lot of hate directed at Ryan McQuade, who made the initial callout post. Even after receipts were provided, some folks are more interested in harassing Ryan for being a good and honest person than looking inwardly about their behavior or trying to learn how to write by themselves again. I am so mad about this stupid discourse, especially the defenses of a so-called “writer” using AI to do their fucking job that I’m just gonna blast out a review and we’ll see how my fucking voice takes shape under pressure. So let’s start the timer for twelve minutes and take it away.
The most recent film I’ve seen is Nia DeCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. After being extremely put off by the off-kilter styles and tones of Danny Boyle’s previous film, to say nothing of its uninteresting narrative threads, that Aaron Taylor Johnson performance, and what felt like a very uncomfortable collection of racist tropes in the zombie Samson, I was supremely not excited to watch this! I don’t regret missing this in theaters, but DeCosta’s directorial hand proves a more stabilizing force on Alex Garland’s script.
Granted, she never alleviates the sense that The Bone Temple is trying to wring as much story and incident as it can get from two oversized B-plots. I wonder if the scientific breakthroughs and satanic panic cultists would hit harder if this was set earlier in the zombie apocalypse, or if I should take the faith that these types would definitely still be running around long after UK society had settled into this brutal new normal. But there’s real novelty to watching Ralph Fiennes’ doctor form a genuine connection with the drugged-out, increasingly cognizant Samson. The Shape of Water remade as old man yaoi. There’s even more novelty to how few zombies are in this zombie flick.
I am less enthused about how much time we spend with Ser Jimmy and his Fingers, who at least sideline Spike from the movie’s center but take up so. much. time with their gleeful brutality. It’s more interesting to see the mask drop in Jimmy’s one-on-one with Fiennes, a more casual exploration of curiosity and violent psyches, than drawn-out and familiar scenes of nihilist gang violence. I can be impressed at the technical level at watching people get skinned alive in close-up. Not sure what else there is to take from these sections.
DeCosta’s filmmaking is less experimental than Boyle’s prior efforts, but I hated a lot of the tricked-out digital photography in 28 Years Later, so that mostly works for me! At least the sound design and score are consistently solid, and the makeup makes the Fingers’ bloody, scuffed-up and unspoken histories more interesting than a lot of their barbarism.
There, finished that last long-ass run on sentence and I did it, to remind myself I can work under a stupid, self-imposed deadline and say something, anything, in my voice no matter the quality of the writing itself. 355 words in the final review, italics added after the fact. No AI. Fuck cheats. If you need a computer to synthesize your voice you’re just letting it speak for you and muting yourself. You’re bad at writing and you should stop pretending you do it.
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