2014 (Israel)
Contains spoilers.
Much like the
internet™ I'm quite torn by director and co-writer Eitan Reuven's debut zombie
endeavour. I loved each and every highly stylised, frantic and ultra-violent
encounter and it's homage to 28 Days Later was near perfect; yet split as it
was into six distinct slices, each re-purposing a similar big frenetic climax, I
was in all truth rather weary of it all by the end. I was also intrigued by all the long
winded pseudo-philosophical and religious ramblings that contrived the bulk of
the down-time; yet for all the clever little existential and academic insights
I just couldn't shake off the thought that maybe I wasn't quite grasping the
whole, no doubt brilliant, meta simply because there wasn't one, and the 'I am
very smart' script was just really a right up its own behind exercise in academia.
Pretentious might be
the word I'm looking for, and a passage from Genesis and narrator introducing each day rambling about the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the perfect storm that may have been
the cause, while all the time shooting parallels to the current apocalyptic
shit-storm, most certainly was for starters. Also not naming the four disparate
survivors; simply billed as Colonel (Carl McCrystal), Wizard (Zach Cohen),
Doctor (Susanne Gschwendtner) and Daughter (Davina Kevelson) or ever really
exploring their characters beyond their contrasting and reductionist
philosophical positions was a bit showy too. Then again there was obviously
enough know-how that it made for some interesting dialogue and clashes, even
if, as said, I never felt it ever really came together well enough to pull off
what I think it was trying to accomplish. 
While I think it
does the film a disservice to analyse the action sequences totally separately from the conversations and narration I think it's worth it, as a lot of
viewers, and this isn't being insulting, will have glazed over well before the
second long over-complicated chemistry lesson or nihilistic eulogy has begun.
As said this isn't an easy one to call either. There's no doubting Reuven has a
real eye for horror and a real talent at bringing the dark, menacing and
truly dangerous to the screen. I understand the shaky, bouncing and cam
technique isn't for all but I felt it brilliantly captured the convincingly made-up and
perfectly choreographed fast, rabid infected, and the increasingly desperate
and edge-of-the-seat efforts of the survivors to out shoot and out run them.
The narrative itself
though is a bit of a convoluted mess. Yes, even aside from the high academia word-wankery, the way in which the
story jumps about, leaving huge swathes of time unaccounted is jarring, and the base
position that the foursome would rather take the fight to the zombies with
vapour bombs, dynamite and the tight urban sprawl rather than drive two hundred
miles, with two lorries full of provisions to hide and wait it out, is quite
frankly ludicrous. Also while the cat and mouse fight with a zombie-hybrid
billed as Mouser (David Lavenski) was actually interesting, even finally firing some connections in me to the pseudo-intellectual stream of consciousness being
spouted by the narrator, he was painfully underutilised and unexplored, and
brought to an abrupt end weakly and prematurely.
It's 28 Days Later
territory. They're infected, alive and the plan is to get to a month or two in
when they've all died of hunger or exposure then move to a nice clean spot and
start life again. So not zombie? It took me a while but I've now embraced the mindless
but alive, and will gladly argue their zombie place at the table. While I fully
acknowledge Romero's legacy the further I've delved the more inherently
ambiguous and ultimately moot the whole life and dead debate is; and it's lack
of control which serves as the actual signifier. There were zombies well before Romero
stuck his grubby mitts in, and they were very much alive, and while he created
an undoubted cult niche, let's not get carried away.
So while I do have
quite a lot of respect for Another World, I can't help but feel the
high intensity and highly stylised action would have been better partnered with
a pseudo-intellectual meta that wasn't trying quite so hard. There's a lot going
on; way too much with a Pandora's Box approach to the end of the world
that tries to mesh together just too many ideologies and principles. There's euthanasia, Viking burials, bastardised Descartes, dinosaur extinction and Gaia theories, the merits of autodidacticism and utilitarianism, and even God's
eternal grace and love is thrown into the mix; nothing is left out the intellectual maelstrom and
whilst there's no doubting the writers know a great deal of words and concepts
there's little evidence they know how to weave a coherent story with them all.
So certainly interesting, and certainly entertaining, Another World
ultimately falls short as either the gnarly little horror or the little existential piece of art it thinks it is - 4/10.
Steven@WTD.
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