Producers: Andrew Macdonald, Peter Rice, Bernard Bellew, Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and Cillian Murphy Director: Danny Boyle Screenplay: Alex Garland Cast: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes, Edvin Ryding, Christopher Fulford, Jack O’Connell, Chi Lewis-Parry, Celi Crossland, Erin Kellyman, Emma Laird, Rocco Haynes and Sandy Bachelor Distributor: Sony Entertainment/Columbia Pictures
Grade: B+
The timing may be a bit off—the original “28 Days Later” came out in 2003, which means that this third movie in the series should not, if the title is any indication, have appeared until 2031. But the first sequel, “28 Weeks Later,” didn’t appear until 2007, so precision in calculating the passage of time seems never to have been a preoccupation with the filmmakers. In any event, this is intended as the first part of a trilogy, so though the second installment is reportedly ready for release next year, perhaps the third won’t come out for another six years. On the other hand, the recent experience of the pandemic makes the present an appropriate backdrop for the reemergence of the “Rage” Virus.
The first film, of course, was seminal in what’s come to be known as the zombie renaissance, a proliferation of movies featuring the resurrected undead that found its culmination in the TV series “The Walking Dead,” which premiered in 2010 and has been spewing sequels and spin-offs ever since. George Romero may have sowed the seeds of the zombie apocalypse back in the 1960s, but the concept really bloomed after 2003.
So how does this new entry from Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, the director and writer of the original film (they were involved with “28 Weeks Later” only as executive producers), stack up? Well, given the intervening years, it inevitably can’t avoid seeming a bit like another spin-off of “The Walking Dead”—there are only so many premises the genre allows. But despite moments of bleak humor, it blends a powerful tone of mournfulness into the expected violence, ultimately conveying an almost elegiac mood. While there are scenes expertly designed to turn your stomach and make you squirm, there are others intended to induce you to think about mortality and what it means to be human.
The film is bookended by sequences that, unless one is attentive, might seem unrelated. A prologue, set during the original outbreak, shows a group of children watching the Teletubbies on TV when the house in which they’ve congregated is attacked. In a gruesome sequence virtually all the kids and adults are slaughtered, their blood splashed onto the TV screen, except for one, a tyke named Jimmy (Rocco Haynes), who escapes to the church next door where his father (Sandy Bachelor), the minister, is praying maniacally at the altar. He manages to press a silver cross into the boy’s hand before the infected swarm kill him; Jimmy hides beneath the floor. He, grown up (Jack O’Connell), and that cross, reappear at the end, and will obviously play a major role in the next installment.
For now, however, the focus shifts to Holy Isle, or Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast of England, where a group of refugees established a self-sufficient community that has survived for almost three decades, thanks to a causeway almost a mile long that connects the island to the Northumbrian mainland but is covered by the sea during high tide. It’s a militant group—Jon Harris edits in montages of British forces at various historical moments, most notably the battle of Agincourt, where the St. George’s flag that flies over the village was prominently displayed; and it fosters a coming-of-age ritual in which boys are trained in archery and taken by their fathers onto the mainland for a day’s initiation in killing the infected.
That rite opens the major narrative, as twelve-year old Spike (the remarkably expressive Alfie Williams), with a quiver of arrows prepared by elderly family friend Sam (Christopher Fulford), is taken by his stern father Jamie (gruff, bearded Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a skilled scavenger, on his first kill, leaving behind his mother Isla (Jamie Comer), an ill woman who suffers bouts of hysteria and amnesia. The boy succeeds in piercing the neck of one of the obese, lumbering Slow-Lows, who crawl about on their bellies searching for grubs and worms to devour, but he panics when the fast-moving Berserkers attack under the lead of their Alpha (fearsome Chi Lewis-Parry), and father and son are forced to take refuge in a crumbling farmhouse, barely surviving the onslaught but making it back home after a desperate run across the partially submerged causeway.
Before their return, however, Spike has spied in the distance a fire that Sam speculates marks the abode of Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, looking rather like Ben Kingsley), an eccentric Jamie dismisses as mad. Spike, however, thinks his father is lying, and determines to take Isla to Kelson for treatment. The journey is a harrowing one, with moments of grim humor (an abandoned Shell station with the initial letter detached, and an adjoining diner called the Happy Eater, which of course becomes a dangerous place) and an extended interlude featuring Erik (charismatic Edvin Ryding), a Swedish soldier who’s the sole survivor of a NATO patrol boat guarding against Brits attempting to cross to the continent. (The film ignores the suggestion at the end of “28 Weeks Later” that the virus had reached France.) There’s another encounter, both frightening and revealing, in a wrecked train, where Isla connects with a pregnant Berserker (Celi Crossland) and mother and son escape the Alpha’s onslaught with a newborn to tend.
They manage to reach Kelson’s compound, where the doctor has fashioned a striking memorial to those who have perished—a memento mori, as he calls it (and a ravishing accomplishment of production designer Mark Tildesley, whose work throughout is remarkable). The episode also brings, in Kelson’s formulation, a memento amori in the closure of Spike’s relationship with Isla, as well as a glimmer of future hope in Spike’s decision about the baby. What the sudden appearance of Jimmy and his crew at a moment when Spike is in peril—a recurrent motif that, it must be admitted, is somewhat of a weakness in the script—will mean for the ruminative tone of this film’s final third will presumably be explained in the sequel.
What’s extraordinary about “28 Years Later” is that while necessarily embracing the tropes of the genre its predecessor was instrumental in establishing, it reaches beyond them, as most of the original’s imitators fail to do; and if it’s not entirely successful in integrating all the elements, one has to admire Boyle and Garland for the attempt. Their efforts, and those of the entire cast, exhibit total devotion to the material, with Boyle doing his best work in years, balancing frenetic action and meditative mysteriousness to potent effect. In that’s he’s aided by the brilliance of Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography; using an iPhone, he creates visuals of ravishing beauty and eye-popping color even as he’s capturing horrific hallucinatory images of human heads being ripped from their bodies, the spinal cords swinging underneath them. Harris’ montages go beyond the martial collages to mesmerizing flashbacks and sudden bursts of flame, keeping viewers constantly ill at ease, while the score by Young Fathers is eclectic in the extreme, mashing together stately hymns with the hardest of rock.
Young Williams anchors the film with a performance aching with vulnerability and determination, while Comer similarly juggles moments of distracted uncertainty with others of maternal warmth. Fiennes offers another eminently refined turn as the mystical doctor. And one shouldn’t overlook the contribution of Ryding as a young man whose cockiness is matched by his ruefulness over the choices he’s made.
“28 Years Later” is remarkable for opting to do something radically different amid the cascade of zombie apocalypse films—some excellent, to be sure, but most pretty awful. That it succeeds as well as it does raises the bar for the next installments in the series.