Nineteen One

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

So I enjoyed Ralph Fiennes of course -- absolutely astonishing, especially the Iron Maiden segment; I enjoyed Jack O'Connell -- brilliant as a psychopath who patterns himself on Jimmy Saville; I loved the reflective tone; the visuals; the worldbuilding; the humour. Yet...

So why do I have reservations? Well, the one thing you'll notice is missing is plot. Not that plot is missing. There are two big plotlines. But they don't intersect. One is very slow, and perhaps not entirely plausible -- no zombie film ever thrived by suggesting a road out. The other is brutal, and the characters among the Jimmies were too low flame to play against Lord Sir Jimmy Crystal.

And the reflectiveness wasn't *about* anything. It just slowed the film down. There was no question asked or answered. In such a low-tension film, you need there to be.

So is it any good? Yes. And if you like the franchise, you'll like it. You might even love it. You'll certainly love Fiennes. Maybe even Oscar-level good.

Distress

I don't know what it is about Greg Egan. It's like he builds this cool setting: future Australia, leaning towards post-scarcity but not quite there; organic seastead grown by anarchists; scientists fighting over the Theory of Everything; a digital journalist who's part-cyborg.

Then he gets bogged down in a plot that disappears up its own arse so hard that although the world was (just) enough to follow it, you get that sinking feeling, like you will not arrive at anything worth reading. And really, you don't. 

It's far too talky and far too "clever". The idea doesn't even really make sense. Probably. I wasn't paying enough attention to quite follow it. I wish he'd had more cool science fiction and half the science. He set the scene for it and then just ugh, didn't bother.

If you like hard scifi, you might like it. You could probably pass it off as "cerebral", in which case you might go as high as three and a half, four, but I couldn't, so two and a half, three at the very most.

posted by Dr Zen @ 6:41 pm