alex garland

28 Years Later (2025)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but back in 2017 I attended a screening of 28 Days Later at Terror Tuesday at the now-defunct original “Ritz” location of the Alamo Drafthouse (what occupies that space now I dare not name). For weeks after, I listened to “In the House, In a Heartbeat” on repeat, dozens if not hundreds of times. It was a weird time, and I was going through it, but it’s also a certified banger. It was only my second viewing of the movie after a high school rental of the DVD from the Blockbuster in Natchitoches, and in the intro, the programmer at the time talked about how that very DVD was already out of print and that 28 Days Later was unavailable to stream anywhere. That appears to still be the case, despite the release of this relatively high profile sequel, and the ease of access to the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later on Tubi. (That Blockbuster is now a pawn shop, apparently, and they appear to have lots of DVDs in stock, so you might be able to find a copy of 28DL there, for what it’s worth.) That screening featured a rate 35MM print of the original film, large portions of which were shot on digital on the Canon XL1 and then were transferred to actual film stock, which resulted in 28DL’s novel visual qualities but also, I believe, makes it difficult to stream . . . or maybe too many people would think there was something wrong with the app rather than understand that the film’s supposed to look like that. 

It’s been 23 years since the Rage Virus broke out on screen and half a decade longer since then in-universe. As the opening crawl tells us, the outbreak was contained in continental Europe but that the British Isles were turned into a quarantine zone. After an opening sequence that occurs early in the original outbreak which sees a young boy escaping from his home after his community is slaughtered by rage zombies, including his pastor father, who allows himself to be overrun in a fit of mad religious ecstasy, we cut to … 28 years later. Spike (Alfie Williams) is a twelve-year-old boy living in an island community with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who is all but bedridden with an affliction that also affects her concentration and memory. The island is kept safe due to tides in the region making it impossible to swim to, but an easily defendable natural causeway emerges at low tide and allows the islanders to go to the mainland to forage for food and firewood. Most boys are taken to the mainland for a rite of passage zombie hunting trip at fourteen or fifteen, but Jamie insists that Spike is ready, and the two set out with their bows to bag a few undead. 

Spike is awed by the mainland, and he manages to get an impressive first kill on the hunt. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the zombies have evolved, with slightly more intelligent and much more difficult to slay “alphas” emerging (one presumes that, without the internet, these folks never learned that the whole “alpha wolf” thing was bad science), who are strong enough to rip out the spinal column of its prey and also seem to be doing so almost ritualistically. Jamie and Spike are forced to take shelter in a dilapidated, abandoned farmhouse, where they also find the corpse of a man who was hung upside down and left for the zombies to find and feast upon, with the name “Jimmy” carved into his flesh. They manage to make it back to safety, barely, and Spike is celebrated at a ceremony that the town holds in his honor, but he finds his father’s tall tales of Spike’s supposed prowess dishonest and is even more disillusioned when he sees his drunken father sneak away from the party with a woman. When a family friend lets slip that a mysterious fire that Spike saw on the mainland may mark the home of a Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), which Jamie previously denied knowing anything about, Spike decides to sneak away with his mother and take her to find Kelson in the hope that he can diagnose and treat her. Along the way, they witness further changes to the infected and find themselves allied with shipwrecked Swedish sailor Erik (Edvin Ryding), the lone survivor of his downed quarantine patrol boat, who serves to give us insight into what the rest of the world is like. 

Erik adds a wrinkle here that’s quite a lot of fun. After the first film trafficked heavily in images of desolate urban areas as Jim wandered through the empty husk of London, this one follows its day one prologue with a cut to a somewhat idyllic present day, where a close knit community tends sheep and fashions arrows. It doesn’t initially have the feel of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, as having bacon with breakfast is a lavish anomaly but not completely unheard of. The island itself is lush and green but has a bit of the uncanny about it as well, with the recurring appearance of an unremarked upon creepy mask that multiple characters wear implying that they’ve gotten a little weird with it out there, and it’s a dangling thread left to, no doubt, be developed in the next sequel. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has completely moved on from the whole “zombie plague” thing. People work as delivery drivers, they order packages online, and they have smartphones, all of which are alien concepts to Spike, who has never seen a photograph less than three decades old. When Erik shows him a picture of his girlfriend making a duck face in the moments before his battery dies, Spike has no frame of reference for that social media beauty standard and compares her appearance to a girl in the village whose allergy to shellfish causes her to swell up. Back in that same village hangs a portrait of a fairly young Queen Elizabeth II, because these people aren’t even aware that she’s dead (presuming she died in 2022 in their world as in ours and wasn’t afflicted with the Rage Virus, which I didn’t realize I needed to see until this very moment). 

It’s almost unfathomable to think that the rest of the world could simply move on from locking down multiple nations and washing their hands of the whole situation while consigning the people living there to almost certain eventual violent death at the hands of sprinting, infected undead. But then again, we’re kind of living in that world, aren’t we? We’ve all lived through the rampant spread of a virus that killed millions of people, and once everybody got vaccinated (well…) and we reached a point of “well, most people won’t be at risk,” most of society simply did move on, and we’re still driving delivery trucks and ordering packages online and getting new smartphones. Disability advocates have talked for years about how our necropolitical  institutions have decided that the wheels of commerce must turn, even if they must be greased by the blood of the chronically ill or otherwise highly susceptible. We also live in a society where horrible, awful, genocidal things are happening “over there,” out of sight and, for many, out of mind; “It’s awful that children are being burned alive by phosphorus ammunition and that huge numbers of people have been abandoned to certain, horrifying death by the rest of the world, but I don’t see what that has to do with me or my need for a frappuccino.” Erik shows us something about the world beyond these quarantined islands; it’s obvious that Spike has grown up never knowing a world before the Rage, but if Erik is even approximately the same age as the actor portraying him, so has he. In Erick’s world, the long term, hands off approach to dealing with the infected is baked into society as something that happens over there and is a simple, sad fact of life, and the wheels just keep turning. 

Although he’s only a child and therefore gets billed in the credits after a man who’s on screen for mere moments, the MVP here is relative newcomer Alfie Williams. There’s a quiet resilience to him, and he carries a major, if understated, emotional journey that begins when he returns to the island from his hunting trip. He’s surrounded by the trappings of the village’s celebration of his hunt, including that weird mask thing, but as he watches his father carry on the time honored tradition of exaggerating their bravery and marksmanship, a crack in the foundation of his belief in both his father and his society begins to form. He already has his suspicions about his father’s denial of knowing what the fire in the hills on the mainland might be, and once he sees Jamie getting adulterous and learning that his father knows about Dr. Kelson (and then leaping to the conclusion that Jamie is refusing to get help for Isla from the mainlander), he resolves to put a seemingly doomed plan into motion. Williams pulls all of this off very well for a performer his age, and you never for a moment doubt that Spike is a kid who’s never seen a frisbee or an iPhone. That’s not to denigrate the performances of Comer, who is excellent as always, or Taylor-Johnson, who is very effective here as a husband and father maintaining a brave face despite the clearly imminent death of his ill wife while also living through the end of days. Fiennes is also great here as the broken Dr. Kelson, who makes a great deal out of what amounts to not much screen time. 

This film ends on such an overt tonal shift that I think it’s turning off some people. A couple of friends of mine to whom I had been recommending the film happened to be coming out of a screening of 28 Years just as I was headed into a screening of The Materialists. They found the film messy, and although we didn’t get much of a chance to talk about where they felt that it failed, they mentioned that the sudden genre shift was unexpected and jarring. I would also wager that the brief jumpcuts at the beginning of the film that serve to set some of the tone will be off-putting to some, although I rather enjoyed it as a shorthand for the myth-building within the community of the island. Set to the 1915 Taylor Holmes recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots,” we get to see a little bit of the culture of the island: their use of archery as their primary method of hunting and anti-infected defense, their fortification of the island, and the training of their young to carry on, all of it interspliced with footage from monochrome war films, Technicolor Robins of Locksley, and other bits of film and video that pass by so quickly that some of the images are almost subliminal. The idea that these people have been reduced to a medieval level of technology in the modern era is an interesting one, and this gets it across in a great visual way but one that is definitely not going to be to everyone’s liking. That’s what makes Danny Boyle Danny Boyle, after all. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Americans Under Siege, With and Without Context

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

I recently caught a double feature at my local multiplex of high-style, high-tension thrillers about American soldiers under siege in claustrophobic locations. The stories told in Alex Garland’s Warfare & Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are separated by entire genres, decades, and oceans, and yet they both trap American soldiers in tight-space locales by surrounding them with enemy combatants, whittling down their ranks one corpse at a time. That shared Americans-under-siege dynamic puts them in unlikely conversation with each other as two feature films currently in wide release, but what really makes that conversation interesting is the films’ respective relationships with the cultural & historical context around their sieges. Warfare is so hostile to providing context that it borders on experimentation in narrative form, while Sinners is entirely about context, explaining its own supernatural siege’s relation to America’s past, present, and future. Together, they represent the two extremes of contextual explanation in cinematic storytelling, to the point where considering them together is something that would only occur to you if you happen to write movie reviews and catch them both at the same theatre in a single evening.

Assigning Warfare‘s authorship entirely to Alex Garland is a bit misleading, since he shares directorial credit with former U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. In fact, the real-time, true-story siege thriller is most interesting for the battle between its two directors: one who wants to honor the soldiers depicted “for always answering the call” (Mendoza) and one who wants to examine them & pluck their limbs off like bugs he caught in a jar (Garland). An opening title card explains that the film’s reenactment of a failed 2006 American military mission during the Iraq War was made “using only the memories” of Mendoza’s platoon, who experienced the violent episode first-hand. After the reenactment concludes, surviving members of that platoon are shown visiting the film’s set mid-production to provide their insight, contextualizing the movie as an honorable commemoration of their service & sacrifice during the harshest conditions of war. Only, that final moment is undercut by inclusion of a portrait of the Iraqi family who were also present that day and whose home was invaded & destroyed to fit the American military’s needs & whims. Earlier, when the surviving American soldiers have safely escaped the real-time gunfight in rescue tanks, the camera then lingers on that family appearing puzzled & shellshocked in the rubble of their home, as if they were just invaded by space aliens and not fellow human beings.

Garland & Mendoza’s choice to reenact this one specific mission without explaining the larger context of the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq (under false pretenses of seeking weapons of mass destruction) has been hotly debated as a disingenuous, amoral screenwriting choice among the film’s detractors. From the Iraqi family’s perspective, however, that absence of context only makes the unlawful intrusion even more terrifying & cruel. The family is sleeping in their cozy duplex when Americans kick down their doors and sledgehammer their walls in the middle of the night, inviting enemy fire into the home as a makeshift military base while they’re gathered to huddle on a single bed, powerless. There is no warning or preparation for this invasion, nor is their any communication once the fighting ceases. There’s no context whatsoever, neither for that family nor for the audience. All that’s offered is a dramatic reenactment of the gunfight from the surviving American soldiers’ perspective, with the flattering casting of young Hollywood hunks like Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai to help sweeten the deal for those who “answered the call.” The absence of testimony from the Iraqi citizens invaded, shot at, and displaced by those soldiers’ mission becomes glaring by the final credits, though, and the questions that absence raises hang heavy in the air. I like to think that unease was Garland’s main contribution to the picture but, without context, I can only guess.

The political & historical context behind the all-in-one-day siege plot of Sinners is much easier to parse, since Ryan Coogler is much more upfront about what he’s saying through his art. The director’s fifth feature film (all starring career-long collaborator Michael B. Jordan) and his first not adapted from either pre-existing IP or real-life events, Sinners is set in a 1930s Mississippi overrun with bloodsucking vampires. You wouldn’t guess the vampire part in its first hour, though, which is mostly a getting-the-gang-back-together drama about two former soldiers and current booze-runners (twins, both played by Jordan) who return to their hometown to set up a juke joint for Black patrons during Prohibition. After a long stretch of friendly “Look what the cat dragged in” reunions (featuring consistently dependable character actors like Delroy Lindo & Wunmi Mosaku), the juke joint proves to be a communal success, if not a financial one. Unfortunately, the party gets to be a little too lively, which attracts the attention of white, vampiric interlopers (led by the consistently intense Jack O’Connell). The vampires are particularly attracted to the transcendently beautiful blues music played by the juke joint’s youngest employee, Preacher Boy (newcomer Miles Caton), which introduces an unignorable cultural appropriation metaphor to the vampires’ violent desire to be let inside the party. More practically, it also sours the vibe of the evening by trapping the partygoers in a single location, waiting to be drained of their blood and assimilated into the vampire cult.

Sinners is a truly American horror story, a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Every detail of the story that isn’t character-based drama registers as commentary on American identity: the illusion of freedom, the fixation on money, the compulsory Christianity, the lingering infrastructures of slavery & The Klan. The only positive touchstones of American culture are, in fact, Black culture, as represented in a fish-fry dance party that offers a Mississippi farming community a few hours to cut loose before returning to a life of poverty & backbreaking labor . . . until the party attracts vampiric outsiders who want to claim that culture as their own. In one standout sequence, Coogler extrapolates on this idea to visually & aurally lay out how the Delta blues that Preacher Boy is playing in the juke joint is foundational for all fundamentally American music & pop culture, illustrating its connections to funk, rock, hip-hop, bounce, and beyond in a physical, impossible embodiment of the story’s context. It’s a moment that not only accomplishes everything Baz Lurhman’s Elvis picture failed to do across 150 extra minutes of runtime, but it also positions Sinners as one of the most distinctly American vampire stories ever told on screen (among which I suppose its closest competition is Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark).

The only dramatic context Warfare provides before kicking off its real-time siege sequence is a brief moment where all soldiers involved are watching a pop music video on a shared laptop, laughing at its over-the-top sexuality & pelvic thrusts. There’s just enough time allowed to that scene for the audience to discern a few key soldiers’ personalities through body language & facial expressions, before they’re immediately shown breaking into and destroying a sleeping family’s home. In contrast, Sinners spends the first half of its 140min runtime getting to know the gangsters, players, and partiers it eventually puts under vampiric siege, so that they feel like real people instead of walking, talking metaphors. It’s through that sprawling attention to context that we learn that the booze-running twins who open the Mississippi juke joint were WWI soldiers before they became gangster contemporaries of Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago. Even after the siege story is officially over, Coogler can’t help but pile on more context about cultural vampires & the blues, dragging the setting into contemporary times with a surprise guest appearance by blues legend Buddy Guy. Normally, I would say less is more when it comes to a movie explaining its own themes & context, but Coogler overcommits to those explanations to the point of academic scholarship, while still managing to deliver a fun & sexy vampire movie in the process. Meanwhile, Warfare‘s deliberate aversion to context threatens to implode the entire project, with only a few stray shots of Americans viewed from an outsider’s perspective affording it any sense of artistic or political purpose.

-Brandon Ledet

Civil War (2024)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

The first noises you hear in Alex Garland’s Civil War are surround-sound blasts of static bouncing around the room in unpredictable, disorienting patterns.  That discordance continues in the film’s crate-digging soundtrack, which includes songs from bands like Suicide & Silver Apples that disorient their audiences with off-rhythm oscillation for a near-psychedelic effect.  Likewise, a sunny, up-beat party track from De La Soul violently clashes against a scene of brutal militarism in a way that’s chillingly wrong to the ear and to the heart.  Civil War is cinema of discordance, a blockbuster art film that purports to take an apolitical view of inflammatory politics.  That discordance is evident in its main subject: the psychology behind war journalism & battlefield photography.  Even though the work itself is often noble, journalists’ personal impulses to participate in violence as up-close spectators can be disturbingly inhuman, and Garland’s main interest appears to be in the volatile disharmony between those two truths.  It’s a movie about professional neutrals who act against every survival instinct in their bodies that tell them to fight or flee, and that instinct that says what you’re observing is dangerous & wrong carries over to the filmmaking craft as well – something that only becomes more disturbing when you find yourself enjoying it.

Kirsten Dunst stars as a respected photojournalist who reluctantly passes her torch to a young upstart played by Cailee Spaeny, mirroring the actors’ real-life professional dynamic as Sofia Coppola muses.  Along with two similarly, generationally divided newspaper men (Wagner Moura & Stephen McKinley Henderson), they travel down the East Coast of a near-future America that’s devolved into chaos & bloodshed, hoping to document the final days of an illegitimate president who refuses to leave office (Nick Offerman) before he is executed by the combined military of defecting states.  Like in Garland’s screenplay for 28 Days Later, their journey is an episodic collection of interactions with survivors who’ve shed the final semblances of civility in the wreckage of a dying society (including a show-stopping performance from Jesse Plemons as a small-time, sociopathic tyrant), except instead of a zombie virus everyone’s just fighting to survive extremist politics.  The journalists look down on people who’ve consciously decided to stay out of the war—including their own parents—but in the almighty name of objectivity they attempt the same political avoidance, just from a much closer, more thrilling proximity.  They sometimes pontificate about the importance of allowing readers to decide on the issues for themselves based on the raw data they provide from the front-lines, but Garland makes it clear that their attraction to the profession can be something much more selfish than that.  Moments after watching & documenting real people bleed to death through a camera lens, they shout, “What a rush!” and compliment the artistic quality of each other’s pictures.  They’re essentially adrenaline addicts who’ve found a way to philosophically justify getting their fix.

There may be something amoral about picking at the ethics & psychology of front-line war journalism in this way, especially at a time when we’re relying on the bravery of on-the-ground documentation from Gaza to counteract & contradict official government narratives that downplay an ongoing genocide.  Civil War never makes any clear, overt statements about journalism as a discipline, though; it just dwells on how unnatural it is for journalists to be able to compartmentalize in real time during battle, even finding a perverse thrill in the excitement.  They are active participants in war without ever admitting it to themselves, and most of the emotional, character-based drama of the film is tied to the ability to maintain that emotional distance as the consequences of the war get increasingly personal.  As the lead, Dunst in particular struggles to stay protected in her compartmentalized headspace where nothing matters except getting “the money shot” of actual combatants being brutally killed just a few feet away from her camera.  It shuts off like a light switch when she sees her inhuman behavior reflected in the younger version of herself, played by Spaeny.  It also shuts off when reviewing her own artistically framed pictures of a dying colleague, which she deletes out of respect (and maybe out of self-disgust).  However, as soon as she finds herself in competition to capture a front-page photo before other nearby journalists beat her to the punch, it flips back on, and the movie doesn’t seem to have anything concrete to say about that switch except to note how deeply strange it is as a professional talent.  Nor does it really need to.

Like a lot of recent audience-dividers, it seems the major sticking point for most Civil War detractors is that Garland’s main thematic interests don’t match the themes of the movie they made up in their heads before arriving to the theater.  Any claims from either audience or filmmaker that the movie is apolitical ring false, given that Nick Offerman plays a 3rd-term president who declares “Some are calling it the greatest victory of all time” in press conferences about his obvious, disastrous failures.  If the allusions to Trump and the January 6 insurrection were any more blatant, the movie would be derided as an on-the-nose caricature.  The divide between artist & audience is just one of personal interests.  If you’re looking to Civil War for speculative fiction about where the current populist politics of our country may soon lead us, the movie is not interested enough in near-future worldbuilding to draw you a roadmap.  It’s much more interested in the psychology of the unbiased, objective spectators of this extremist political discord than in the politics of those actually, actively participating in it, which it takes more as a given.  Maybe that’s purely a statement about the nature of war journalism, or maybe it’s something that can be extrapolated as commentary on the consumption of horrific news footage as a subgenre of smartphone content, or as self-deprecating commentary on making fictional films about politics instead of directly participating in it.  Maybe even Garland himself doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say about the act of reducing the horrors of real-world violence into sensationalist words & images, but it’s at least clear that he feels something alienating & cold in that spectatorship, and that feeling is effectively conveyed through his choices behind the camera.

-Brandon Ledet

Men (2022)

/ swampflix / 17 Comments

There’s been a lot of recent pushback against the suggestion that A24 has an overriding “house style.”  Younger film nerds who were raised on a cinematic diet of Disney-owned studios like Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm can go a little overboard transferring their fandom of boardroom-directed brands to auteur-driven distributors like A24 & Neon, but I don’t know that they’re entirely wrong to do so.  Some of A24’s unified “house style” is an illusion generated by their brand-conscious marketing & distribution strategies (which are truly admirable in the way they lure broad audiences into seeing niche-interest art films).  I can’t deny that their in-house productions often share common tones & tropes, though, even if that’s only a result of selecting which projects to fund, as opposed to dictating what directors deliver in the final edit.  For instance, I’m confident I would’ve guessed what studio produced the “A24 Horror” film Men before I would’ve guessed which frequent A24 employee directed it.  Alex Garland is usually reliable for a chilly sci-fi creepout (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Devs), not an atmospheric folk horror with a blatant 1:1 metaphor behind all its grotesque imagery.  That’s glaringly recognizable A24 territory, even if general praise for the studio as a corporate auteur can be a little silly.

With Men, Alex Garland updates The Wicker Man for the post-Get Out era and ends up making his version of mother! in the process.  Jessie Buckley stars as the Big City outsider intruding on the strange, insular customs of rural Brits, tethered to her London homebase only through daily Facetime calls with her sister (who provides Lil Rel-style running commentary and eventual rescue).  The small-village cult she stumbles into worships at the altar of Misogyny.  The villagers are so unified in their hatred of women that they all share the same actor’s CG-applied face (Rory Kinnear’s), making the title Men shorthand for Yes, All Men.  This is a purely allegorical exercise.  Buckley’s terrorized heroine might be from a real-world London, but the countryside village where she vacations is outright Biblical in its heavy-handed visual metaphors, complete with a first-act reference to forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.  All of the men (or, more accurately, all of the man) in her vicinity blame her for their own moral & behavioral shortcomings, violently punishing her for their own sins.  Each variation of Kinnear represents a different misogynist archetype, from schoolboy mouthbreather to clueless microagressor to repressed incel to base, hateful animal.  In their sickly presence Buckley realizes that all men are the same, all men are creeps, and their pathetic, self-hating abuses against her are not actually her fault, no matter how deftly they’re excused (which is where the allegory echoes beyond the borders of the village to resonate in her real-world social life).

It’s difficult to parse out which aspects of Men are personal to Garland as an auteur vs. which aspects result from the expectations & standards of A24 Horror as a brand.  It’s a useless distinction in a lot of ways, since I appreciate both the director and the studio for consistently bringing provocative genre films to the American multiplex.  The reason I mention it at all is because Men is near impossible to discuss as a standalone work.  Most of the conversation around it focuses more on broad genre trends than it does on this movie in particular, guided by individual audiences’ personal appetite for yet another atmospheric, allegorical horror with blatant social messaging.  Regardless of the way Men participates in the macro trends of A24 productions or modern horror at large, I do think it’s clear that Garland is exploring something personal here.  It’s an anguished, pathetic expression of guilt about the misogyny lurking in all men—even the “nice” ones—that gets stunningly cathartic in its go-for-broke climax, releasing all of the film’s slow-winding tension in a slimy, disjointed fit of body horror.  If you want, you can continue to track the central metaphor in that grotesque display through the ways one form of misogyny (to borrow a term from Genesis) begets another.  It’s also just a broadcast of ugly, difficult-to-stomach impulses direct from Garland’s psyche, which is the exact kind of personal art I’m always looking for at the movies.  I find it strange that Garland stepped outside his home realm of sci-fi to exorcise these particular demons, but I hope enough people appreciate the effort that he feels it was worth the risk.  It’s a great, squirmy little horror film no matter where it fits in the larger cultural landscape or the director’s own catalog.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #117 of The Swampflix Podcast: Zombi Child (2020) vs. The Zombie Diaspora

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

Welcome to Episode #117 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss Bertrand Bonello’s new film Zombi Child (2020) and the ever-broadening zombie genre’s diasporic exodus away from its Haitian Vodou roots. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Britnee Lombas, James Cohn, and Brandon Ledet

Never Let Me Go (2010)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

The recent critical success of Annihilation (to say nothing about the film’s financial doom at the hands of its distributor) has been a welcome opportunity to look back to Alex Garland’s career-long achievements as a sci-fi screenwriter before he made the jump to buzzworthy auteur in his debut feature as a director, Ex Machina. A significant part of that reexamination has been tied to a rumor, recently confirmed by actor Karl Urban, that Garland was the uncredited director of the sci-fi action thriller Dredd. I very much enjoy Dredd as a slick, bare-bones slice of schlocky spectacle, but it’s not quite of the same cloth as what I enjoyed so much in Annihilation & Ex Machina. To me, Garland’s personal brand of sci-fi is one of heady, introspective melancholy. His films might feature Domhnall Gleeson seducing a sexy robot or Natalie Portman firing bullets at a monstrous alligator-beast, but they’re still works built on the backs of sci-fi ideas, as opposed to sci-fi spectacle. To that point, I’d suggest that the undersung work of Garland’s past is not Dredd at all, but rather the sci-fi melodrama Never Let Me Go. Adapted from a widely adored novel by Nobel prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, who also penned Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go is a romantic period drama set in an alternate timeline version of the 1970s (and later stretching to the 1990s). It details a decades-long love triangle melodrama between three doomed characters, recalling more the historical romantic epic ambitions of a film like Atonement rather than the shoot-em-up spectacle of Dredd. It’s not an especially fresh, attention-grabbing work. There’s no space travel, ray guns, or alternate dimensions. Instead, it dwells on the glum, moody repercussions a sci-fi dystopia wreaks on the emotional state of the characters who live it, which makes the film feel right at home with Garland’s more recent, more revered directorial efforts.

I was intrigued by the trailer for Never Let Me Go when I saw it nearly a decade ago, but also confused why the advertising made its central twist so obvious. As it turns out, it’s because the main conceit is not a twist at all, but a premise that’s stated up front and seen to its logical, emotional conclusion. A breakthrough discovery in the alternate history 1950s raised the live expectancy rate of the average citizen well past the 100-year mark: clones. Clones are systemically raised as part of an organ-farming program. Donations are involuntary, required without exception, and donors are raised to understand what fate awaits them as their purpose in life reaches “completion” (hint: they don’t get to enjoy the extended life expectancy rate the new technology affords the rest of the world). Our window into this scenario is a traditional British boarding school that only appears sinister at the margins. Cloned children are taught that it’s their special duty to keep themselves “healthy inside.” Chip readers, daily pills, and mysterious art contests hint at the administration behind their care, but we never peak behind the proverbial curtain. Instead, we watch them mimic social behaviors form music & television, find enormous pleasure in the thrift store castoffs of regular children, and search blindly for clues to the identity of the “originals” they were cloned from in any scraps of the outside would they can gather. From this grim backdrop emerges a decades-long tale of unrequited love & romantic jealousy among three of the boarding school student as they age out of the safety of childhood education and into active, repetitive organ donations. Some attention is paid to the mysteries behind the administrative structure of their preparation as donors, but the story is much more concerned with the emotional repercussion of an unfulfilled romantic life of people who were “born” to die young. It’s a small, intimate story told within the context of a massively ambitious sci-fi premise, so it’s no wonder Garland was drawn to telling it onscreen (he was also reportedly chummy with Ishiguro on a social basis, which helps I’m sure).

I can’t kick myself too much for missing Never Let Me Go in its initial theatrical run. Practically nobody saw this thing. It earned $9 million on a $15 million budget, only $2 million of which was domestic box office. The real shame there is that I believe the film could have been a huge hit if it had arrived just a few years later. Its romantic strife amidst a grim dystopia would have been right at home with the YA craze that followed The Hunger Games in 2012. Then there’s the cache of the film’s cast, which only gets more impressive every passing year: Keira Knightly, Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Sally Hawkins, Domhnall Gleeson, and so on. With Garland’s recent critical success, Never Let Me Go now has a unique context as a primer for his auteurist voice, but it’s honestly baffling that the film has yet to become a hot topic before, whether initially or upon reappraisal. The film may be a little low-key melancholy for a star-studded sci-fi picture, but it’s far from the limited appeal of the art house version of this child-farming territory in works like Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution. This is the tragic story of young people being disfigured & discarded by a menacing society who treats them like appliances, but in the midst of watching it the weight of that premise never overwhelms the simple love story at its core. If there’s anything Garland has proven himself to be particularly adept at, it’s achieving intimacy against the backdrop of far-reaching sci-fi concepts and Never Let Me Go is a great, distilled example of how effective that dynamic can be. He’s never quite turned that talent into boffo box office (not even with the popcorn action spectacle of Dredd), but Ex Machina & Annihilation both enjoyed a critical goodwill Never Let Me Go deserves as well. It’s doubtful that wide scale reappraisal is ever coming, since the movie’s previous lack of attention doesn’t make much sense either, but it’s still pure-Garland in its intimate sci-fi introspection, an auteurist voice we’re just starting to fully understand.

-Brandon Ledet

Ex Machina (2015)

/ swampflix / 20 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourhalfstar

Sometimes a straight-forward, low-key picture is the exactly correct approach when dealing with larger than life concepts. This can especially be true with sci-fi. I had a lot of fun with the twisty trashiness of this year’s Predestination, which was anything but tasteful, and the ludicrous world-building of last year’s The Zero Theorem, but neither of those examples haunted me quite as much as Alex Garland’s directorial debut Ex Machina. There’s something about Ex Machina’s straight-forward, no nonsense approach to sci-fi storytelling that struck a real chord in me. It’s not likely to win over folks who are looking to be surprised by every single development in its plot, but for those willing to enjoy the movie on its own stripped-down terms there’s a lot of intense visual rewards & interesting thematic explorations of, among other things, masculine romantic possessiveness that can be deeply satisfying. It’s a cold, tightly-controlled film that somehow echoes both the overwhelming psychedelic claustrophobia of Beyond the Black Rainbow & the you’re-in-over-your-head-kid misanthropy of last year’s brilliantly dark Frank without coming off as at all showy in the process. That’s no small feat.

Holding down the Frank end of that formula is incredibly talented Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson (who also starred in Frank, go figure), playing a young computer programmer who is recruited by a villainous half-Steve Jobs/half-Howard Hughes bro-type (played by the also talented Oscar Isaac) to test the consciousness of a just-invented AI robot called Ava. Despite her artificial appearance, Ava is incredibly human and challenges both her creator’s & her observer’s views of who & what she is, calling into question whether her confinement & lack of freedom is a form of abuse. As more is slowly revealed about Isaac’s mad scientist & the depthless intelligence Ava is hiding, the movie takes on a deeply sinister, misanthropic tone in which no one comes across as a good person, but rather all three parties are complicit in attempting to control, mislead, and manipulate, all for their own selfish reasons. In the cold confines of the remote compound where this three-way power struggle unfolds, there’s a deeply unsettling revelation about the worst aspects of human nature at play here, one that is in no way lessened by being able to see where the story is going before it arrives there.

The truly impressive thing about Ex Machina’s calm, controlled style is how striking of a visual effect the movie accomplishes through very simple, straightforward techniques. Throughout the film, there are frequent “power-outs” in the setting’s remote facility that bathe the screen in a threateningly intense red light. When the camera cuts from these images to the contrasting bright greens of nature outside, the movie not only draws a visual comparison between nature & artifice, it also creates a surprisingly psychedelic experience that recalls the futuristic medical facility of Beyond the Black Rainbow. Just like with its acting, story-telling, thematic explorations, tone, and pacing, the visual aesthetic established in Ex Machina is surprisingly effective for something so intentionally simple. It’s an impressive picture in how it makes no grand gestures to impress, relying on its inherent strengths instead of showy gimmickry to establish itself as a unique work. I found the effect of this approach both eerie and refreshing, both disturbing and poignant. In other words, it’s a great film.

-Brandon Ledet