Dancing About The Bone Temple

Reading back over my thoughts about 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, I’ve been frustrated that I can’t adequately describe exactly how the climax of that movie felt like multiple channels of information converging into one, sending a shockwave backwards and improving everything that came before it.

My friend Jake put it exceptionally well, so I’m going to steal it: “the final act of the movie was like a lens had been creeping towards me and suddenly a bunch of things crisply snapped into focus.”

For me, what was so remarkable was that it wasn’t just a sense of, “oh, I get what this movie is trying to say now,” but also, “I get how these movies work and why they tell their stories the way they do.” Things that I’d spent a long time dismissing as nothing more than stylistic flourishes suddenly seemed essential. They’re what make these movies have depth beyond stylish zombie thrillers, turning them into stories worth telling.

But how to describe in a blog post something that’s conveyed through flashes of jarringly incongruous imagery, old film clips, sound design, music choices, and editing? The phrase “dancing about architecture” came to mind, even though I’ve always thought of cinema and writing as being closely related, instead of completely disparate art forms.

At least on the “main” channel. I tend to think of movies as being narratives first, which are supported, clarified, refined, intensified, or occasionally subverted by everything going on in all the other channels available to cinema: cinematography, editing, sound effects, music, and so on.

Even when everything that’s going on in the “side” channels ends up being more interesting or impactful than the narrative. Until 28 Years Later, my favorite Danny Boyle movie had been Slumdog Millionaire. But my key memories of that movie have little to do with the love story at its core. Instead, they’re all about emotion: speed, determination, drive, celebration. I’ve always seen it as an example of how Boyle’s flourishes are what make it memorable at all. It’s a pretty straightforward story delivered with such energy and sentimentality that you feel it as much as you understand it.

And I’ve always thought that 28 Days Later was essentially the same thing: it’s a zombie story, and it has a strong sense of setting, and it’s intelligent, but what ultimately makes it interesting is all of the cinematic style applied to it. An elevated zombie thriller, but still more or less an iteration of the formula. All the familiar elements are there: societal breakdown, a group of survivors having to band together, suspicion and paranoia that someone is secretly infected, the cruelty of humans when society’s guard is down, etc.1

That’s why when I’m talking about “the 28 Days Later franchise,” I’m not including 28 Weeks Later. Not just because that was made without Boyle and Alex Garland’s involvement (by every account I’ve seen), but because it just didn’t seem to have any intention of being more than an iteration on stylish zombie suspense thriller. I enjoyed it a lot! I just didn’t get any indication it fit into what they’re trying to do with the new trilogy.

What I think they’re trying to do is present 28 years in an alternate timeline of the UK, and make it an allegory for the past almost-28 years in our universe. Going deeper into the ideas about societal breakdown common to zombie stories and post-apocalyptic stories in general, and coming up with a hopeful (at least, at the time I’m writing this) sense of coming out the other side.

Which means considering 28 Days Later as an integral part of the story the new trilogy is telling. Not retconning it exactly, so much as re-contextualizing it. Even before Cillian Murphy shows up in the coda of The Bone Temple, you’re already thinking of these three, soon-to-be-four movies2 as a single work. So the most distinctive and memorable images and ideas from the first are now swirling around along with the other images and ideas of the past, which are constantly surrounding all of these characters.

An eerily empty London in broad daylight. A virus bringing about the fall of an entire society. The virus created by government/military forces, but unleashed on the world because of animal rights activists. And the virus itself, which causes uncontrollable, unstoppable rage.

Even back in 2002, it wasn’t exactly subtle imagery: rage tearing down society. Taking down the established order, overthrowing a corrupt and sadistic military, a kind of social revolution that could only come from destruction and anarchy. When we come back to that time in the prologue of 28 Years Later, it’s all shot with the same visual language, and I think it’s significant — more than the obvious significance of setting up the story of the Jimmy cult — that we see kids watching television and the infected destroying a church.

But we also see that, 28 years later, the rage has mostly burned itself out. Almost all of the anarchic, millennial energy is gone, replaced with lumbering husks of former people, reduced to crawling through the forest eating bugs. And society hasn’t rebuilt itself; nothing productive came out of the rage and destruction. It’s just isolated communities stuck in survival mode with nothing more than their memories and traditions.

I have to wonder whether the subplot about the UK being quarantined from the rest of the world is a direct commentary on Brexit and isolationism, or if it’s a less pointed and more universal idea of trying to safely contain the fall of civilization inside a single place, like Escape from New York and Escape from Los Angeles. Desperately hoping to stave off change, confine it elsewhere, and continue living in the normal and familiar.

Even the visual style of 28 Days Later, which was so novel and distinctive at the time, has been woven into the visual language of the new movies. After I watched The Bone Temple, I mistakenly thought it was a half-hearted attempt to fit a Nia DaCosta-led movie into a series previously defined by Danny Boyle, a stylistic flourish done out of obligation. Now, though, I think it’s used in much the same way as the footage of medieval and early-20th-century warfare in 28 Years Later: it’s part of the memories of this place. The style of the first movie has become as much an indicator of “early 2000s” as Duran Duran songs are of the early 1980s.

Notably, it’s used whenever there’s an attack by (or an attack on) the infected (or, in the case of Samson, both at once). Who are themselves literal manifestations of early 2000s rage.

I also said that much of The Bone Temple was filmed “like a documentary about a gang of sadistic Satanists,” which I meant as in comparison to the flourishes of 28 Years Later, but even with that qualification, is still not right. The scenes with Dr Kelson and Samson still have the dreamlike quality of much of 28 Years Later, with shots of the countryside set to music, and long shots of the two of them incongruously sitting together or getting stoned together, or “happy together” montages. It’s only because so much of the story involves the Jimmy gang that the style seems so restrained and straightforward.

Which to me suggests the idea of the banality of evil. At the end of 28 Years Later, the gang is a bonkers surprise, and it’s all being seen from Spike’s perspective, so we get a lot of disorienting quick cuts. In The Bone Temple, the perspective has shifted to that of a dispassionate observer. We’re no longer seeing the world from Spike’s viewpoint, but switching between multiple stories, and Spike is the most sympathetic (and passive) participant in one of them.

The torture scene seems to go on for so long partly because it’s treated so matter-of-factly. We get a few gruesome close-ups, but none of the flashy editing or stylistic work that the series is more or less known for at this point. It feels like the movie flat-out refuses to let the audience romanticize any aspect of this violence. No “bullet time” shots like with one of the infected getting killed, and not even the brutal energy of an earlier scene where Samson rips a guy’s head and spine out of his body. There’s nothing exciting about any of this; it’s just horrible.

And the mutilated bodies are left hanging there for the rest of the scene. So long that the movie no longer seems to be emphasizing the horror of it, but just the pointlessness of it. Even while Jimmy Ink sits outside with Spike, having lost interest in what’s going on, casually commenting on the nature of the screaming. It’s not even that she’s numb to it by this point; it seems that she’s actually bored by its emptiness.

She doesn’t have the same psychotic bloodlust as the rest of the gang. She doesn’t need to lord power over people like Jimmy Crystal does. We’ve seen her effortlessly kill zombies, so she doesn’t need to do this to survive. We can infer that at some point in the past, she bought into the promise that they were serving some higher power, and that there was a real purpose to what they were doing, but now she’s realized that it’s all a lie. She was born into a world that had already fallen apart, with no sane person around to suggest that there’s any alternative.

So it’s perfectly fitting that there’s no sense of “magic” in the scenes with the Jimmy gang. They’re a cargo cult built around a psychopath’s childhood memories of a pedophile. They don’t represent anything beyond murder, destruction, and lies. There’s not even the hint of heavy-metal allure that was in Dr Kelson’s display.

Meanwhile, Dr Kelson is probably the sanest and most sympathetic character that we’ve seen in the trilogy so far. But the Duran Duran songs, and the nostalgic snapshots, drive home the idea that he’s not that different from the other survivors we’ve seen: locked inside memories. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have needed to hear “Girls on Film” and “Ordinary World” to get this, considering the man lives inside a monument made from the bones of dead people, which is the title of the movie, and he repeatedly says “remember we will die.”

28 Years Later makes a lot of the contrast between the security and safety of Spike’s home village, and the orange-colored man living alone amidst towers made from dead bodies he renders down to bones and ashes. It’s key to the story of that movie: this is Spike’s idea of normal, and it’s very similar to ours, and it’s surprising that he’s shown the most kindness and compassion by the person who seems to be the most dangerous and insane.

The Bone Temple follows that contrast by showing how they’re actually similar. Kelson spends all of his time remembering the past and trying to honor the dead. The village spends all of its time inside a “Wee Britain:” recreating a society based on romanticized memories of tradition and culture, right down to recreating all of their faults. They’re driven by war and honor, isolating themselves on a small island and driving away any hostile intruders.

It’s fascinating that The Bone Temple‘s climax cuts between Kelson’s version of Old Nick, and Samson regaining his senses. I have no idea if this is the actual plan, or if it would even work in terms of story, but the end of The Bone Temple vaguely suggests that this is a zombie story where the hope for the future isn’t in the survivors, but the zombies.

His words are the first suggestion that something has actually changed, something new has actually happened in this world, after 28 years of being locked in rage, murder, and false memories. His fighting his way out of the train car feels like more than just survival, but breaking free.

And Jimmy Crystal’s vision of a blood-soaked Samson as Satan, and his calling out “why have you forsaken me?” isn’t just one last bit of self-important blasphemy. It’s an omen. Samson really does have the potential that Jimmy Crystal always lied about, of bringing about a new world from destruction, and the final insult is that he’s going to have no part in it.

The coda shows Cillian Murphy’s character and his daughter (?) living in safety and presumed security, but I thought it was notable that all of their dialogue is about history. And that he’s both her tutor and her teacher, implying that they either live alone or in a very small community. The feel of the scene is safety, security, and serenity, but we’ve already seen that in this world, that also means stagnation.

The very end suggests that the next part of the story is going to be about how their peaceful existence is going to be upset by the arrival of Spike and the former Jimmy Ink. I’m a lot more intrigued by the suggestion that they’re all unaware that somewhere out there, there’s a nude giant who’s about to change the world.

1
Now that I think about it, that’s probably why I enjoyed the hell out of Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, but it basically evaporated the second it was over. I still think it was extremely well made, but ultimately didn’t “mean” even as much as the original.

2
Again, no offense to 28 Weeks Later

1 Now that I think about it, that’s probably why I enjoyed the hell out of Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, but it basically evaporated the second it was over. I still think it was extremely well made, but ultimately didn’t “mean” even as much as the original.

2 Again, no offense to 28 Weeks Later