The critical thematic point of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later is when the small group of heroes, who have been evading the zombie hordes that have overtaken Great Britain, are rescued by a surviving human military outfit, only to soon discover this collective -free of oversight or consequence in their myopic and violently sexual delusions about rebuilding society- is just as dangerous if not more-so than the rage-infected automatons. It’s really the chief thing about Alex Garland’s script that makes it so potent -that damning conception of human nature under pressure. And it is the same thing that he and director Nia DaCosta bring back to 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple , which adds an additional layer of bringing a little more nuance to the zombies. There are two visceral violent sequences in the movie that stand out -one in which one of the infected tears off a human’s head and then cannibalizes it, and another in which a human gang ties up a group of fellow survivors and flays the...
Gus Van Sant has a certain creative affinity for, and a mild, sometimes cautious sympathy with eccentric real characters. In the extreme it applies to each of the subjects of his ‘Death Trilogy’, though also to a degree his portraits of the eponymous gay rights icon in Milk and niche underground cartoonist John Callahan in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot . Tony Kiritsis is another one of these figures, whom Van Sant is clearly fascinated by and whose grievance he relates with in broad terms if not perhaps the specifics of his personal issues, actions, and mindset -a man framed as right and wrong in equal measure. Dead Man’s Wire is an extremely detailed recounting of a hostage situation that took place in Indianapolis in 1977. Kiritsis, played by Bill Skarsgård, went to the Meridian Mortgage firm for an appointment with its wealthy founding broker M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), instead getting his son Richard (Dacre Montgomery) filling in for his vacationing father. Feeling ch...