We Need to Talk About the Ending of 'The Bone Temple'
Populism is catching strays now??
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Like the first 28 Years Later, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is inspired, a solidly fun time at the multiplex, albeit one that hits an odd, sour note at the end. I was loathe to discuss The Bone Temple’s ending in my review of the film, both because the final scene seems mostly irrelevant to the movie that came before it, and because it’s difficult to discuss without getting into spoiler territory. Nonetheless, I felt the need to screed, so here we are in a second post about the same movie. No refunds!
So, yes, the following will include spoilers for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Obviously!
Structurally, the ending sequences of both films are doing the same thing—which is to say, setting up the sequels. In 28 Years Later, our protagonist Spike leaves his home on the isolated isle of Lindisfarne—separated from the British mainland by a causeway that’s only accessible at low tide—taking his afflicted mother to the homestead of the mysterious Dr. Ian Kelson (that’s ripped Ralph Fiennes painted orange with iodine) to see if he can cure her. Dr. Ian tells Spike that his mother has an aggressive form of brain cancer and quickly euthanizes her before boiling the flesh off her skull and adding it to the column of skulls in his “ossuary” (that’s Twisleton for “bone temple”). I thought it was kind of strange that they just killed off Spike’s mum without a conversation first, and then staged the decorative mounting of her skull like it was a heartfelt requiem, but anyway, that wasn’t the weird part. (If I wanted to see someone get her skull mounted, I’d call your mom, am I right?)
The weird part comes right at the end, after Spike helps Dr. Ian deliver a zombie’s baby (the baby is uninfected!), delivers it back to Lindisfarne, and returns to the infected mainland. Returning to the mainland (one of Spike’s many questionable decisions, frankly the kid is kind of an idiot), Spike is quickly menaced by zombies again. And yet he’s saved—and this is the weird part—by a gang of kicking, stabbing, acrobatics-performing characters that I initially described as “Viking Ninjas.”
This gang of zombie killers are somehow simultaneously Norwegian Black Metal and hypebeast-coded. They’re led by Jack O’Connell, a character we met as a child in the film’s opening frame while he was hiding from zombies in the basement of a church. Now he wears an upside-down crucifix necklace and leads a gang of blond ninjas. Uhhhh…. sure? Lots of material for the sequel, I guess.
Not being British, I didn’t immediately recognize that the gang were styled not as Viking ninjas, but rather meant to evoke Jimmy Savile, the beloved British radio and television presenter turned pedophile necrophiliac (I knew Savile’s name and some of his story, but couldn’t recognize him by costume). Anyway, this is where they chose to end the previous installment: on a non-sequitur about platinum blond parkour ninjas. Weird! Again, it felt a bit like a prank (though not un-entertainingly so).
Six months later, we can say that at least I was correct about the ending being material for the sequel.
That sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, released this past week, indeed follows Spike and “Young Jimmy” (the grown up version of that kid from the church who now runs a ninja gang), along with Young Jimmy’s gang of Satan-worshiping sadistic torturers, who also all call each other “Jimmy.” The latest film (allegedly the second in a planned trilogy, shot back-to-back with the first) jumps back and forth in parallel storytelling between Spike and the Jimmies and Dr. Ian (Ralph Fiennes), 28 Years Later’s humanistic, one-man Swiss Family Robinson, determined to recreate a pluralistic society and maybe teach the huge-dicked ripped zombie giant Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) how to dance to Duran Duran.
Which is to say: with the context of The Bone Temple, the ending of 28 Years Later isn’t that weird; it’s at least somewhat logical as a lead-in (though still a hell of a left turn).
The ending of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, meanwhile, is also odd, but for different reasons. In the penultimate sequence, Dr. Ian essentially sacrifices himself for Spike, double-crossing Young Jimmy, who ends up being crucified upside down by his own Jimmies. They had thought Dr. Ian might be “Old Nick,” aka Satan, and Young Jimmy had strongarmed Dr. Ian into playing along, leading to Dr. Ian putting on a grand show set to Iron Maiden, in which he puts on a brilliant one-man show dazzling enough to convince some young chavs that he’s really the devil. Fantastic scene. Yet once he’s successfully convinced them all that he is in fact Satan, Dr. Ian flips on Young Jimmy, who fatally stabs Dr. Ian, but not quickly enough to save Young Jimmy from being crucified upside down by his Jimmies. Again, not really the part I dragged you here to discuss, but important context nonetheless.
More in question is the final sequence. We open on a now grey-haired (but still impossibly handsome) Cillian Murphy from the first movie (28 Days Later). He seems to be living a reasonably stable existence in a house on the coastal countryside, where he’s making tea and tutoring a young girl (presumably his daughter). He’s prepping her for a test on 20th century history. He recounts the end of World War I, and the punitive Treaty of Versailles, which, he explains, in its hurry to punish the war’s instigators, created divisions that only served to pave the way for the second World War. It took a long time and two devastating wars, but the powers that be had learned a lesson, he lectures. So at the end of the second, rather than penalizing the losers as Versailles had done, the winners conceived of the Marshall Plan, to help them rebuild, prevent future wars, all that stuff.
“This time it was the ideas that were punished,” Cillian Murphy lectures. “Fascism, nationalism, populism; totally dismantled. Never to be again.”
Now this was the part that had me scratching my head. Populism? Excuuuuse me?
