'28 Years Later' Takes Some Big Swings
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland return for a belated sequel that's fantastic until it gets super weird, and even then it's pretty entertaining.
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Danny Boyle has had a weird career. The lightbulb-headed 68-year-old has directed everything from modern classics (Trainspotting) to dreadful dogshit (Slumdog Millionaire) to promising concepts that ultimately ended up being dreadful dogshit (Yesterday). In 28 Years Later, Boyle re-teams with another sometimes-brilliant Brit, his old collaborator Alex Garland, for a 22-years-later follow-up to their “fast zombies” classic, 28 Days Later.
The two face a tall challenge in this: figuring out how to bring something new to possibly our most degraded genre: the zombie movie. To be fair, it seemed fairly degraded in 2003 too, but that was before ten seasons of The Walking Dead, plus four spinoffs (including The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, a title that made me feel like I was having a stroke when I first heard it), not to mention HBO’s gentrified version, The Last of Us. Now “Zombie Survival Kits” are big business (here’s one that retails for $850) and you can buy 20-different version of “zombie killer” assault rifles. It’s one of those trends that would be really hard to try to explain to a European.
My opening day matinee of 28 Years Later was nearly sold out (trust me, that never happens here) so it seems The Hogs’ appetite for additional zombie slop remains unslaked. Boyle and Garland’s trick though is much the same as it was for the first movie, and maybe more relevant this time: imagining what the world looks like when all its institutions break down. For me at least, their skill at building this always overshadowed the actual zombie action. My memories of the first film are pretty spotty, but beyond grainy, shaky-cam action of twitchy zombies puking blood, one of the main images that stands out was them raiding an abandoned grocery store and how weirdly fun it looked. The film had a rare knack for acknowledging the human tendency to squeeze joy from any circumstances. That alone made 28 Days Later far more interesting than the usual “zombies go squish” or “actually, it’s a metaphor — did you catch that??” that we often get from the genre.
28 Years Later (would you believe it’s set 28 years after a zombie virus outbreak??) gives Boyle and Garland the space to do even more world-building, and the obvious glee they take in it is wildly compelling. 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his chavvy tough guy father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and ailing mother, Isla (Jodie Comer) on the tidal island of Lindisfarne, separated from the mainland by a causeway that’s only accessible at low tide. Very handy for keeping your community zombie free (stay outta my island community, Zombowksi!) and an instructive example for aspiring screenwriters of the old adage “setting is story.”
An opening crawl at the beginning tells us that entire British Isles have been quarantined since the outbreak of the “rage virus,” by a unified Europe that uses patrols to maintain it and ensure that life on the continent goes on as normal, leaving the bread pie eaters to cannibalize each other. Meanwhile, just a few wonderfully economical establishing shots tell us everything we need to know about life on Lindisfarne: a collectivist society that has learned to be self-sufficient, repairing old tools and clothes and generally making do without modern technology or imports.
Rather than One Big Metaphor, Boyle and Garland have seized on this premise as a jumping off point to tackle… well, damn near everything: Brexit, COVID protocols, mortality, illness, PTSD, Catholicism, euthanasia, infidelity, the grindset mentality, globalism, and daddy issues (maybe I missed a few?). Impressively, they manage this juggling act in a way that doesn’t feel scatterbrained, at least at first. And then in the last 15 minutes it feels like they maybe got a studio note they didn’t like and turned in the most incongruent, tonally bizarre collection of sequel teases they could come up with as a fuck you, ending up with a movie that’s much less coherent than it had been for most of its run time, but no less entertaining. 28 Years Later is the rare 115-minute movie that I actually wish had been longer.
For the people of Lindisfarne, going to the mainland to kill some zombies has become something of a rite of passage. Jamie is training Spike for his first raiding mission, even though he’s younger than boys typically are for this sort of thing (12, rather than 14 or 15). Jamie is convinced Spike can handle it — partly out of a chauvinistic desire to toughen him, partly out of a deep love and fatherly pride. ATJ (who has been hit or miss in his career) does steady work here. As a relatively new father myself, 28 Years Later’s meditations on the duties and pitfalls of dadhood really landed with me. Meanwhile, Spike’s mother is mostly bedbound with an unexplained illness that leaves her sometimes coherent but often confused, given to forgetting things she’s just been told and misrecognizing her loved ones.
Meanwhile meanwhile, zombie society seems to have evolved just as much as the non-infected. The “fast ones” are still around, and some of the most dangerous, as Spike learns on his first zombie mission with Jamie. But now there are also fat, slow ones, who crawl around the forest floor on all fours eating worms like feral Harkonnens (the better to practice your bow skills on), a pregnant one, and even a giant caveman/viking one with a giant flopping dick that they call an “Alpha.” I took my middle-school-aged stepson with me and I kind of wanted to mess with him by being like “No, son, that’s a totally average-sized dick, all adults have them.”
