2002’s 28 Days Later objectively revitalized the zombie genre through fast-paced action and human drama. In fact, director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and writer Alex Garland (Civil War) inspired so many imitators that it’s hard to believe there could be more life to wring out of the survivors of a viral apocalypse being hunted by the infected. Yet with 28 Years Later, Boyle and Garland have once again produced a remarkable, surreal film by stretching and evolving the genre’s tropes.
A bit of opening text explaining that the Rage Virus had been eradicated on continental Europe and contained to Great Britain is all the acknowledgement 28 Years Later gives to the unimpressive 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later. Garland’s script for the new movie keeps the focus extremely tight, following Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old living on an island accompanying his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson)) on a ritualistic zombie-hunting mission to the mainland.
The first trailer for 28 Years Later terrified viewers by juxtaposing unsettling imagery of the initial fall of Britain and the survivors’ island haven, set to Taylor Holmes’ 1915 recording of the Rudyard Kipling military poem “Boots,” which is so eerie it’s been used to teach soldiers to endure psychological trauma. The edit was not just a clever marketing play, as the poem is used in the movie with a mix of footage depicting the defense of Britain from medieval castles through the World Wars to portray Spike and Jamie’s mission as just the latest chapter in a long story of young men marching off to find glory and ostensibly protect their homeland. The repetitive nature of the poem, and the film’s montage of how Spike’s island home has prepared him for his coming-of-age hunt, makes for one of the rare cases where seeing a trailer actually enhances the moviegoing experience rather than spoiling it.
There’s something even more universal in Spike’s story than that of a young soldier marching off to prove his courage. 28 Years Later is a classic British family drama plopped into the middle of the post-apocalypse. Spike gets his first glimpse of the larger world around him and becomes a man not through killing but by discovering the flaws and mortality of his parents. While Jamie has pushed Spike to go to the mainland years earlier than his peers to enjoy the glory of the accomplishment, Spike doesn’t care about being celebrated: he just wants to help his mother Isla (Jodie Comer of Killing Eve) who is afflicted by a mysterious ailment that has left her bedridden and delusional. Williams does a tremendous job despite his age, skillfully walking the line between boy and man as he alternates between wanting to curl up in bed and make silly faces with his mom and trying to protect her from both monsters and hard truths.
Jamie guiding Spike through a dangerous world recalls the terror of Cillian Murphy’s bicycle courier waking from a coma in 28 Weeks Later. While that film’s haunting opening focused on the eerieness of empty urban environments, 28 Years Later sees the island rewilded, populated by massive herds of deer and roving packs of infected as if Britain had been transported back to prehistoric times. Like Garland’s Annihilation this is a place of horror and beauty. A scene where Jamie and Spike run across a flooded causeway beneath the aurora borealis and a massive flock of crows is as tense as it is awe-inspiring in its empty majesty.
Boyle plays with time and perspective in a way reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s work, blending flashbacks, dreams, hallucinations and the disturbing present like puzzle pieces that eventually snap together to reveal what is going on. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who utilized an extreme wide-scoped iPhone camera rig to nod to the original miniDV digital sheen, will zoom in on a dripping liquid, skillfully building tension long before it’s revealed just why it’s so ominous. A sharp cut to a unit of soldiers on the run from the infected at first feels like it belongs in an earlier entry in the franchise before the plot crashes into Spike’s story for a hilarious interlude.
Just when the setting starts to feel comprehensible, the stranded Swedish sailor Erik (Edvin Ryding of Young Royals) provides an alternative perspective of how messed up things are and a very different model of the young man leaving home for a greater cause. The discordant notes largely work, with the exception of the very end, which while heavily telegraphed goes beyond 28 Years Later’s earlier dark humor to an absurdism that feels more reminiscent of Boyle’s Trainspotting. It’s clearly meant to set up for the next film in the planned trilogy, but it would have been better as a post-credits to let Boyle and Garland’s moody, very standalone film breathe a bit more.
One of the biggest innovations 28 Days Later made to the genre is shifting from George A. Romero’s lumbering walking dead to zombies so fast their movements are practically a blur of blood and death. Boyle and Garland have it both ways here, with bulbous, boil-ridden crawling zombies that mostly lumber along the ground sucking up earthworms but still can produce the creeping dread as they move towards the unaware with the inevitability of ambush predators. They’re a dramatic contrast to the vicious Alphas, pack leaders that make even veteran hunters like Jamie run for their lives (and who Boyle shoots in all their bloody, relentless, full-frontal glory).
The nature-film aesthetic is also utilized in night vision footage of the infected feasting and reinforced by Ralph Fiennes’ possibly mad Dr. Ian Kelson showing up to refer to a giant infected holding a man’s spinal column like a primatologist talking about one of their favorite silverbacks. Fiennes is always tremendous as an actor, and he makes the most of his brief appearance here as a strangely stoic yet genial presence in a world gone mad.
28 Days Later’s successors like I Am Legend, The Girl with All the Gifts and The Last of Us have also focused on the ways the initial infection evolves, but 28 Years Later stands apart by never searching for a larger cure or answers. Like the original, the film is firmly rooted in deeply personal drama, focusing on the questions of how to remember the dead and what human endeavors will stand the test of time. One of the many evocative and uncommented on shots of the film features a church spraypainted with an apocalyptic message, tagged with the name of a man who presumably came long after. 28 Years Later argues that the world is always ending for someone – what matters is how you handle the end and whatever comes next.
28 Years Later premieres in theaters on June 20.
