Just seen '28 days later'. Not bad for a brit-flick. Shot in doubleplus-grainy DV by Danny Boyle, it's a pretty exciting horror-thriller (ok, yes it does suffer from a few classic brit-flick problems i.e. lack of visual ambition, fuzzy-minded intellectual framework (despite being written by Alex Garland), dodgy dialogue, and often terrible acting, particularly from kids who aspire only to the lofty standards set by the Children's Film Foundation in the '70s). However, the film opens with a captivating sequence (set to magisterial shoegazer-schlock-rock by godspeed you black emporer!) in which our hero awakes in a post-apocalyptic deserted London, staggering around the City and Oxford Street, after a beautiful Waterloo sunrise.
I always find these scenes compelling. One of the few good things about 'Vanilla Sky' was seeing tough heterosexual Tom Cruise find himself alone in an empty Times Square (Radiohead deemed the appropriate shoegazers there ...). Or the recent, and absolutely appalling, 'Reign Of Fire', featuring a ravaged London (scorched but still standing). Recall also earlier films ... Romero's classic zombie flicks, with abandoned factories, gas stations and shopping malls ... and 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire', with Edward Judd wandering through a post-war London about to burn, as the planet spins towards the sun. Love that film. Can anyone think of other great 'deserted cities' movies?
For bonus points, compare and contrast with the Japanese moviemaker's desire to see the city destroyed. Generalising massively of course (particularly as Hollywood now seems to be a city-destroyer too), but is there a meaningful cultural difference here? Between the Eastern approach (witness almost any anime), which popular theory has linked to the imminent reality of earthquake/tidal wave, or memory of Hiroshima/firebombing? And a Western approach, in which the city remains standing, but we are removed from it?
Probably something to do with estate agents.
Apropos of zombie flicks (as '28 days later' is), Marina Warner writes an interesting piece in The Guardian on the genesis of the zombie idea, linking Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the modern industrial city.
"But the movie that sealed the appropriation of the zombie for white consciousness was - is - The Night of the Living Dead, made in 1968 in Pittsburgh, once the great steel capital of America. By then, the mills were closing and Pittsburgh was facing decline; the team of George Romero and John Russo recast the Caribbean living dead as a ravening, restless, superannuated white proletariat rising up, under the effect of a radiation leak, to contaminate all with their condition."
