Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s return to the rage-infected wasteland was very much worth the wait.
It’s hard to know if 28 Years Later is fueling or simply exploiting the recent renaissance of stories about zombies, but the commercial timing of its release could not be better. On levels both superficial and deep, director Danny Boyle’s sequel picks up ideas that were introduced in The Last of Us Season 2, not to mention a handful of other television series about the walking dead.
Then again, both of its previous chapters preceded not only that particular series and the game it’s based upon, but several dozen copycats and imitators that followed. Yet like the origin story that set this franchise’s events in motion, what matters is no longer where it all began but how far it’s come.
Reunited for the first time in almost 20 years with screenwriter (and now filmmaker-in-his-own-right) Alex Garland, Boyle and his co-conspirator showcase their shared maturity as storytellers while retaining the scrappy creativity that gave 28 Days Later such a thrilling charge. Though all three films (thus far) continue to function largely independent from one another — thereby enabling each generation of moviegoers to have a story to call their own — the underlying connective tissue, bound together by thoughtful and complex performances from Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes and especially 12-year-old newcomer Alfie Williams, makes the overall saga feel stronger than ever.
Taylor-Johnson (Kraven the Hunter) plays Jamie, a father training his son Spike (Williams) to survive on Holy Island, a small community in Northeast England that protects itself from the rage virus by hiding at the end of a causeway that gets swallowed each day by the ocean’s surrounding tides. After the two of them venture onto the mainland so that Spike can bag his first kill — despite the objections of Jamie’s ailing wife Isla (Comer) — the community’s subsequent celebration of his eventual success inadvertently reveals some harsh truths that alienate the boy from his father.
Escaping Holy Island in search of a diagnosis (and, hopefully, a cure) for Isla, Spike ventures further than ever into the mainland of England, which was quarantined and abandoned decades ago by the rest of the world. Armed only with his father’s training, he soon finds himself tested by the dangers of that untamed landscape.
Back in 2002, 28 Days Later distinguished itself aesthetically, shooting on digital video while the format was still in its infancy, but in many ways adhered to a formula that the genre’s forefather, George A. Romero, pioneered decades ago: no matter how bad the undead may be, the living ultimately make things much worse.
Garland’s script uncovered some beautifully inventive, and emotionally rich, ways to test the characters in a brutal landscape (in particular a loving father’s eventual infection), but for lack of a more succinct way to describe it, that film’s “rape mansion” conclusion felt like an unconvincing way to complicate the circumstances in which the characters eventually found themselves. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 2007 sequel manages to be more thrilling and less sentimental but its impulse to expand the scope of the franchise’s mythology, inevitable or even appropriate though the choice may have been, replaces believable humanity with a lot of bloody pyrotechnics and way too many improbable decisions.
28 Years Later, by comparison, incorporates the world-building of its predecessor but retains the intimacy of the original film. Garland’s script rightfully observes that a few expository intertitles do more than enough to establish the world into which the audience and the film’s characters are plunged into, and then dials into the lives of a family that’s doing its best to navigate an unimaginable situation both environmentally and interpersonally.
At 12, Spike isn’t an overconfident superkid, but one raised harshly in a harsh world, and consequently he makes the decisions of a 12-year-old — a few wiser than his years, but more often ones that are well-intentioned but impulsive. It makes sense why he can’t understand why his father would struggle with the responsibility of caring for a wife whose sickness can’t be remedied and might seek solace elsewhere. And Isla’s vacillating mental clarity is absolutely the kind of thing that one can empathize with and be exasperated by simultaneously. Then on top of that, there aren’t just zombies, but different kinds of zombies — a byproduct of the evolution of the virus.
Garland and Boyle utilize the passage of time, in the franchise and within the chronology of the films themselves, to normalize the world around this family so that the fantasy/horror elements of the franchise blend organically with the character development. There are both gruesome, violent moments and quietly devastating ones, and they all fit together seamlessly.
Unexpectedly, Boyle’s return to a look that’s, let’s say, slightly lower than the contemporary standards of digital cinematography is most successful when it’s complemented by editor Jon Harris working at his most frenetic and aggressive, flashing between angles that may not quite jibe with classical film language but create an intensity without sacrificing visual geography. In between, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle’s extreme widescreen frame creates images that are uniquely painterly, evoking both the introspection of how the average popcorn-muncher might survive in such unforgiving conditions, and in some cases luxuriating on the unsettling ooze of a crawling zombie’s flesh as it awkwardly advances towards an intended victim.
The instant charm of young star Williams evokes a young Christian Bale — he feels like a real kid who’s preternaturally sophisticated, especially opposite Comer. Meanwhile, a scene-stealing, predictably skillful turn from Ralph Fiennes elevates a section of the film that risks mawkishness, while also indulging the grim humor and even silliness of the whole concept. But the movements — the performances — of the undead, with their various personalities, manage to be repulsive, chilling and believably human all at once. This is a movie that never forgets that zombies were once people too.
Even before 28 Days Later, Boyle has often delivered endings that are polarizing, and the tonal shift in the finale of this film will likely spur no small debate — as mitigating as the news may be that a follow-up is already on the way. (Personally, I think it’s great.) But with or without that button, 28 Years Later is handily the best installment in this series and one that, rather than reiterating Hollywood’s lack of originality, unexpectedly makes you glad for franchises.
You don’t need to have seen either of its predecessors, but its richness is enhanced by them — more than their characters or back story, their aesthetics, rhythm and tone. Boyle’s is a film that doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants, it seems to have gone native and learned how to live among them, and ultimately the series and genre is better for it.
