NATHAN WEINBENDER:
28 Years Later returns director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland to the series they kickstarted in 2002 with 28 Days Later. With its bleary, grimy digital photography and hordes of twitchy, fast-moving flesh eaters, it brought the zombie genre into the 21st century. They’ve attempted to reimagine the genre once again, with a more expansive vision that will span three features. If this film is any indication, the next two will be pretty bonkers.
This is now a franchise that has itself stretched to nearly 28 years. The original film was paranoid, spare and tightly wound. Its sequel, 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, was angrier and more cynical, less about unease than sheer brute force. 28 Years Later falls somewhere in between. It’s mostly elegiac in its consideration of civilization’s need to persevere, but it also has bursts of outrageous gore that have us laughing out loud and shaking our heads.
We’ve leaped ahead in the series timeline. The so-called “rage virus,” which is blood borne and takes effect almost instantly, has been eradicated from Europe. But there are still groups of the infected roaming the British Isles, and much of the human population lives in quarantine.
Garland sets his story in an isolated community surrounded by water, the rising tides protecting them from invaders. Our hero is a young kid named Spike (Alfie Williams), whose father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a hunter-gatherer eager to teach him the art of the kill. Spike’s mother (Jodie Comer) is bedridden, wracked with an illness that has potentially driven her mad. He hears rumors of a medical doctor, a job that doesn’t exist in his village, living in exile, and so he steals away with his mother and they roam the land in hopes of curing her ailment.
Along the way, they encounter various factions of the undead and a handful of human survivors, kind of like a Mad Max wasteland transplanted to the rolling, verdant hills of rural England. The movie gets a nice jolt of eccentricity with the third-act appearance of Ralph Fiennes as the eccentric M.D., who slathers himself in iodine and lives amongst giant towers made up of human skulls. Those towers represent the film’s effect in microcosm: horrifying in their implication, but somehow weirdly beautiful.
After more highbrow fare like Steve Jobs and the maudlin Beatles fantasy Yesterday, it’s nice to see Boyle return to the grungier, edgier style of his early work. Boyle and his longtime cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle go for sensory overload and a deliberately jarring mix of mediums, from consumer-grade cameras to smartphones. One of their innovations this time is an insane-looking rig mounted with 20 iPhones, which gives some of the zombie kills a jittery bullet-time effect.
The real-world parallels continue to haunt this series. 28 Days Later was released in the aftermath of 9/11, echoed in its images of a desolate London plastered with missing person flyers. The sequel, 28 Weeks Later, was about military intervention and corporal violence, and had echoes of the intensifying War in Iraq. Here, with all the talk of viruses and quarantines, it’s impossible not to think about COVID.
Because it’s directly setting up a sequel—subtitled The Bone Temple, to be released early next year—28 Years Later ends abruptly and bafflingly, hastening the wearying trend of films forgoing a real ending for a “to be continued” title card. There’s the nagging feeling that it’s incomplete, that we’ve only seen half (or maybe only a third) of the story. Still, I look forward to where that story is heading.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.