In Love With the '80s

Spoilers of 28 Weeks Later below.

Yesterday I finally got around to watching 28 Weeks Later (far too long since its premiere). Like it? Yes. Love it? Not so much. I really dug on how the severity of action was kicked up a notch from the last one. It has the best helicopter vs zombies scene in film to date. Up until the final reel it had a good amount of the social commentary I expect from good zombie movies: there were allegories for the fall of man in an "every man for himself" mentality (and the requisite examples of the importance of caring for others), overdone examples of the American way of handling problems by squashing them. And therein lies my first dislike: just how absolutely retarded did the writers have to make the US military in order to pull off the sequence of events in their plot? What idiot lets a civilian in alone with an infected? Why wasn't there automated containment? Although, I think my first uneasy feeling came about when I realized that the soldiers highlighted were pretty much the soldiers that would include Chris in their ranks: the medical squads. I actually had a momentary worry that Chris was going to end up getting attacked by zombies. Social commentary disappears in the final reel though, where the movie veers directly into the territory that Adj hates about zombie movies--it becomes entirely nihilistic as the plague of zombie infection is now spreading beyond England. The score for this film (which is the same as that of its predecessor) is one of my favorites as well. I really dig on that music.

Dig dug.

Remember when we were kids and most of the cool video games were two-player jobs? You'd have your pals over after school and team up to take down aliens in Contra or take turns trying to save Princess Peach? Lately I've been finding myself more and more displeased with the state of the multi-player video game industry. Nowadays it seems that all of the best games are single player (by best I mean most popular or best produced) or multi-player online only; the interaction with your pals aspect of gaming is dying as any human connection is weeded out in favor of ethereal connections with strangers on the internets. Yesterday this hit me hardest when Brian was over and we wanted to Xbox 360 and all we had available for two-player action was Tetris (which was still great, but not for hours of fun). Sure, the occasional rare GOOD multi-player game does still come out now and again--about one per fifty single player jobs and it's disheartening. Why even have 4-player capability built into the machine if most of the games won't even accommodate two?