28 Weeks Later: A Rant About the Shaky Cam Era
28 Weeks Later.
28 Weeks Later was the 2007 sequel to 28 Days Later, the 2002 Danny Boyle film starring Cillian Murphy which is often credited with jump-starting the Zombie Renaissance of the 2000s. They are both about a “rage virus” ravaging the UK, and feature pretty standard zombie apocalypse narratives. The franchise is also generally credited with popularizing the idea of fast-moving zombies, and I thought 28 Days Later was a decent flick, especially considering its subsequent impact on breathing new life into the genre. It does, however, have one of the worst trailers of all time. It is so bad, in fact, that I actually thought this was a fan-made trailer at first, splicing together footage from other movies. The point is that, even back in 2002, there were questionable decisions being made about this franchise.
28 Weeks Later takes the Aliens approach to sequels - it’s the same basic premise as the first film, but now with more military and artillery to blow things up. With a strong cast including Idris Elba, Jeremy Renner and Rose Byrne one would expect this film to be at least OK as far as genre fare goes. One would be wrong. In fact, 28 Weeks Later is essentially unwatchable. It’s not the story - which is of course nonsensical and compels each and every character to do the stupidest possible thing at all times. This is a zombie movie, so that’s par for the course. No, it’s the style of filmmaking, known as shaky cam, which turns 28 Weeks Later into a mess.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the film is unwatchable. It cannot be viewed by the human eye, because the director (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) employs the shaky cam style to the point where the movie becomes a visual abstraction, more Jackson Pollock than cinematic experience. The camera herks and jerks wildly from start to finish, creating an incomprehensible pastiche of grainy, blurry images. No doubt he thought he was making art.
But the line between art and garbage has never been clearer and 28 Weeks Later is fully on the wrong side. Even when there is no action, and the characters are just standing, the frame will often bob and weave as if the camera itself has palsy. The theory behind this style is clear enough - it’s meant to create immediacy, by placing a handheld camera right in the thick of the action. By constantly cutting the visual language is supposed to express the confusion, the violence and the frenzy of the scene. If done well, like the landing on Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan, it can be very effective. Unfortunately, it usually is not done well and the result is complete and total visual incoherence masquerading as a conscious directorial choice and even a lauded style of filmmaking.
We have Paul Greengrass to thank for this. Handheld shaky cams had been used before of course, but in 2004 when Greengrass directed The Bourne Supremacy, he elevated the style to something of a fad. The first film in the series, The Bourne Identity, had some all-time beautiful and cleanly staged action sequences. The way they were shot, you could track how the action and the choreography flowed. It was clear and coherent. When Greengrass took over, he introduced his shaky cam style - employing unnecessary zooms and pans and cuts, and butchering the film into a montage of disconnected, off-center images. Cleanly staged action sequences gave way to an abstract collection of images and camera movements, the cumulative effect of which is to make the viewer seasick and then angry at the director for ruining the movie.
The really bewildering thing about this, is that the style then caught on and was elevated to something of a fad in Hollywood. By 2007, the wave had reached its lunatic apotheosis, infecting films like 28 Weeks Later and The Kingdom (a truly terrible movie, which is also one of the most egregious examples of the shaky cam style gone haywire). After that its use subsided, although occasionally it will still find its way into more contemporary terrible movies like The Big Short. If a director uses shaky cam sparingly, and only for particular action sequences and the sequences are well constructed and blocked and shot and retain their coherence, then it can be a powerful tool. If the shaky cam makes an appearance when, say, Christian Bale is sitting at his desk talking about mortgage backed securities, you know you’ve got a shit ass director masquerading as an artist behind the lens.
The thing about shaky cam that is really hard for me to understand, however, is that even now it has its fervent defenders. The AV Club reviewed 28 Weeks Later in the following way: “The handheld camera bobs and weaves frenetically… [and] under Fresnadillo's assured direction, 28 Weeks Later blurs the line between genre entertainment and a photojournalist's shots of the next urban catastrophe.” Scott Tobias, the reviewer, even approvingly links the film’s visual style (and the “message” it’s trying to convey?) to the Iraq War.
Later, in a broader defense of Paul Greengrass' motion sickness style, a piece in Vox held it up as some kind of penetrating insight about the way human’s perceive the world in the age of digital surveillance: “Greengrass’s style replicates our own sensory information gathering systems, as if unprocessed by thought…. fractured and dangerous, anxious and unstable, hyperaware but never quite sure of itself. But the style is meant to reflect the paranoia and information fragmentation of our own world as well.”
This is straight up insane and provable nonsense, but it also shows just how in thrall people were in the 2000s (and I guess some still are) to the dogma of the shaky cam, willing to defend what is essentially visual diarrhea as somehow reflecting important insights about society. No. Respectfully, just no. Get out of here with that shit. Give me a shot that is properly framed, where the camera movements and the blocking and the staging are deliberate and meaningful.
What the shaky cam era taught us was that careful attention to the visual composition of a shot could be replaced with so much sound and fury and noise to the point of indecipherable absurdity. I am glad that for the most part that era in filmmaking is behind us, but we must always remain vigilant, in order that we may defend against its return and its defenders who walk among us still, disguised as those who would render aid but who in fact would soak the Earth in darkness.
