28 year later: bone temple thoughts
I really liked this film and it made me want to watch the first one again! ‼️This post contains lots of spoilers - be warned if you haven't seen the film.
The scene that stuck with me is Rafe Fiennes's Doctor Kelson gently probing Jack OConell's psychopathic Jimmy Crystal about his experience of the before times.
In a film about the nature of evil, making you pause and think about this character's experience is a skill. It comes after we've seen infected Samson, having been given anti-psychotic medication, remember where he was, as a child, when he was infected.
It's apparent Jimmy is mentally ill, and you wonder what his life would have been like without the infection.
The Saville imagery has been talked about a lot, and I now see it as an artefact of people living in the pop culture detritus of a previous life, a previous civilisation. I think I'd watch a whole series around this concept! But also as a thematic element about the nature of evil - the old zombie movie trope that sometimes it's your fellow survivors you should be more scared of.
The film isn't realistic - it's a fantasy, and has an over the top, fable type feel to it. Less than someone telling a story, but more like the infected have transformed the island into a mystical space, terrifying - but after 28 years the people there are beginning to adapt and see the beauty there (there's several shots of nature, murmurations, the stars), and a generation born to the island have never known anything else. In good ways - Spike, his Dad, nature, Dr Kelson and his desire to connect, to heal, and in bad ways - the Jimmies revel in torture and killing, in a world where death and violence are at hand constantly.
This also makes it a very visceral and fun film to watch - the gore made me clamp my hands over my mouth, and the Dr Kelson and Samson sections - as well as Dr Kelson's final, incredible show - made me laugh with glee.
As Dr Kelson set up his act and pyrotechnics to the sound track of Iron Maiden, I whispered to my friend "Imagine if you'd never heard music before, or been to a gig!". As the Jimmies danced, it made you feel like you were experiencing this for the first time too. Cinema!