DAN WEBSTER:
Zombie films have been around for nearly a century. And yet we never seem to tire of them.
From Victor Halperin’s 1932 feature White Zombie to George A. Romero’s Dead films, we watched. And many of us did so either at a drive-in or during a Friday-night Creature Features TV show—zombies stumbling and bumbling toward some non-dead human, intent on… what? Mere consumption of live flesh? Revenge on the living? A deranged kind of sexual release?
That latter possibility might explain why so many of us at age 14 were enthralled.
Anyway, along came Danny Boyle and things changed. In 2002, working from a script by Alex Garland, Boyle shot the film 28 Days Later. In it, Cillian Murphy stars as a man who awakens from a coma to discover that the UK has been decimated by something called the Rage Virus, which turns ordinary humans into unthinking, bloodthirsty savages.
Boyle’s version of zombies, though, was something different. There was no stumbling or bumbling for these murderous beasts. They were sleek and swift, able to dash across open fields or down otherwise empty city streets. It was everything the character Murphy was playing could do just to survive.
Then in 2007, Garland and Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo teamed up to shoot a sequel. Titled 28 Weeks Later, it focuses on a pair of children who who prove to be far more capable at surviving than either of their parents.
Now we have 28 Years Later, and things have transformed even further. The world that Boyle and Garland are exploring isn’t necessarily different, but the manner in which they do so certainly is. Whereas the first films were pure horror, with a bit of commentary about the source of such a scourge, this new one is less a study in horror and more of a meditation on the question of death itself—and, possibly, a new beginning.
The setting is a tidal island off the Northeast coast of England (the film was shot mostly on a real island called Lindisfarne). Accessible only at low tide, when the lowered water exposes a causeway, the island is a virtual fortress, keeping its inhabitants safe from the infected souls roaming the mainland.
But on occasion, as a rite of passage, elders take young boys (no mention is made of girls) to the mainland to hunt the infected who have evolved into two types: those who crawl along the ground like overgrown maggots, and those few who retain strength and speed.
One of the strong types, aptly called the Alpha, threatens an island father and son, Jamie (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Spike (played by Alfie Williams), who have braved the mainland. But even while proving his manhood by wielding a bow and arrow, Spike begins to question the values he has been raised to believe when he discovers his father’s duplicity.
And part of that duplicity involves Spike’s mother Isla (played by Jodie Comer). Suffering from an illness no one on the island is educated enough to understand, much less cure, Isla spends most of her days in bed. Which is where she stays until Spike, having learned that a real doctor (played by Ralph Fiennes) lives back on the mainland, decides to take her to him to seek a cure.
It's during Spike’s return trek that, one, he chances upon what may be the future of humankind and, two, learns to cope with death’s seeming finality.
Boyle and Garland fill their film with images and scenes taken from classic films and documentaries, all of which speak of British history and conceits of its grandeur, largely lost now to this modern pandemic. The dominant feeling, though, is wrapped up in a phrase that Spike learns: memento mori, which he is told means remember death. It’s the acceptance of this tenet that is Spike’s true induction into adulthood.
Oh, and 28 Years Later opens with a scene that is referenced in the film’s closing sequence. Reports are that this is just the opening chapter in a whole new trilogy. Which again, as I say, we movie fans never seem to tire of zombies.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.
