By Tracy Harms
Special guest blogger
Deep in the roots of Science Fiction are the pulps, disreputable depths from which visions of zombie hordes emerged. Pulp magazines were a most lowbrow medium. This was a medium where SF and Horror smudged together too closely to bother sorting one from the other.
A bit more recently, SF took to centering tales of apocalyptic futures. This subgenre has offered more of a mix between coarse titillations and sophisticated social commentary, and has proliferated so much for so long as to make one wonder whether Science Fiction is always and only portrayals of wildly disastrous futures. It’s not, but that’s been a sweet spot for sales, exactly as the pulp heritage of SF makes unsurprising. It meshes well with zombies, too.
28 Years Later: Bone Temple is the new release in a film franchise that has all the superficial hallmarks of a comic book. I went in expecting a zombie flick and a gory action flick and a civilization-struggling-in-collapse flick. In these regards I wasn’t disappointed, but to my surprise some viewers were. They wanted more zombies and more cathartic sprayings of blood and bones. Tough luck for them. They unwittingly stumbled into a strikingly crafted storyline, a highbrow Science Fiction tale that earns its place among other SF works that insert serious thematic implications where ticket-buyers thought they were choosing pulp shallowness. Such is life.
We’re not done with the stereotypes, though. Bone Temple hinted strongly, from the conclusion of the prior film, 28 Years Later, that it would be riffing on Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, and/or the infamous film version of that story. That classic work of UK SF put an overt eye towards “the future,” and particularly to puzzles regarding social cohesion in the face of modern transformations. Might children wind up feral in the absence of adequately civilizing influences? The answer in the world of the Bone Temple is strongly affirmative, most distressingly so.
People, unlike zombies, entail all sorts of complications. People bring moral problems that outweigh mere violent death. The street gangs in A Clockwork Orange were counterposed against establishment institutions. While the police, courts, and psychiatric wards in Burgess’ tale were apparently inadequate to prevent gangs from forming and wilding, they were present and poised to intervene and suppress. The world of 28 lacks any such taming powers. The gang that fleshes out most of Bone Temple is in social free-fall.
As a result, 28 Years Later: Bone Temple may be the most alarming horror film I have seen in years. As in: could the world of our future send us to Hell? Not literally the mythological spiritual abode, of course, but a simple human pattern of suffering, ignorance, and evil which easily passes as its namesake. One in which people come to expect, accept, and enact the worst.
Last year’s 28 Years Later laid the groundwork and context for Bone Temple. The premise of these movies gives a more blatant origin for the horrid brats who rove in gangs than does Burgess’ future. The world was yanked out from under them in their tender years. These films draw us into thoughts about childhood, childhood trauma, and what happens when children are deprived of a decent future. The youthful gangsters clutch to their memories of children’s television entertainment. It was the sparkly portion of their past, now cemented in their minds with no mature art to supersede it. Kids’ TV is superficial and infantile and so are its post-apocalyptic fans. The global disaster which forms the premise of the 28 franchise implies a generation that was stunted in its development. The tensions between childhood and maturity, between innocence and depravity, are magnified through brazen reference to Jimmy Savile, a UK TV celebrity whose reputation collapsed in a sexual abuse scandal. Do these damaged youngsters know he became thought of as a monster? Perhaps; and perhaps that’s why they emulate him. Perhaps not. There’s no internet to inform them. I suspect they would not care. To emulate is to honor a past, even a horrid past, whereas indifferent ignorance is the mark of civilizational erasure.
My interest in this film and in its 2025 predecessor started with knowing it’s written by Alex Garland. Garland has written some of the best on-screen SF I’ve seen over recent years. I’m particularly enamored with Annihilation. I thoroughly enjoyed both Ex Machina and the television series Devs. Garland’s screenwriting is so consistently strong that I will sit down for anything he pens. The storyline of Bone Temple exceeded my expectations. I was expecting something adequate, like the 2025 film that is its set-up. I got a good deal more.
In my enthusiasm I may have given the impression that this is A Most Weighty Film, which would miss the fact that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Bone Temple is very much crafted to provide an entertaining couple of hours in the theatre, assuming you’re eager to see icky stuff, as lots of moviegoers are. It’s more in the vein of a graphic novel than a work of literature. Yet, it has stuck with me for its character interactions and its plentiful implications. Strong SF concocts fantastical scenes and, through them, pokes at the human condition. That’s everything I wanted from the pulps, and more.
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