Director Report Card: Danny Boyle (2010)

 

13. 127 Hours

 

It is, by any definition of the word, an extraordinary story. I vaguely recall hearing the true life tale in or around 2003. Of how a rock climber had his arm pinned to a cave wall by a fallen boulder. How he survived for five days in a narrow crack in the Utah desert before realizing he was going to die of dehydration without desperate action. Using the weight of his own body against the rock wall, he shattered his forearm before slowly amputating above the elbow with a tiny pocket knife. How he then repelled down a 65-foot drop and hiked for seven miles, his bloody stump crudely tied off, finally being found by a vacationing family. Delirious, dehydrated, and bleeding badly, the man was air-lifted to a hospital, ultimately surviving the entire ordeal. The incident inspires either awe at the ability of the human spirit to endure or horror at how terrifyingly wrong things can go. Personally, it inspired me to never ever go hiking in the desert or anywhere else for that matter.  Either way, it's the kind of insane true story you're not likely to forget once you hear it. Naturally, such a tale of survival and resilience prompted multiple media appearances and a book deal. 

And, obviously, a movie. After Aron Ralston's autobiographical recollection of the event, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place," became a bestseller, Danny Boyle became fascinated with the story. He spent four years trying to develop a film based on the book, writing a treatment himself before passing it over to Simon Beaufoy to expand it into a feature length script. After winning Best Director and Beat Picture for "Slumdog Millionaire," Boyle had the necessary cache to make the film. In the context of his overall career, that feels like a very calculated move. A director gets a bunch of Oscars and his next project is an inspirational, based-on-a-true-story biography about the will to survive. In other words, certainly not the kind of movie that was going to dispel any notices that the guy who made "Trainspotting" had thoroughly sold out by this point, his punk rock spirit having given way to sentimental studio schlock and a hunger for more gold statues. "127 Hours" got plenty of nominations but few wins. Fifteen years after its release, the film does seem to be slightly better regarded among the edgy dickheads like myself than some of Boyle's other post-"Slumdog" work. 

By spring of 2003, mechanical engineer Aron Ralston was an experienced mountaineer, rock climber, and hiker. On the 26th of April, he left his home early in the morning without telling anyone of his plans. He drove south of the Canyonlands National Park into a mountainous range of desert. He was there to explore Bluejohn Canyon, a long and narrow channel in which sheer walls close in all around those inside. After diving into a hidden cave pool with two female hikers, and getting invited to a party the next night, Aron continues onward by himself. That is when an 800 pound boulder is dislodged, crushing his right arm and trapping him in the remote canyon. Knowing no help is on the way, and with little water left, Ralston tried everything he could to escape without success for five days. Documenting his experience with the camcorder he brought with him, he consigned himself to death before finding the strength to perform the act of bodily mutilation that would save his life.

Ralston's story is, without question, a bizarre and captivating one that can't help but be passed along. However, I don't think Boyle was attracted to the material because he was inspired by Ralston's willingness to survive or the grisly, "can you believe this shit?" facts of the matter. In interviews about the film, he described being inspired by Darren Aronofsky's “The Wrestler,” by a desire to follow one character in a similar super-focused manner. He also described “127 Hours” as an “action movie with a guy who can't move.” In other words, Ralston's story presented a technical challenge. How do you make a compelling cinematic work out of a story about a guy who is fixed to one spot? For five days, Ralston was wedged into a tiny cave. How do you translate that experience to the screen without it being visually tedious, keeping the isolation and desperation of the story without devoting the entire runtime to mostly stationary shots of one guy in one place? 

When presented with such a boundary, a filmmaker essentially has two steps they can take. First off, they can cheat. By which I mean they can venture outside the confines of the canyon Ralston was trapped in, via the power of flashbacks, memories, dream sequences, or focusing equally on his life before the accident as during it. This would basically violate the main promise of “127 hours,” that it would be primarily devoted to depicting the week he was down that hole with the big-ass rock on his arm. Boyle's film only does this a little bit. After all of fifteen minutes, Aron gets trapped under the boulder. At which point the film's title appears on-screen, signaling to the viewer that this story is actually beginning. We do get glimpses of his childhood and nights with an ex-girlfriend. The diversions outside of the canyon, however, are mostly composed of the dreams and hallucinations Ralston experienced while in this situation. They are in the film, primarily, to get the viewer further into the main character's head. We are seeing his thoughts and feeling illustrated, just as much as the physical reality of what he went through.

The other option – if the filmmaker has the foresight to realize that the caving accident is what this story is about, that the audience is interested in this and not the mundane details of Ralston's life before – is to fuck around with the camera as much as possible. One suspects that the very first shot Boyle conceived of when imagining the film occurs shortly after Aron realizes he's stuck. The camera rushes up out of the crevasse, as he screams for help, until the viewer is looking down from the heavens at this massive, jagged line in the ground in a vast and empty landscape. This is the first, truly blatant example in the film of Boyle pairing an otherwise stationary story with as much visual flashiness as possible. He sticks the camera inside the drinking tube of Ralston's water bottle on more than one occasion. The film begins with a montage spread across three sections of the screen, a technique the director also revisits a number of times. Two cinematographers worked on “127 Hours.” Boyle's regular Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, who previously worked on “28 Weeks Later,” are both credited. One assumes that the movie's hyper-kinetic visual sense necessitated two directors of photography behind the camera. 

In a lot of way, this makes “127 Hours” a lot closer to the frantic style that characterized the rowdier, wackier moments in “Trainspotting” or “Shallow Grave” than the relative realism that kind of defined Boyle's post-digital work. The cinematography whips around from a number of perspectives. Some scenes are from an objective third point of view, as movies usually are shot, while a lot of others are from Ralston's point-of-view. The audience is sometimes privy to Ralston's thoughts via voice over. The longer underground he is, the more unstable his mental state becomes. This is depicted with an increasingly wilder sound design, emphasizing the off-screen sounds of a bird. The pain of the make-shift surgery is verbalized with a buzzer sound. The trademark chortling of Scooby-Doo is rendered sinister, in a clever way. The most extreme flights of fancy in the film are either when Aron dreams of a flood freeing him from the rock. Or it might be when he imagines himself on a talk show of sorts, Boyle once again revisiting the idea of using banal television as a contrast to the horrors of the story. 

What I'm saying is, yes, “127 Hours” doesn't feature elaborate camera angles and fantastical sequences simply because Danny Boyle realized he had to make the movie look cool or else risk making a boring movie. Attempting to replicate Ralston's delirious state of mind does give the filmmakers plenty of option to go a little crazy. On a more literal level, there is some precedence in the story for playing around with the frame of the image. The real life Aron Ralston has ascertain that “127 Hours” is a rather authentic recreation of what he lived through. The man video-taping himself – leaving a video journal of sorts behind, under the expectations that he was going to die and could only hope someone would discover it some day – is a matter of record. That means an element of a screen, the aperture screen of the cam-corder, is present in the story. The scenes of Ralston monologuing to the camera makes one imagine a fictionalized version of this story told as a found footage film, a fairly popular trend still in 2010. If nothing else, it's an organic way for Boyle and his team to incorporate a little bit of “28 Days Later's” digital look into this film.

I have no idea if Danny Boyle himself felt he had lost some of his edge a little over his last few movies. If he felt “Slumdog Millionaire” was a crowd-pleaser or that genre films like “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine” operated within certain fantastical limits. Either way, “127 Hours” does feel a little bit like an active attempt to re-capture the high energy and anti-social behavior of “Trainspotting.” In particular, this often feels like an attempt to stretch out the unsettling ambiance of the detox sequence from that movie for a much longer time. Clearly, the goal is to have as much of the movie occupy a feverish state for as long as possible, dreams and reality bleeding into each other, physical agony and a fear of death taking over the protagonist's mind. “127 Hours” can't sustain that kind of nervous emotion for a whole ninety minutes. However, it succeeds more often than not. If nothing else, the amputation scene feels properly frenzied and leaves a seasick feeling in your stomach while it is happen.

A big reason why “127 Hours” is able to build as much tension as it can – despite most people watching it being aware that Aron Ralston did not die in that canyon – is because of the music. Boyle must have been happy with the work A.R. Rahman did scoring “Slumdog Millionaire,” as they worked together on this again. Rahman's score often utilizes a simple, pounding bass chord, simulating both the drum of a speeding up heartbeat and invoking the sense that something unfortunate is about to happen soon. This motif reappears any time Ralston is making a serious attempt to make an escape, reminding the viewer what is at stake and how easily all of it can fall apart. When paired with fast cut images of Rolstan trying to rig a pulley up or water filling the canyon, it successfully puts the audience at unease. (The rest of Rahman's score relies on creating a dreamy ambiance or suggesting the wide and empty desert landscape. That's the mood the expected Oscar bait song, performed by an expectedly breathy Dido, operates in.) The very specifically chosen soundtrack choices also reminded me of Boyle's earlier, rowdier films. Bill Withers' “Lovely Day” has never been more genuinely uplifting and ebullient then here. 

While “127 Hours” strikes me as a mostly sincere effort to recapture the unpredictable grit of Boyle's earlier films, thematically it is still far more connected to the likes of “Slumdog Millionaire” than “Trainspotting.” Like the Best Picture winner, “127 Hours” muses on the nature of destiny and fate. In its opening scene, a peering camera makes sure to show us that Aron missed grabbing his Swiss army knife – which he later wishes he had when performing make-shift surgery on himself – by a matter of inches. Later, while considering the rock holding him down, he thinks about how the stone had been waiting for him for thousand of years. A confluence of events, whether by chance or fate, is what brings all of us to our destinations. However, much like “Slumdog Millionaire,” “127 Hours” does seem to suggest that we do have some pre-ordained fates ahead of us. Ralston, both in the film and real life, credits a vision of his future son with giving him the final push he needed to finally escape. Who is to say what the truth is or not but, at least within this film's universe, specific things can only happen as chain reactions of events in the past.

Another challenge specific to this true story is that, if adapted, it means mostly one person is going to be the only actor on-screen for the majority of its runtime. Recognizable faces like Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn appears as two hiker Aron befriends before his accident. Other actors appear in flashbacks and fantasies. However, for most of the movie, this is a one-man show for James Franco. Franco, multi-hyphenated artist of debatable merit and shitty person though he might be, does handle the task well. Franco has the exact correct level of cockiness you'd expect from a guy who'd go on a perilous hike without telling a single soul. An exhaustion and desperation is evident on Franco's face as the situation grows graver. If nothing else, he properly creates a protagonist that the audience can root for without ignoring the flaws and mistakes he has to make up for.
 

The moment “127 Hours” most resembles your standard, inspirational biopic is in its final minutes. That's when the real life Ralston puts in the expected cameo appearance during the pre-credits round-up of facts about his life since. It is noted that his accident did nothing to dissuade his interest in mountain climbing and extreme hiking, which is meant to play as a triumphant note. In real life, Aron's brush with mortality, in his own words, turned him into a bit of a cocky asshole. And then the next time he was in the news was him and his second wife getting arrested for smacking each other around. Compared to that, the film adaptation of his misadventure only scoring six Oscars nominations and no wins – compared to “Slumdog Millionaire” sweeping – feels like less of a drop-out. All of that aside, this one actually isn't bad. If Boyle was mostly interested because he wanted to see if he could overcome the built-in limitations of the material, I would say he did successfully navigate that roadblock in his own way. [Grade: B]

 

Director Report Card: Danny Boyle (2008)

 

12. Slumdog Millionaire

This is right around the time I jumped off the Danny Boyle train. "Sunshine" disappointed me so much that I immediately became skeptical of his involvement in any other project. When his follow-up was announced, I can vividly recall narrowing my eyes and thinking "Oh, so it's a movie about "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" Who cares about that?" A lot of people, it turns out. We all know now that "Slumdog Millionaire" would become a sleeper hit, grossing 375 million worldwide against a 15 million dollar budget, making it the biggest film of its director's career by a large margin. "Slumdog Millionaire's" success did not end there, as it also swept through most of the big award shows. The film's list of accolades include eight Oscars, seven BAFTAs, four Golden Globes, three Grammys, and plenty of others. This did nothing to dissuade my notion that Danny Boyle wasn't on my wavelength anymore. Though I like to think I've mostly outgrown my teenage contrarian attitudes, I'll admit this marks the first time I've actually sat down to watch "Slumdog Millionaire." 

Jamal has the chance of a lifetime. He is appearing on "Kaun Banega Crorepati," the Hindi version of "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?," and he's very close to winning the grand prize. He's so close that the show runners think he is cheating and Jamal is brutally interrogated by law enforcement. This is when he recounts the journey that has brought him to this place: Jamal and his brother Salim grew up in the slums of Mumbai. After the death of their mother, they fell in with a gangster who trains children to be beggars... Usually by crippling or wounding them, so their increasingly pathetic state will receive more hand-outs. There, they meet Latika, a young girl who also grew up in the slums. While escaping their master, Latika is separated from the boys. The brothers do whatever they can to survive but Jamal remains determined to find Latika. They discover her being prepared to be a prostitute, resulting in Salim murdering their former caretaker and pushing his brother away. Years later, Jamal works as a gopher in a call center, Salim is an errand man for a high-profile gangster, and Latika is now the kept woman of the same mobster. Jamal has worked to appear on the game show in hopes of contacting Latika and winning enough money to change their lives forever. 

The thread most connecting "Slumdog Millionaire" to Boyle's earlier work is its brutal depiction of poverty. You can find a line from the junk houses of "Trainspotting," the vagabonds of "Strumpet," and the post-apocalyptic wanderers of "28 Days Later" to the homeless kids here doing anything they can to survive. The film doesn't pull many punches. It starts by literally covering the protagonists, head to toe, in human feces. Somehow, this is only the beginning of the challenges the boy faces. That children are the focus of the first half of the film only makes these events more harrowing. In life under the poverty line, in the shadows of Mumbai, even little kids are another potential cash source to be exploited. Whether that's via prostitution or burning their eyes and breaking their arms to make them more effective beggars. The people who claim to want to protect and care for these kids are only manipulating them for a chance to make more money further down the line. Cash is the only thing that seems to matter to the majority of people in this world, Jamal being propelled by love making him an outlier in a thoroughly cynical world. 

"Slumdog Millionaire's" depiction of life as an unhoused child around the city formally known as Bombay attracted considerable controversy. This is a film partially made by Europeans about marginalized brown people in another country, bringing with it the expected subtext of othering different cultures and races in order to score points as a properly aware white person. This would make the film typical "misery porn," made by white storytellers for a white audience, about how bad those poor people have it in some far away place. A tokenized and simplified version of life in another country designed to make rich people thousands of miles away feel bad on the route to making themselves feel better. That Jamal speaks with a British accent in the latter half of the film also suggests an uncomfortable need to align the Anglo viewer with the dark skinned protagonist. Indian critics have accused "Slumdog Millionaire" of painting an overly negative depiction of India, some going so far as to call it an "anti-Indian film" or an assault on the country's self-esteem. These are obviously very serious accusations, not without foundation, that deserved to be considered. 

I'm merely a pasty-skinned dumb-ass on the internet and any contribution I could make to this debate is unneeded. However, it's not as if any of the things depicted in the film – child exploitation, prolific poverty, criminal empires – don't actually happen in Mumbai. "Slumdog Millionaire" does not depict India as a country without kindness, love, or joy. However, it does accurately reflect India as a country crippled by a caste system designed to keep the disadvantaged poor and the rich ever more powerful. Crime or falling into money is depicted as the only way to achieve true upward momentum on a culture that values currency more than it values people. If this is seen as an unfair criticism of Indian culture, then it must be an unfair criticism of places all over the world. It's not as if the film was made without an Indian perspective, as Loveleen Tanden receives a co-directing credit on the film. I'm far too dumb and white to contribute meaningfully to this conversation. I would say an outsider making observations on Indian culture is worthy of criticism but it would seem to me that most of the problems depicted here are very real and this is an honest handling of them.

As much as "Slumdog Millionaire" is a gritty drama about life on the streets, it is also paradoxically a fairy tale of sorts. This is designed to be the underdog-iest of underdog stories. By sinking Jamal into a pool of literal human excrement in the first act, our hero begins in about as low a situation as can be imagine. From this, he pulls himself up to being a literal millionaire. He escapes adversity and then learns to survive through his own wits. There's a sort of frantic, youthful energy to scenes of him and Salim riding the rails of a train way, stealing food and goods from the rich, that is delivered like a child enthusiastically telling an exaggerated story of their adventures. When he starts to con gullible tourists into believing he's a tour guide to the Taj Mahal, it has the impish feeling of getting away with something, pulling one over on the snobs. There's no doubt that actually living this life would be difficult, full of hardships, starvation, and misery. "Slumdog Millionaire" acknowledges that while also playing like someone joyfully recounting the misadventures of their younger days. 

In fact, that's exactly what "Slumdog Millionaire" is. The majority of the film is told in flashback, Jamal relating his story to the cops interrogating him or reflecting on past events while in the middle of the game. He recalls events with such specificity, the circumstances he has lived through leading so directly into the questions he is asked on the game show, that the movie comes dangerously close to feeling contrived or corny. There's a real “Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays” atmosphere to the way the film is structured. Human memory doesn't actually work like that and, on account of all of us being human hopefully, we all know this. You have to buy into the improbable likeliness of that set-up to enjoy "Slumdog Millionaire" or else you'll be incredulously shaking your head the entire time. This is why the film invokes that fairy tale like tone throughout most of its runtime. It allows for contrivances that would otherwise drop you right out of the reality of the story. 

And what would a fairy tale be without a princess? Throughout the life time of events "Slumdog Millionaire" depicts, it looks like Jamal and Latika meet only a handful of times as adults. One of those meetings includes him seeing her from a far-off distance, the woman waving at him. Over years, Jamal remains fixated on Latika, making it his life long mission to find her, rescue her from the situation she is in, and be with her forever. The film ends soundly on the note of "And they lived happily ever after." This premise never once addresses if Latika wants Jamal to "rescue" her from the life she has. If being the moll of a Bombay gangster is an existence she might actually have become accustomed to. In fact, the character is never given any sort of interior life at all. She exists exactly like a princess in a tower, a goal for the hero to work towards, a reward for triumphing. The script takes it as a given that the girl wants to be with the boy. She is an enshrined ideal, a perfect sweetheart, whose presumed life of affiliation with criminals is only passingly acknowledged. Latika remains oddly virginal for someone nearly sold into sexual slavery, untouched and unsullied like a prim princess in a children's tale is supposed to be. 

Like I said, "Slumdog Millionaire" is knowingly invoking this tone, allowing it to get away with tropes that might otherwise have been deemed problematic. We simply have to take the film on its word that Latika is a fully-formed human being who has understandable reasons for everything she does. I guess the kid you knew briefly in grade school who is suddenly a millionaire is probably the preferable choice over a grouchy crime boss, despite him kind of stalking you for a decade. That Boyle and his team can get away with this is because "Slumdog Millionaire" is partially a homage to the greatest format for improbable tales that has ever been devised: The motion picture. The character establishing moment for Jamal is when he wades through shit to get an autograph from Amitabh Bachchan, a beloved icon of Bollywood cinema. Stories shown from a projector or a television screen are depicted as whimsical escapes from the characters' harsh lives. It is the medium that ultimately provides Jamal an out from this hard life. I am woefully unfamiliar with Hindi cinema but, from my understanding, fantastical stories of heroes escaping adversity, brothers becoming enemies, strangely chaste romances, and random song-and-dance numbers are reoccurring tropes of this world. "Slumdog Millionaire" is clearly invoking these ideas in a self-aware way, most blatantly in the subplot of Salim's rise and fall within Mumbai's underworld. The movie makes the viewer wait the entire runtime for the dance number, that most expected of Bollywood cliches, and it acts as a much awaited exhale right before the credits role. Those who are familiar with India's national style of filmmaking primarily through cultural osmosis can still recognize the tools Boyle and Tandan are intentionally working with. (This also explains why the Academy loved the movie so much, as odes to the magic of the cinema are among their favorite topics.)

Ultimately, "Slumdog Millionaire" is using these ideas in service of a story about destiny. Though perhaps not from the angle you are expecting. Throughout Jamal's recollection of his life, he comes across events that very specifically prepare him for the questions he has to answer on the game show. Some of these function as quirks of happenstance, the answer he needing in that moment appearing as a minor background detail during a pivotal memory. Other times, they appear as acts of divine intervention, such as when a vision of Rama appears to him as a boy. It would be easy to assume that "Slumdog Millionaire" is telling a cheesy story about a protagonist who happens to have lived the exact correct circumstances to bring him to this moment. However, the retrospective aspect to the way the film is constructed gives me another reading instead. We are all results of the lives we have lived. The choices we make in the future are an accumulation of the events we have lived through, the people we've known, and what we've learned in the past. If you see "Slumdog Millionaire" as simply a fairy tale, Jamal gets his cash prize as his "Cinderella" reward for living through a shitty life. If taken as an pondering on the nature of life and fate, the film can be seen as showing us that each of us are constructed by everything that has come before us.

For all the interesting ideas inside the film, this easily could have still come across as a coy and overly calculated attempt at sentimental story telling, with a possibly patronizing tone towards another race. However, what I think truly holds "Slumdog Millionaire" together is Dev Patel's lead performance. As Jamal, he is a bundle of utter sincerity. You believe that he truly loves Lakita because Petal makes the guy seem so utterly enraptured by this woman he's only talked to a few times. The absolute sincerity Petal brings to the character makes him easy to root for. You want to see the guy succeed, against the adverse circumstances he's lived with. The entire movie truly belongs to Patel, as his youthful energy and charm keeps the viewer compelled during the more improbable narrative choices the film makes. When the final question, the climax of the story arrives, the look of dumbfounded luck on Patel's face goes a long way towards selling the emotion of not only that moment but the entire film.

This would mark Boyle's fifth collaboration with Anthony Dod Mantle, the director of photographer ultimately winning an Oscar for his work here. The gritty, digital style Mantle is known for, that be brought to "28 Days Later," is certainly present here. Much of "Slumdog Millionaire" is characterized by a dark and muddy approach. However, this is paired with some colorful visual exclamation points, pauses in the chaos that stand out. While I'm not the biggest fan of Mantle's cinematography, it is considerably enlivened by Chris Dickens' editing. Dickens previously worked on Edgar Wright's first two features and, funny enough, that high-energy style of cutting recalls the kinetic approach of Boyle's earlier films. This means, visually, "Slumdog Millionaire" represents a fusion between the approach that defined his earlier work and the digital graininess that had come to dominate his last few movies.

Having now seen “Slumdog Millionaire,” I think I can safely say that there were probably better movies released that year, that arguably deserved to sweep the Oscars more than this one. However, it's also not a bad movie. A strong leading man and an interesting approach to its material makes the film a pleasant enough watch. If this represents Boyle's shift from indie weirdo to mainstream crowd-pleaser, I suppose worst fates are possible for directors. The film will soon become a Broadway musical, proving that this certainly isn't the most forgotten of Best Picture winners from that decade, no matter how divisive it remains among the serious film fan crowd. Corny but energetic, calculated but sweet, “Slumdog Millionaire” does manage to entertain decently enough for the time you spend watching. [Grade: B]

Director Report Card: Danny Boyle (2007)

 

11. Sunshine

“Millions” did not receive much notice in the United States. For American fans of Danny Boyle, what felt like the real follow-up to “28 Days Later” wouldn't arrive until 2007. What made the film more anticipated by fans of Boyle's zombie thriller is that it was a continuation of many of those same partnerships. “Sunshine” emerged from a script by Alex Garland, marking his third collaboration with the director. Cillian Murphy would return as the leading man. Most exciting, the film would see the team that revitalized the zombie movie trying their hands at another stalwart genre: The science fiction epic. All of which is to say that “Sunshine” was highly anticipated upon release in 2007. For a lot of people, it must've lived up to the hype. In the years since, I've often seen “Sunshine” praised by my fellow film nerds. I, however, was so disappointed with the film when I first saw it, that it changed my whole opinion of its director. Has my opinion changed any in eighteen years?

Fifty years into the future, the entire planet Earth is facing a crisis like never before. Our sun is dying. The world is freezing. A space craft known as the Icarus was sent on a mission to reignite the fading star with a nuclear bomb. They failed, disappearing somewhere around Mercury. Now, a second mission is own its way, the last chance the world has for survival. Icarus II is captained by Kaneda, navigated by Trey, and piloted by Cassie. And the mission is not going well. Physicist Capa and engineer Mace are getting into fights. The oxygen garden manned by biologist Corazon is ignited by an intense ray of sunlight. Upon discovering the abandoned Icarus I, the team detours to gather the first bomb from this other vessel, giving themselves two chances to save Earth. Kaneda is killed, Trey has a mental breakdown, and the ship is not left with enough oxygen to complete the mission. They dock with Icarus I to find its crew incinerated within and an unworking bomb. An explosion follows, leading to the death of two more crew members. As the Icarus II carries its sole payload to the sun, more unexpected dangers will threaten a mission that seems increasingly hopeless. 

Garland would be inspired to write “Sunshine” after researching the inevitable heat death of the universe. The writer and director spent a year fine-tuning the script, going through over thirty drafts. Scientific advisors were hired to ensure that the movie was as plausible as possible. This included a professor of particle physics regularly giving the cast and crew lectures on the topic at hand. This makes “Sunshine” a clear example of what is called “hard sci-fi.” There is no fantastical technology like faster-than-light travel, teleportation, or hyper-sleep. No aliens or exotic theories are present. That didn't stop “Sunshine” from being picked apart by real world scientists. The death of our star is due to a Q-ball – a type of theoretical particle phenomenon that I'm definitely not smart enough to explain – being caught within our sun. That wouldn't be possible, apparently, nor could a single nuclear device reignite a dying star. Nevertheless, the film is still a lot more realistic than most movies about space travel and intergalactic disaster. 

As any astronaut or cosmologist or astrophysicist will tell you, space is big. The characters in “Sunshine” are utterly isolated from their friends and family at home, uncertain if their messages are even reaching them. They have been on this mission for years now, disconnected from what is happening on their frozen world. More than anything else, space is incredibly dangerous. This is the idea that “Sunshine” emphasizes the most. A minor miscalculation can cause a calamity. A stray ray of sunlight is enough to ignite the oxygen store within the shuttle. In other words, space sucks. The entire population of the planet Earth is counting on their success but the team is surrounded by peril at every turn. I don't know if there's anything “harder” in science fiction than emphasizing that space travel is insanely dangerous. 

A space mission being constantly beset by misfortune and calamity probably would've been enough to make a suitably dramatic film. Accordingly, “Sunshine” focuses its narrative entirely on the ship. We see very little of how the sun slowly dying has effected life on Earth. However, the script never lets us forget that saving Earth is the entire purpose of this mission. That creates an apocalypse that is ultimately a bit too conceptual to get your brain around. Obviously, we know resurrecting the sun to save all life on Earth is important... But it would've been nice if “Sunshine” showed us that a little more than it simply told us that. A film about the sun fading out, Earth slowly succumbing to increasing cold and unending winter, strikes me as a lot more interesting than a movie about the mission to reignite the sun. With the script so stubbornly refusing to give us a sense of what is at stakes here, it leaves “Sunshine's” narrative without much tension. 

There's another reason why I struggle with becoming invested in “Sunshine.” I don't care about any of these characters. The film has an ensemble cast of about eight characters, which doesn't seem like a lot. However, the script splits time between a few of them, never truly establishing a protagonist to center the audience. Frustratingly, few attempts are made to develop these characters beyond their role on the ship. Chris Evan's James Mace is an engineer and perpetually angry. Michelle Yeoh's Corazon cares a lot about her plants. Cliff Curtis' Searle has an eccentric fascination with sunlight. Most of the rest of the crew don't get that much development, Rose Byrne's Cassie merely being the pilot and Troy Garity's Harvey never emerging as anything more than the second-in-command. Only their positions on the ship, their names, and the various famous faces playing them distinguishes them.

The characters in “Sunshine” are so indistinct that I often have trouble remembering which one is which. The film often has them wearing bulky space suits that obscure their faces, making it harder to remember who is who. That is a big problem when almost the entire film is about slowly killing off the cast. “Sunshine” repeatedly reminds us how many people are on the Icarus II, how many are needed to complete the mission, and how much oxygen is left to support that number. With every additional accident and death, their chances for success diminishes further. Never mind that their odds of actually getting to the sun and reviving it are low to begin with. Understandly, being on a suicide mission to save the entire fucking solar system has left the entire crew in pretty grumpy moods. This means “Sunshine” starts out in a grim place, tonally, and only grows more fatalistic as it continues. When combined with characters that are difficult to be invested in, it makes the entire film feel like a miserable slog. 

“Sunshine” would see Boyle collaborating with cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler for the first time. Küchler was best known, at the time, for his work on documentations like “One Day in September” and low budget dramas like Lynne Ramsay's “Ratcatcher.” It was his fifth collaboration with editor Chris Gill, who had been cutting Boyle's films since “Strumpet” and was crucial in designing the frantic visual style of “28 Days Later.” Gill's quick cuts and Küchler's gritty style do not make for the smoothest combination. This might just be a me thing but I genuinely have a lot of trouble following “Sunshine” simply on a visual level. This might be because “Sunshine” is often focused on creating a claustrophobic atmosphere, sticking us inside the helmets of these space suits and the tight, dark corners of the ship. Or maybe I'm simply stupid or something. Either way, throughout this viewing, I often lost track of where the characters where, the lay-out of the ship, and the position of the vessel in relation to the vastness of the stars and planets around it. 

I'm referring simply to the basic look of the film. That doesn't include the flashy, stylized flourishes that Boyle, Küchler and Gill also include. Upon entering the Icarus I for the first time, split-second images of the deceased crew flash on-screen. That didn't effect my ability to follow the story. In fact, maybe it was a little cool. However, in its last third, “Sunshine” introduces an annoying visual quirk. Every time a particular character is on a scene, the images become washed-out, blurry, pulsating, and distorted. The idea is obviously to up the tension, making the villain seem as if he's effecting the reality around him. Unfortunately, it also makes the movie increasingly difficult to follow. The climax of “Sunshine” left me baffled to the point that I had to re-read the Wikipedia plot synopsis afterwards to understand what was going on. 

You might have noticed I said “villain” above, in a story where the opposing force would seem to be a natural disaster and not an individual. With a little over thirty minutes left to go before end credits roll, “Sunshine” makes a massive narrative shift. Throughout most of the movie, I was under the impression that Boyle's main inspiration where grand, technical space exploration stories like “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “Silent Running.” Instead, it turns out that “Sunshine” was most obviously inspired by “Alien.” In its final act, the film suddenly introduces a villain. How he gets into the ship is left unexplained. How he continues to pursue the remaining characters seems difficult to determine. How he survives the wounds that turned him from a normal man and into a monster seems implausible. It is a big shift in the narrative that catches the audience off-guard.

And that could've worked. Sure. Bigger swings than that have proven compelling before. Boyle and Garland have made wild shifts in their films before, to varying levels of success. However, what “Sunshine” does after suddenly thrusting a visceral, physical threat into the story is rather baffling. This sci-fi thriller about the end of the world, for some reason, becomes a slasher movie. That's not an exaggeration. The last third is devoted to a hideously deformed villain, who rambles like a lunatic, working his way through the remaining cast and killing them one by one. Like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees before him, he repeatedly pops back up after seemingly being defeated, relentlessly following the final girl and survivor boy. He survives a number of injuries that would've killed any normal person, before finally perishing in a spectacularly gory fashion. Now, I love a good slasher movie. Truthfully, I love a lot of bad slasher movies too. There aren't too many subgenres I have more of a built-in affection for than a trashy, gory, body count flick. However, this sudden shift has always struck me as such a severe change in direction that it leaves “Sunshine” completely unmoored in its final act. 

“Sunshine” starting out as a very high-minded film concerned with highly technical scientific details, only to end up as a trashy genre exercise at the last minute is a trick that was always going to be hard to pull off. Unfortunately, “Sunshine” continues to operate as if it's a profound meditation on various serious topics even after becoming a murder spree. The villain is motivated by apparent visions from God, believing humanity is doomed and it is wrong to try and save us. This ties into the ideas throughout the film, of human spirit's ability to always find a goal that keeps us moving forward. It ends up feeling more like unearned pretensions than anything else. “Sunshine” motions at broader, philosophical themes without making any real statements about them. 
 

“Sunshine” was an expensive film to make, at least by the standards of the kind of movies Boyle was usually making up to that point. Andrew Macdonald had to cobble together the additional funds for the forty million dollar budget from a variety of sources. Ultimately, the film fell short of that goal at the box office. After making “Sunshine,” Danny Boyle said he was no longer interested in working in the science fiction genre, describing production as a “spiritually exhausting experience.” That would suggest that the entire process was not a satisfying ordeal for the director or producer. In time, however, “Sunshine” would win a a cult following. People seem to love it now. I guess I must remain the odd man out on this one. “Sunshine” has big ideas and an interestingly massive scope but the film repeatedly makes decisions that alienate me as it goes along. [Grade: C-]

RECENT WATCHES: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

“28 Days Later” was made for a meager budget of eight million dollars. At the international box office, it grossed over 82 million dollars. That's how horror movies are supposed to work, from a business perspective. Low investment, high return. Moreover, not capitalizing on the burst of interest in zombie media created by the first film would be a mistake, right? And how was anyone able to resist calling it “28 Weeks Later,” building on the easy naming structure present in the original? To put it simply, a sequel was inevitable. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland had already moved onto their next project though, committed to a sci-fi epic that would make it hard to work on a grimy zombie sequel. The search was on for a new creative team. Eventually, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo of Spanish language thriller “Intacto” would be chosen. A substantially bigger budget of 15 million dollars was provided to turn one gritty horror flick that had taken the world by storm into an on-going franchise.

196 days after the Rage Virus first breached containment in Great Britain, the situation seems to be under control. All of the infected have starved to death. NATO has taken control over the island, establishing a safe zone on the Isle of Dogs in an attempt to begin rebuilding. Among the survivors is Don, who feels immense guilt over leaving his wife, Alice, to die during the initial outbreak. In the safe zone, he is reunited with his children, Tommy and Andy. They have questions about their mother but he assures them she's gone. The two eventually sneak out of the containment area and discover this is a lie: Alice has survived due to a mysterious genetic immunity to the Rage Virus. She is still an asymptomatic carrier though, meaning she's quickly captured by the military. A medical officer named Scarlet believes a vaccine can be made from Alice's blood. However, Don sneaks into the lab and kisses his wife. The Rage Virus spreads to him and, very quickly, a full blown outbreak has consumed the safe zone. Under the care of a sympathetic sniper named Doyle, Scarlet and the two kids attempt to make it out of the quickly escalating chaos alive.

If no other theme emerged out of the later follow-ups to “Night of the Living Dead,” it's that authority will always use a crisis as an opportunity to seize more control. Unlike the unhinged soldiers and evil billionaires of Romero's later “Day” and “Land,” the military occupation in “28 Weeks Later” is well intended. They want to help people, rebuild a country torn apart by crisis and prevent any further outbreaks. However, being granted a level of leadership, even if it's with the best of intentions, still results in you peering down on everyone else from a dehumanizing angle. A largely pre-fame Idris Elba plays the U.S. general overlooking the operation on the Isle of Dogs. Once the virus starts to break out again, he doesn't take long at all to initiate a clean-sweep protocol. Soldiers are ordered to kill everything that moves, infected and not. The city is purged with a fire bombing. Before the end, the NATO forces are actively killing the people they have sworn to protect. If “28 Days Later” was an unintentional but utterly fitting reaction to the immediate chaos of a post-9/11 world, the sequel looks back on the reaction with a more skeptical eye. It sees military institutions trying to messily work out solutions with no eye towards the human lives caught in the middle. This is a clear criticism of the cluster-fuck response the U.S. government made in the wake of the attacks. I don't think the antagonistic soldiers here being American was any mistake. That makes “28 Weeks Later” the first War on Terror zombie movie, a critique of a system that is more concerned with restoring "order" than protecting people.

What made “28 Days Later” a little more special, beyond its novel approach to the zombie premise, was how it centered on some very human characters. The sequel sees no cast returning but does pull off a similar idea. Donald loved his wife and they cherished their kids together. In a world gone completely fucking nuts though, does the need to survive overcome questions of love? It did for Don and that guilt haunts him. The sequel makes a surprise turn midway through, when what had previously been the protagonist is turned into a Rage zombie. It's almost as if Don is being consumed by his own shame over abandoning his wife. Through the mayhem that follows, Tammy clings to Andy. She wants to protect her brother. Scarlet and Doyle emerge as older sibling figures of a sort too, looking out for the youngsters. All along, Don lurks in the background, almost as if he seeks to reunite his family even in his Rage-driven state. Like the military, he's an authority figure eager to restore control, in this case of the standard family unit of a father and his children. Meanwhile, the kids find a new family of sorts, based on empathy and compassion. I think the father's hang-ups and fears – excellently portrayed by Danny Boyle regular Robert Carlyle, who is also a fine rage zombie – could have been foreground a bit more. It's still an interesting theme to cook into your horror sequel.

Danny Boyle made a very deliberate stylistic choice using grainy, shaky digital video in “28 Days Later.” A lot of lesser filmmakers thought this meant jerking the camera around and making sure everything looked like shit was a cheat code to creating a tense, scary movie. Sometimes, cinematographer Enrique Chediak – previously of “The Faculty” – seems to be slipping into that meaningless chaos. A couple of moment in the sequel are a little too jittery to follow. However, the film mostly does a good job of building upon the technique used in “Days.” In fact, the opening sequence, where the infected horde infiltrates and destroys the safety of Don's first shelter, keeps up-ing the intensity until a properly shaking climax. John Murphy's already iconic theme music from the first film is reprised here to great effect. The sequel attempts to replicate that thrilling sense of dread throughout. When Don becomes infected himself, it strikes that right balance of panic and emotion. A moment when shooting breaks out in the city or a hero sacrifices himself amid a poison gas attack does as well. However, shooting an extended sequence in the back-half largely through the night vision scope of a rifle was maybe not such a good idea.

The script essentially means “28 Weeks Later” is splitting its screen time between multiple story threads. Don, his kids, and the military personnel that become their guardians are all doing their own things throughout the first half. Somehow, this is successfully built upon and creates a nicely tense second part. The time is taken to humanize our heroes before truly throwing them into the shit. Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Poots, as Andy and Tammy, both manage to be rare examples of carefully acted child performers in a horror movie. Their sibling bond is especially warmly depicted. The viewer wants to protect these kids. That same instinct aligns us with Rose Byrne as Scarlet, who immediately develops a motherly side towards the youngster. Jeremy Renner is also well utilized as Doyle. I like how the sequel treats the soldiers as average guys simply doing a job, devoid of any misplaced rah-rah jingoism before going for a darker portrayal of those willing to follow any order. 

In general, "28 Weeks Later" has a sturdier structure and pacing than the original. It lacks some of the freshness and eeriness of Boyle's film, as sequels inevitably tend to. The bigger budget does allow for a far wider scope, with more elaborate action sequences involving the fire-bombing of the Isle of Dogs or a pretty cool stunt in which a horde of Rage zombies meet some helicopter blades. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo put together a worthy sequel, maintaining the visual connection to the original and expanding upon its ideas while standing alone as a solid horror flick in its own right. Those that claim “28 Weeks Later” is scarier than the film it sequelizes aren't entirely wrong though. The sequel does its damnedest to be a more tense and thrilling experience. I'd rank the two films as about equal, extremely well executed variation on a familiar post-apocalyptic situation. [7/10]

Director Report Card: Danny Boyle (2004)

 

10. Millions

 

After “28 Days Later,” Danny Boyle had the biggest international hit of his career up to that point. I don't think revitalizing the zombie movie with probably the most talked-about horror film of that year gave the director a blank check exactly. However, he probably had a wide range of choice for what he could do next. Up to that point, the director had made gritty stories of social isolation, class division, and substance abuse his bread and butter. As your encore to a horror movie defined by its extra grimy visual style, what do you choose? If you're this guy, you decide to make a kid's movie. Boyle would team with celebrated screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce to craft what was, for many years, the only film in the director's career that isn't rated R. It remains the only Danny Boyle movie you can watch on the vanilla version of Disney+ right now, to give you an idea of “Millions'” family-friendly content. How did a filmmaker known for far grittier material adapt to this wild change in direction?

Following the death of their mother, nine year old Damian, his twelve year old brother Anthony, and their dad move into the suburbs of Widnes. Damian, who has a hyper-focus on stories of Catholic saints and Christian martyrs, has trouble making friends. While playing in a cardboard box on the side of a railway, a bag full of British pounds notes falls into his lap. At the end of the year, the United Kingdom is adopting the Euro as its official currency, making the money worthless. With Christmas around the corner, Damian decides to give the money to those in need around his town. Anthony convinces him to keep the amount a secret, the brothers performing these good acts in secret. Unfortunately, money doesn't materialize out of thin air. The boys have unknowingly swiped a cache of stolen pounds from a bank robber, who is on their trail. This dovetails with the boys having far more personal problems in their lives.

The opening minutes of “Millions” makes one thing certain: Danny Boyle did not change any of his style when making a movie for a family-friendly audience. Very shortly after the film begins, the audience is privy to the boys' imaginative flights of fancy. They picture their new home being built on the spot. Throughout “Millions,” there are multiple montages brought together by high-energy editing. Multiple frames appear on-screen several times. Quirky camera angles are chosen for a number of key shots, such as assuming the perspective of a motorized trash can as it drives through a crowded school. There's some British electronic music on the soundtrack too. One specific sequence has another boy describing the daring heist that resulted in these pound notes disappearing from a bank, which feels exactly like something that could have appeared in any of his prior films. That is the moment, in fact, that I noticed “Millions” plays a bit like a kid-friendly version of “Shallow Grave.” 

However, “Millions” is not a movie about paranoia and selfishness the way “Shallow Grave” was. Out of Boyle's past work, tonally, it most resembles “A Life Less Ordinary.” I mean, that motorized trashcan that demands people give it money is a lot like the robot janitors in that movie. What I truly mean by this comparison is that “Millions” sees the director embracing his whimsical side in a way we've only previously seen in that one. This is most evident in the elaborate fantasy sequences Damian has. He often imagines conversations with the various saints he admires. These fantastical spirits sometimes have golden halos over their heads. When Saint Nicholas – much more in-line with Catholic tradition than Santa Claus ones – appears, his dialogue is in subtitled Greek. Saint Clare of Assisi puffs on a cigarette during their conversation, one example of the not exactly saintly behavior we see these visions perform. It is, in other words, cute. It might even be classified as cutesy, depending on how you feel about magical-realism and kids learning valuable life lessons from down-to-Earth versions of historical figures. Still, it's a lot less all-over-the-place than “A Life Less Ordinary” was. A little kid being the main character makes imaginative fantasy sequences a lot easier to accept. 

That Damian's day dreams are so specific is also interesting. “A Life Less Ordinary” was the most blatant example of Boyle including themes of religious imagery in his movies, of literal angels and the will of heaven playing a big role in the story. “Millions” sees this idea coming back to the surface in a much less aggressively quirky way. Damian is really fascinated with saints. He knows everything about the subject of Christian martyrdom, including the gory details of their sacrifices. He often deploys this information at length, seemingly unable to read how his info-dumps make his teachers and classmates uncomfortable. When he hears someone else mention his obsession, he gets excited and perks up. At one point, his brother begs him not to be weird and off-putting. I have no idea if Cottrell-Boyce or Boyle intended this reading but, when watched in 2025, the conclusions is impossible to avoid: Damian is definitely neuro-divergent and most likely on the autism spectrum. 

Speaking as someone recently diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, this possibly unintentional depiction of the condition strikes me as one of the better cinematic reading. The young star of the film, Alex Etel, plays Damian as somewhat literal in his thinking. He seems to have difficulty reading the intentions and actions of the others. That his favorite topic is an extremely niche one feels a lot more specific to me than the usual short hands writers use to establish autistic characters. It's only in retrospect that I realize Damian's differing perspective making him conditioned to help people might classify this as an example of the unfortunate “Inspirationally Disadvantaged” trope. That the word autism or Aspergers is never uttered in this script, that the film aligns so closely with his point-of-view, gives him far more depth than most examples of the condition on-screen. The boy is not defined by his brain chemistry nor do his eccentricities control him. He has an actual personality. 

All of the above marks “Millions” as a kids movie, through and through. It is about how children observe the world and concerned with the same things they are concerned with. That doesn't mean “Millions” is overly juvenile. Most family movies with the premise of kids suddenly coming into a bag full of money would play strictly as comedy. You'd have the youngsters spending the cash on ridiculous luxuries, perhaps in service of a moral about responsibility. “Millions” is grappling with themes a lot heavier than that. Damian considers the money appearing to be a miracle. He doesn't think about that the cash obviously came from somewhere. When that conclusion is foisted upon him, he has a conversation with St. Peter about what a “miracle” truly is. 

When the dad finally discovers the money, it's in the aftermath of their home being burglarized. Rather than give the cash away, as the boys had been doing, he spends it on stuff the family needs and a lot of stuff they want too. Is this a better or worst use of that money than giving it to charity? Does performing acts of kindness for others mean you deserve to have some nice stuff too? Or is returning the pounds to the government that intends on destroying it the most “correct” options? Eventually, the boy reaches a conclusion not that different from what “Shallow Grave” implied: Money doesn't have much of anything to do with what's right at all. These are serious considerations to have, quite heavy for a movie ostensibly targeted at ten year olds. “Millions” never judges its characters for any of the actions they choose. The audience, no matter how young they may be, are left room to come to their own conclusions. 

That's the not the only surprising way “Millions” doesn't talk down to its audience. This is, in many ways, a traditional coming of age story. The brothers are close but also sometimes at odds with each other. Anthony is a little older than Damian, more aware of their situation than his brother. He ogles an online bra catalogue at one point, the titillating element going over Damian's head. Ultimately, as different as the boys can be, they are still brothers. Lewis Owen McGibbon, who only has two other acting credits outside of this film, gives a naturalistic and lived-in performance. “Millions” does an excellent job of making it seem like the camera happens to be catching the normal, expected interactions between these young boys totally by chance. The weight and conflict between the brothers is a big reason why that works so well.

The relaxed, realistic tone that “Millions” captures is also reflected in how the film handles its most dramatic plot points. The Christmas setting, which eventually involves Damian acting in a nativity play, contrasts with the story of charity and giving. The death of the boys' mother always lingers in the background. Every time Damian talks to a saint, he asks them if there's a new saint in heaven yet, meaning he's waiting to hear back from his mom. At one point, Anthony uses the death of their mom as an excuse to escape punishment in school. As their dad begins a romance with another woman, the older brother becomes resentful of both their father trying to "replace" their mom and of his younger brother's naive inability to process the death. It's another way the film is surprisingly complicated in handling a subject that most kids movies would treat in a far more simplistic manner. Grief is complicated and everyone, kids included, handle it differently. 

What I'm saying is that "Millions" sees Danny Boyle adapting to the kid-friendly genre without sacrificing any of the style or substance that made most of his previous films good. In fact, you can tell he made this seemingly uncharacteristic movie directly after a horror flick. The villain in "Millions" is referred to only as "The Poor Man." He approaches Damian by the train tracks and the boy takes his claim of being an innocent wanderer at face value. (Anthony quickly becomes concerned that the man's interest in his brother is unwholesome in a decidedly more predatory fashion, another example of the film nodding at heavier themes than you'd expect.) He is, in fact, one of the robbers who took the money in the first place. He begins to pursue and blackmail the boy, determined to get his loot back. This manifests as Damian having reoccurring nightmares about the man's hand reaching for the mail slot or lurking in the wings of the school auditorium. It's actually kind of creepy. The antagonist becomes a representation of the guilt Damian feels for taking money that wasn't his, an idea that is processed in a way a kid that age could understand: Namely, a boogeyman coming to get him. 

Perhaps another reason "Millions" can get away with some of its more whimsical, fantastical touches is because the movie subtly establishes itself as taking place in a different world than ours right from the get-go. As an ignorant Yank, I was only vaguely aware of this but "Millions'" entire premise hinges on an event that did not happen in reality. The United Kingdom did not accept the Euro as their official form of currency. The British Pound is still in use, making the climatic crux of the film – spending all that money before it becomes valueless at the stroke of midnight – an invention of the writer. I don't know if Cottrell-Boyce and Boyle made the film with the expectation that the United Kingdom would eventually adopt the Euro or if the concept was always approached entirely as a "what if?" scenario. Either way, that makes "Millions" an extremely low-key work of alternate universe fiction. It's always a work of fantasy, Damian's daydreams being a more personal reflection of that. 

At one point, early in development, "Millions" was going to be a musical. Boyle hoped Noel Gallagher, famous as the songwriter and guitarist of the definitive nineties Britrock band and for publicly bickering with his brother, would write the songs. That certainly would have brought an all-together different layer to the theme of sibling rivalry in the story. Not to mention making the whimsical touches fit right in. Instead, Frank Cottrell-Boyce adopted his own screenplay into a novel while filming was underway. The book came out a little before the film and would win an award for excellence in British children's literature. The cinematic "Millions" made a modest little profit at the box office, unsurprisingly doing better in England than abroad. It's among the director's more overlooked films but I found it charming and sweet with a lot more depth, maturity, and style than is usually asked of for family-friendly entertainment. It's a movie from the director of "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later" that you can watch with your mom and she'll probably like it too. [Grade: B]

Director Report Card: Danny Boyle (2001)

 

9. 28 Days Later

 

Here's how the story is always told: After the international success of George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead," what quickly crystalized into the zombie movie had a boom period throughout the eighties. By the nineties, the flow of such films had trickled to a stop before totally disappearing by the end of the decade. Novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland, inspired by his love of Romero's classics, decided to write his own take on the premise at the start of the new millennium. His collaborator on "The Beach," Danny Boyle, loved the script and decided to direct it. "28 Days Later..." came out in 2002, was hailed by critics as the scariest movie in years, and would prompt a zombie revival. The resulting renewal of interest in shambling corpses would outlast previous flirtations with the sub-genre, becoming a sensation in the worlds of comics, television, and memes, moving thoroughly into the mainstream in the process. From this perspective, "28 Days Later" is easily among the most important horror movies of the 21st century thus far. This telling of the tale is not entirely true. The ever-mutable zombie was already popular in video games, which Garland credited with inspiring him to write "28 Days Later." Undead gut munchers never entirely went away and there's been much pedantic debate over whether Boyle and Garland's film technically qualifies as a zombie flick anyway. Either way, "28 Days Later" did have an immediate and obvious impact on the horror genre and cinema in general. Twenty-three years later, how does the film hold up?

Animal activities break into a laboratory and free chimpanzee test subjects, unaware that they are infected with what is known as the Rage Virus. The disease spreads through blood or saliva, transforming the infectee into a mindlessly violent killer within minutes. Less than a month after this event, London has already become devastated. That's when Jim awakens from a coma into a city that seems deserted, with no idea what happened. He quickly discovers the rage infected populace and is only saved by Selena, a survivor who is scavenging through the nearly abandoned London for food and supplies. The two soon meet up with Frank and his daughter Hannah, who have been hiding in their flat. Hearing radio messages from a military base in Manchester, the quartet begins the perilous journey towards what they hope is the last bastion of civilization. What they find is not what they hope for and the threat of the Rage-infected hordes are never far away. 

The opening images of "28 Days Later" are of violence, political strife, and mass executions. This is quickly revealed as footage one of the chimp test subjects is being forced to watch. Humans are monkeys too, of course, and this is the first sign of the themes the film is dealing with. "28 Days Later" presents a world in which order has been overturned. In a matter of days, society has collapsed and the majority of people in Great Britain have been reduced to screeching, homicidal maniacs. The social structures we count on to protect us, amenities as simple as running water and fresh food, have failed. The old world is dead and a new, terrifying one has risen in its place. And there's no going back. The September 11th terrorist attacks would occur while "28 Days Later" was filming. There was no way Garland, Boyle, and their team knew Earth was on the verge of entering a chaotic new century. Despite that, their film seems to perfectly capture the anxieties that would grip the globe soon enough. In "28 Days Later," no one can be trusted. Your closest friend or love one can turn into a vicious killer with little warning. Institutions like religion and the military have fallen towards squalor and authoritarianism. We fear our brother and are now ruled by paranoia and a base need to survive, everything around us shattering into chaos. It was an accurate reading of the international mood in the weeks and months following September, 2001. 

Boyle and Garland have assured us that they were inspired more by the fear of disease than societal collapse when conceiving "28 Days Later" though. In the two decades since the film's release, the world has suffered another paradigm shifting crisis. And COVID-19 spreads a lot easier than the Rage Virus does. The most striking and eerie sequences in “28 Days Later” remain the scenes of Jim exploring an eerily empty London. It's quiet, the streets devoid of people. Enough signs remain that people where once here but they are surely gone now. It's almost as if Jim has awaken into a world where everyone else has vanished. Many certainly observed that the shots of London here – captured, miraculously, early in the morning before people left for work – closely resembles the city during the 2020 lock-downs. As alien and unsettling as the images where in 2002, they are more unsettling now that we know how plausible such events truly are.

Let us stop back for a minute. People way too hung-up on details insist that the Rage infected populace, being neither revived corpses nor cannibals, do not qualify as zombies. This ignores that the term “zombie” has always covered a wide range of cinematic ghouls and can be generally applied to any faceless horde of attacking, diseased humanoids. These were not the first running zombies in film history. However, the Rage Virus certainly turbo-boosted what was previously thought of mostly as shuffling revenants. They are wild-eyed, baring teeth, covered with sweat and constantly oozing blood and spit. A crowd of them emerging out of the dark, running at full speed and with no desire beyond killing the first thing they get their hands on, is certainly a terrifying sight. The image of infected people, still running while ablaze or being peppered with gunfire, is about as visceral a threat as can be conceived. 

It does represent a reshuffling of what the zombie means as a cultural symbol. These are not slowly creeping reminders of our own mortality, as in Romero's classics. Instead, they are fast moving attackers. They brim with infection, spewing blood and leaking fluid from every pour. They announce their presence with screams and wails. Seemingly, they are everywhere, emerging from the shadows to attack. The infection spreads almost instantaneously too. The opening scene features a crazed chimpanzee attacking someone, setting up the parallel that the infected resembles primitive predecessors to human beings more than people themselves. The viewer's point-of-view is also aligned with this ape in the opening shot. All of us are only one small turn, the film seems to be saying, from turning into a raging monster. “28 Days Later” represents not so much a fear of disease or the grim inevitability of death but of people, as unpredictable beings whose veneer of civility can easily slip away and reveal the savage animal beneath. 
 

That's nothing new either. Among the many meanings that can be applied to the zombie as a concept is them representing the teething masses of faceless conformity about to consume the individual. Romero's films always made the point that the living are as dangerous, maybe more so, than the undead. The true antagonists of his “Living Dead” saga have always been the people inside. As in “Day of the Dead,” “28 Days Later” eventually has the military emerge as the true villains of this story. When Jim, Selene, and Hannah arrive at the military base, they are relieved. This is before they realize that the soldiers are running a tyrannical operation that disregards basic human rights. Especially of women, who they intend to reduce to breeding stock and sex slaves. As frightening as the Rage infectees are, we are afraid of them because they are us. We are afraid of other people and what they are capable of.

In other words, “28 Days Later” is making a similar point to what Boyle and Garland said with “The Beach.” It doesn't take a lot to turn people into savages. In fact, it's hard to shake the fear that barbarism is the default state of the human animal. In “The Beach,” this idea was turned on its head as an indictment of a privileged American's overly macho Rambo fantasies. In “28 Days Later,” it's employed much more literally. In the final act, after Selene and Hannah have been captured by the military types and the severity of what is happening here has been established, Jim is left outside the facility. He sneaks around and kills the guards, breaks in, attacks the bad guys, and rescues the girls. When he comes face to face with Selene, she mistakes him for one of the infected at first. This brings ideas of women having all too understandable fears of men to mind. It also unironically makes the protagonist seem like a bad-ass action hero, while vaguely gesturing at pseudo-profound ideas about whether the civilized man is actually civilized at all. 

This is why, perhaps, I've been reluctant to embrace “28 Days Later” to the degree that many other cultural critics have. In the years after the film's success, when the zombie genre would become a cottage industry of its own, stories of these type would quickly burn me out. This is not only because there were a lot of them. It's also because right-wing survivalist douche-bag types would co-opt the genre. The universal themes that made me a fan of zombie stories would be traded out for tales of how paranoid gun nuts could be total bad-ass if the structure of polite society wasn't there to hold them back. I don't think Garland and Boyle are telling a story like that in “28 Days Later.” That a group of far-left animal activist types are responsible for unleashing the virus on the world doesn't make a conservative reading of the material impossible but I doubt that was intended. 

Instead, “28 Days Later” also draws from “Day of the Triffids,” a classic of British sci-fi that predates “Night of the Living Dead.” That's a book that pioneered the idea of the “cozy apocalypse.” Indeed, there is something refreshing in the premise of discarding all the structure of the modern world. Of burning down the congested and complicated lives we have now and rebuilding something better from the ground up. That strain of DNA is present in the film. As perilous as Frank and Hannah's lives are, running out of water and resources, there is something comforting about hanging out in your apartment as the world falls down around you. A key sequence have the quartet breaking into a seemingly spotless grocery store. They almost dance around as they scoop up food and drink. It represents one of the few bright spots in an otherwise grim film. There's another scene where Frank drives his cab through the empty streets, in a way that comes across as a bit freeing. I don't want society to collapse and I don't think anybody sensible does either. However, as a fantasy, it does present some appealing opportunities. Who wouldn't want to race along an empty street without fear of collision or speed limits? Or just take whatever they want from a store without a worry about price?

What does separate “28 Days Later” from the far more reactionary zombie stories that followed is that the freedom of a world without rules isn't the sole reason these sequences bring an odd comfort to them. Instead, the film points out something almost optimistic. “28 Days Later” is a movie about how there's little separating people from brutally murderous animals. About how it wouldn't take much for society as we know it to fall apart into utter chaos. It isn't making a nihilistic statement about human nature though. Because kindness does exist in this world. Selene helps Jim. Slowly, while exploring the very green ruins of the English countryside, they develop an attraction to each other. Frank still loves and adores his daughter, doing everything he can to protect her. He welcomes the visitors with open arms. Yes, people can be awful. Yes, the world is a fucked-up place. Selene chops up her previous traveling partner the minute he gets infected. Jim has to beat an infected child to death to survive. That doesn't mean we have to discard all our good nature to survive. That's what truly separates us from the chimpanzees.

That somewhat conflicting idea, that the human animal contains both an endless capacity for cruelty and an ability to love and protect, probably would be a lot harder to buy without a prime cast. Luckily, “28 Days Later” does assemble a fine cast. Cillian Murphy was all but a complete unknown at the time, emerging more as a stage talent than a film one. He plays Jim as a relatable every man, a sensible and average guy thrust into an impossible situation and forced to survive. Naomie Harris, as Selene, strikes the viewer as a deeply practical person, beaten down by the awful circumstance she's in. She is not without a kinder heart within, that slowly reveals itself. Brendan Gleeson, meanwhile, is an utterly lovable teddy bear as Frank, projecting warmth and practicality in every scene... Until that formidable size is later used to make him a threatening physical presence once he's infected. Megan Burns is a sharp-witted young woman that the viewer immediately wants to protect. Simply put, we care about these characters. That's really important to making “28 Days Later” an effective movie.

 

Part of why the zombie format has found such widespread success in television and comics – serialized mediums, in other words – is because it presents a wide open world. Following a group of characters through a city turned upside down probably presents more opportunities for a continuing story than a self-contained one. You can feel this strain in “28 Days Later.” The first half of the film is its most effective. It's also something that can only be done for so long. Jim and Selene simply trying to survive and get through the city isn't much a structure. Finding the military signal, heading towards Manchester, and encountering further problems there imposes a more concrete structure on a slightly shapeless story. It's still not as energizing as that first half and a formless feeling still can't be totally defeated. That's most evident in the abrupt ending, the image literally freezing before we arrive at a weirdly disconnected conclusion. (The result of the filmmakers choosing between three alternate endings, none of which were exactly great.)

These are the positive and negative qualities of “28 Days Later.” It has a story full of big ideas, some more simplistic than others. It has a story that verges towards the shapeless yet is most effective when not enforcing a structure upon itself. The cast is lovable but ultimately reduced to players in a familiar set-up. None of this addresses what the critics were saying in 2002. That “28 Days Later” was the scariest movie of the year, if not all time. No film benefits from hype like that. Which is not to say that “28 Days Later” doesn't bring some intensity your way. The “fast zombie” as a trope would quickly be badly abused by less talented directors. That doesn't change that the Infected are a terrifying threat, red-eyed and spewing blood and always aggressive. The scenes where they leap through glass doors or barred windows, attacking suddenly and violently, sure are a shock. Moreover, John Murphy's score keeps the heart pumping throughout, building tension during a number of key sequence. Boyle doesn't operate in cheap jump scares and is instead seeking to create a mood where chaos can strike at any moment. He largely succeeds.

Much was written, at the time, about the decision to shoot “28 Days Later” on digital video. That makes the little-seen “Strumpet” and “Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise” clear predecessors. The grainy and gritty visuals do contribute a kind of immediacy to the film. It adds extra starkness to the shots of an abandoned London. It contributes to a sense that we, the viewer, are as much dragged along by these events as the characters are. During the best moments, Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography also brings an incredible sense of motion with it. A frantic point-of-view shot racing around the outside of a wall or attached to the point of a jet are two examples. I do miss the preciseness of the cinematography seen in “Trainspotting” and “Shallow Grave” though, as effective as the digital harshness on display here is. 

To answer the question I posed above: Does “28 Days Later” hold up? Its images are still eerie and effecting. It still has some big ideas that hit in new and unsettling ways now. The cast is strong, the soundtrack is great, and there are several banger sequences. I maintain the same criticism that I had for it in 2002, that the narrative could have been a bit sturdier and that some of the concept it plays with are messier than others. I don't think it's the scariest movie ever or the best horror film of the century. However, it's hard to deny that the film gave the zombie premise a much needed shot in the arm. Moreover, I'm not sure anyone but Danny Boyle and his team could have made the film as effective as it is. Taken apart from its oversized shadow, this does remain a brutal bit of post-apocalpytic horror. [Grade: B+]