Decades in the making but arguably being released five years prematurely, 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s follow-up to 2002’s seminal, lo-fi zombie film 28 Days, Later arrives in a world it both anticipated as well as shaped. It would be hard to overstate how important a film 28 Days Later is to pop culture, ushering in a wave of “fast zombie” movies, TV shows, and video games that are still omnipresent to this day (something like The Last of Us has a lot more in common with Boyle’s film than forebears like Night of the Living Dead). But more specifically, the film presciently laid society’s downfall at the feet of rage itself. The film posited a weaponized virus born in a lab and synthesized out of global strife and hyper-polarization to turn regular people into homicidal lunatics, which hasn’t become a less resonant idea in the last 23 years. Factor in how much 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007) functioned as commentaries on the times in which they were made and, cynically, one would think a third film would write itself. There is no shortage of recent societal ills that can’t be explored through projectile-vomiting rage-zombies.
What’s initially so surprising about the new film, then, is how it doesn’t feel like it’s repeating itself; few would accuse 28 Years Later of simply playing the hits. The film is stranger, more diffuse, and less wedded to conventional notions of realism and regularly occurring jump scares than its predecessors. And it’s a more singular filmgoing experience for it. Boyle and returning screenwriter Alex Garland have earnestly reconceived their creation as much as George Miller did his Mad Max franchise, which somewhat appropriately makes 28 Years Later the series’ Beyond the Thunderdome. However, there is a different issue with the film, very much reflecting the era in which it was made: 28 Years Later is merely the first part of a planned trilogy, with its immediate follow-up, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, tentatively scheduled for the winter. And unlike recent “part ones” like Dune and It, 28 Years Later feels less like a self-contained event that whets the appetite for future adventures than for, all intents and purposes, a two-hour first act, ending right around the time when it feels like the story proper is about to begin. It’s not even Wicked in that the film doesn’t conclude on a show-stopping number that will surely send the audience out on a high note (although it is noted with considerable irony that its final scene does feature people “defying gravity”). In other words, no film in recent memory has been more deserving of an “incomplete” grade.
After an early-2000s set prologue stages a massacre against the backdrop of small children watching The Teletubbies on television, we get the time jump promised by the film’s title where we are introduced to Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his 12-year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams), living in a fortified island community that’s equal parts idyllic fishing village and medieval feudal land. We learn that since we last spent time in this world, the rage virus has been contained to the UK — the film more or less retcons the events of 28 Weeks Later out of existence — by having assorted European navies patrolling the waters and instituting a complete and total quarantine. With the mainland of England overrun by a couple generations worth of rage-zombies who have self-organized into marauding packs that resemble early man — they’re led by hulking tribal leaders referred to as “alphas” who have the brute strength to rip someone’s spinal column from their bodies and, with their aversion to clothing, give new meaning to the term BDE — trips off the island are limited to scavenging for supplies and, apparently, father-son hunting expeditions meant to usher young boys into adulthood. But Jamie’s wife Isla (Jodie Comer) is afflicted with an unknown illness that finds her bedridden and delirious; with no doctors on the island, her prospects are bleak. So when Spike hears rumor of a mysterious Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, given a delayed introduction but a welcome injection of relaxed movie star charisma) on the mainland, while simultaneously uncovering Jamie’s philandering, the resentful adolescent gathers up his barely lucid mother and leaves the safety of relative civilization to try and cure her.
As is historically the case with these films, the bulk of 28 Years Later functions as a picaresque road movie with Spike and an infrequently sentient Isla traversing the woods and countryside, alternating between fight and flight when confronted with the infected. They are even briefly joined by Erik (Edvin Ryding), an impertinent Swedish soldier who finds himself stranded in the UK after his naval vessel sinks off the coast. (It would be unfair to disclose what happens to Erik in the film, but needless to say it leads to an especially grim Hamlet joke). With Isla only just clinging to reality and often lacking the strength to walk, her character functions more as a plot device or physical impediment to be overcome, except when the film dictates that she possess near savant-like qualities which allows it to write itself out of assorted corners. But that speaks to the sparseness of Garland’s screenplay. It’s locked into a handful of key sequences or lyrical images it wants to expound upon, but all the connective tissue and scene-by-scene plotting feels perfunctory and under-conceived, with an over-reliance on dei ex machina (it’s hard to keep track of how many times our characters are saved from certain death by some new person leaping into the fray from offscreen). We get a lot of on-the-fly worldbuilding — breadcrumbs hinting at tantalizing possibilities in the evolution of what remains of England and the infected — but it mostly feels extraneous and maddeningly out of reach, like checkpoints on a map we might get to visit someday. It all adds to the sensation that the film is struggling to build momentum and is perpetually sputtering along in second gear. There are ostensibly thrilling incidents and wondrous and/or nightmarish imagery to behold, but nothing seems to be coalescing into an actual narrative that might presumably resolve itself in a satisfying manner. For that we presumably need to wait, at minimum, for at least one additional film.
And yet, reducing 28 Years Later to the sum of its plot and characters does a disservice to what Boyle and his collaborators have accomplished here, with the film regularly achieving a staggering level of eerie beauty. Working with longtime cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Boyle leans into the uncanny qualities of prosumer digital photography, shooting the film on iPhones fastened with widescreen lenses. The original film was famously shot on a Canon XL-1 DV camera, which produced visible pixels the size of grapefruits that some viewers found to be an eyesore. 28 Years Later isn’t as knowingly rough-hewn, but it’s not pretending to be celluloid either. Instead, we get rapid 180-degree shots charting the journey of an arrow from a bow to the skull of an infected (accomplished by building a mobile rig that synchronizes more than a dozen cameras), disquieting sequences shot with infrared lenses, and scenes set against unnaturally sepulchral blacks that recall the otherworldly portent of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. If Boyle once used digital photography as a shorthand for immediacy (and, of course, as a cost-saving measure), here it emphasizes how alien the world has become in both its pastoral and surreal qualities. It’s a $75 million studio film that, in its more outré moments, feels like outsider art. You almost have to admire the chutzpah of what Boyle smuggled into a summer sequel.
But more than pretty pictures or cool camera tricks, what distinguishes 28 Years Later is the way it adroitly balances sudden explosions of violence and mournful reflection, without it simply coming across as — to use a term often associated with the band The Pixies — loud-quiet-loud. 28 Years Later builds on one of the more resonant themes of the 2002 film, and allows its characters to linger while in relative safety to acknowledge the frailty of the flesh and the inevitably of death (and not just the “bad kind” either). The film’s true apex is not a blood-pumping action sequence but rather an impromptu requiem set amidst a towering monument to the dead designed by the production designer Mark Tildesley, one as tactile as it is haunting. For a series defined by freneticism, these digressions allow 28 Years Later to substantively explore spirituality in the natural world while acknowledging humanity even in those who seek to destroy us (yes, even amongst the infected). It this quality that insulates the film from sequelitis… but only up to a point. After nearly 120 minutes of moving pieces around the board, 28 Years Later finally arrives at not a summation or even a particularly rewarding resting point, but an unadvertised “to be continued.” The film leaves its thematic threads dangling while setting up where the story might be headed in the single silliest manner imaginable. There’s an awful lot of throat-clearing in the film — the opening half an hour could be ruthlessly streamlined considering the direction it ultimately takes, if not excised entirely — and one can’t help but trace its issues back to the original sin of being conceived as a multi-chapter saga whose conclusion is dependent upon the grosses. Why make one remarkable film when you can produce three flawed ones at thrice the price!
DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle; CAST: Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Aaron Taylor-Johnson; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing; IN THEATERS: June 20; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 55 min.
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