From Warfare at 28 years later, the electric grip of Alex Garland

It may be set back or in simple support for films, the imprint of Alex Garland clearly feeds 28 years later and Warfare. It is now impossible to escape its influence.

He said (in this magazine) that he would now take a step back. It’s done. Even if he wrote the script, the infested (and the promotion) of 28 years later belong to the only Danny Boyle: it was he who held the iPhones of this suite, and he who shaped the universe of this saga for twenty-three years. Warfarereleased on June 15 on Prime Video, it’s a little different. The film tells the personal story of Ray Mendoza, former Navy Seal who revives his 2006 Iraqi trauma. Garland is co -director, May if it is above all the deposit of the project, the one without whom nothing would have been done. The story really does not belong to him.

Yet difficult to deny that these works form a perfectly Garlandian diptych even if a priori all opposes them. On the one hand, a film of zombies (sorry, infested) which follows a kid in his odyssey through a post-apo England, leaving the security of an island to explore a continent in decay. On the other, a Claustro war film which encloses a handful of soldiers in a house surrounded by Iraqi fighters, and which operates the minute reconstruction of a disaster mission. The epic against camera, horror against raw realism, escape against confinement.

Favorite patterns

Under these surface differences, the filmmaker’s obsessions are reflected everywhere. The two films tell the same initiatory journey: the war that transforms the child into a man. This mechanics reveals the imprint of an author who, even without holding the camera, infused his favorite patterns. In Warfareyoung soldiers experience the fight – inner travel which metamorphoses them in real time.

In 28 years laterhe is a boy who leaves his cocoon to play war against monsters. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, a protective dad at Danny Boyle, seems to prolong the ambiguous paternal figures of Civil Warwhile Ralph Fiennes embodies an ersatz of the Kurtz ofRevelation Now who would not have mismatched in Warfare… Above all, in both cases, the characters evolve in enclosed spaces from which they must urgently get out, another Garlandian fetish since Ex_machina. The British Island of 28 years later and the besieged house of Warfare Resonate and echo themselves according to a logic of cocoon, where claustrophobia becomes the worst enemy.

This consistency reveals the singularity of Garland basically. Belonging to this generation of authors who sail between mediums (novelist, screenwriter, creator of video games, director), he has always been able to anticipate the time without claiming prophecy. His flops who have become cult testifies well of this unique ability to feel the times. With these two films, he established himself as an artist whose power exceeds his only place in the credits. Boyle is the boss of the Zombie saga and Warfare excavates the traumas of Mendoza. But these two films carry the Garlandian DNA even in their contradictions