198 words about 28 Years Later

Nothing stops progress

This movie has an iPhone in it. I am not talking about its production, which utilized banks of iPhones to create a disorientingly variable image quality, at times as flat and snuff-like as the original film, and in others as dazzlingly widescreen as anything else you’d find at the multiplex, all cut together as prudently as anything this side of Fury Road. No: I am talking about a character in the movie who produces an iPhone, 28 years after an apocalypse that occurred 5 years before the iPhone was invented. Said iPhone is used to briefly display a selfie of the sort only conceivable following the advent of social media, which suggests that not even a total societal collapse could stop the indomitable forward march of the internet. There had always been a frisson of science-fiction to the original film, felt largely through the grimy 1K aesthetic, the digital artifacts, the sense of an argument seething beneath it all. The new film lets those ideas foment just off-screen, suggesting a dystopia far stranger than we quite realize. Did you know fully half the characters in this movie are named Jim? What, exactly, happened here?