I saw Sean Bean strutting his bubonic stuff in ‘Black Death’ last night. Not bad. Certainly not as bad as it could have been.
Plot recap: It’s 1349. England’s population has been scythed down by the bubonic plague. Word gets around that there’s one village untouched by the pestilence. A knight by the name of Ulric (Sean Bean) and his band of followers want to check it out. They grab a young monk, Osmund (Eddie Redmayne) as their guide. Osmund has an ulterior motive in joining them. This involves, predictably if not especially appropriately for a wannabe monk, a hot medieval wench.
Anyway, off they pop to find the village. When they get there, they find a balding bloke called Hob (Tim McInnerny) presiding over a hotbed of necromancy. Since this is a horror film, set in a violent age, bad things soon happen, many of which involve bubonic pustules; some of which involve divorcing innocent people from their limbs.
Good points: for a relatively low-budget film about a medieval disease, Black Death is surprisingly beautiful. The sets and costumes are convincing, and the landscape, shot in a chilly palate of grey-greens and slate, feels just right. The freckled Redmayne is cast very well. He has a startled, supernatural look about him, which works very well here. Sean Bean is all gruff voice and prickly beard: you know what to expect from the Bean, and you get it in spades.
Bad points: this is basically The Wicker Man in tights. But with less Britt Ekland. The horror isn’t particularly weird or scary, just a bit gross. The necromancer (Carice van Houten) is pretty but not very sexy – which is a crime against the trade of necromancy IMHO. The narrative arc is a bit flat: Ulric and the gang don’t have to do much questing to find the plagueless village, and when they get there, things aren’t really all that mysterious. The ending, in which a disillusioned Osmund wanders the world doing evil of his own, strains for coldhearted brutality, but actually just feels a bit mean.
But overall, this is a decent, well-shot, uncompromising picture. It has a strong sense of place and plague, and although my companion at the screening claims I snorted all the way through at minor anachronisms, I actually thought it was a pretty faithful vision of what fourteenth-century England might have been like. (All except for the weird Anglo-Saxon names, that is.)
Not pestilential cack, then. Lord have mercy on us all.
Black Death is released in May
Climate change camp v proper rebellion
Here’s an exercise in (un)historical imagination. It is June 1381. You are Wat Tyler, leading a ragtag army of villagers from Kent and Essex on a righteous crusade of justice against corrupt government, punitive taxation and social injustice.
You are on the way to Blackheath, where you intend to set up camp. But on the way there, you step through a wormhole in the fabric of space-time and end up in August 2009.
When you arrive at your destination, you are startled to find that the whole place has been taken over by a load of Hampstead hippies, with foldaway Brompton bicycles, buck-teeth and deferred places to study PPE at Oxford.
Several of them are strumming guitars and a working group is pitching a wigwam, using the camp-building skills they picked up doing their Duke of Edinburgh bronze award.
Tell me seriously that you do not feel your hand tighten around the handle of your pitchfork.