28 years, four riffs, one good reviewer.

I stopped reading movie reviews before watching the film many years ago. Decades really. It was a film reviewer called Ana Maria Del’Oso (apologies for inevitably getting the spelling wrong, A.M.) wot done it to me. I'd been looking forward to watching Clint Eastwood's return to the Western with Unforgiven and naïvely picked up her review, which might have been in the Fairfax papers, or maybe some posh magazine.

In the first paragraph of the review, she gives away the movie's ending. I'm not gonna to do that here, even though the thing’s been out for 30 or 40 years. Maybe there’s somebody who hasn't seen it yet. I remember the feeling of my head coming apart as the words poured through my eyeballs with no way of pushing them back out.

After that, the only time I could read a film review was after I'd seen it for myself, and mostly because I wanted to disagree with somebody whose take on it would be 100% wrong. See Paul Byrne, The Sydney Morning Herald, re. 300.

It was with some trepidation that I encountered this essay by Lynda E. Rucker. Four Riffs on Alex Garland and 28 Years Later… (I’ve embedded her original post below so you can get directly to the piece via her link)

The promise is right there in the title. Spoiler free. And she delivers. The essay is totally worth a read, whether you’re a fan of Alex Garland’s zombie opus or not. It's just really good film and culture writing. So good that I left a comment telling her how much I had enjoyed it.

I thought her reply was worth posting here in full, which I'm doing with her permission:

Yes, there's a whole strain of film writer/aficionado who insists there's no such thing as spoilers and only rubes watch films to see the STORY unfold. Well, call me a rube then--I loathe being spoiled for a film, to the point that I won't even watch a trailer unless I'm on the fence about seeing something. (It's not just about the plot either--I just don't want to get too much about the film at all.)

Of course there is and should be space for expansive film criticism that looks at the whole picture and if I pick up a book of film essays by, say, Manny Farber, I'm not going to be yelling that he's spoiled me without warning. That's a convention of serious film crit and I'm fine with it. But I will always warn if I'm going to do it myself. And I definitely won't do it if my main purpose is to encourage people to watch a film!

And of course great films are still great even when you know what's going to happen. I mean, I had no illusions about what I was in for when I sat down to watch Bergman's The Virgin Spring. (Yet even here I'm not going to say why because not everybody in the world knows what The Virgin Spring is about.)

Film is more than just the story. But come on, film snobs (of which I can be one)--it's also ok to let people choose how much they want to know ahead of time!