Ranking the feature films of Danny Boyle. I saw 28 Days Later in the theatres (I would have been about 12–13), and it will always hold a special place in my heart. Yesterday I just watched at the time of writing this, so there is definitely some recency bias, but rom-com is genuinely one of my favourite genres; and hitching that genre to The Beatles wagon creates an effect that I find to be supremely powerful. The Beach I also saw really young, and to me it is such an important piece of digital culture (my primary research area as a cultural historian).
A few elements of his oeuvre that I really like: the consistent use of crazy, high-concept plot devices; the genre hopping; the music; the audacious digital aesthetics.
The digital culture in The Beach and Millions is part of the canon of net art. It’s a specifically 90s vision of Internet aesthetics that became dated. Like Project Xanadu, these two films are signposts of how things might have been different. That early vision of the Internet was subsumed by the corporate aesthetics of social media; that shift from the grassroots of the early Internet, to the corporate present, is even represented in the narrative of Steve Jobs—evidence that Boyle is very conscious about this aspect of his work. Steve Jobs doesn’t have the flashy effects of Millions or The Beach, but the different acts are shot on different film stocks. If we think about the dynamism of the image across his films—filming televisions, inserting CCTV footage, cut-aways to diegetic footage, the image quality and colour saturation in 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire—he uses the medium of images in a way that is not part of the standard cinematic toolkit (neither in the arthouse, and certainly not at this level of the mainstream). I will mention in my capacity as an art historian that medium specificity is a hallmark of “post-internet art,” a tradition coming out of the fine arts where integration of media & materials into the subject of the work is standard practise.
Visually speaking, the digital aesthetics in Yesterday are contiguous with the 8-bit kitsch of The Beach, but updated to reflect the contemporary reality of digital culture. His use of music, and his persistent work within the aesthetics of digital culture, are signs of perhaps a more overarching theme in his oeuvre: “youth culture,” a recurrent subject since Trainspotting.
All in all, Danny Boyle is a very “deep” filmmaker, which is belied by his mainstream status and the genre trappings of his narrative subjects.