Now/then, now/then… The past and the present exist in perpetual tension in the gory second sequel to Danny Boyle’s zombie horror franchise. “Time didn’t heal anything,” goes the tagline, and as we learned from the recent pandemic, mankind isn’t always prepared for the worst.
By far the most political of the three films, 28 Years Later is particularly scathing about Brexit Britain and its little-islander mentality. But it does have global relevance at a time of rising tensions across the world, bringing to mind the famous quote attributed to famed German physicist Albert Einstein: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
It’s a moot point whether the film is set precisely in the present day, since the original 28 Days Later was made in 2002, which makes this two years early. Intriguingly, it begins with a roomful of children watching Teletubbies, the BBC kids show that first broadcast in 1997, 28 years ago. The peace is shattered by an agitated woman who begs the eldest, a young boy, not to open the door. Nevertheless, the walking dead break in anyway and the boy runs for his life, hiding out in a church where his father is the priest. But sanctuary is short-lived; his father is an end-times Christian who welcomes in his ravenous flock and hands his horrified son a crucifix, telling him to “have faith.”
This opening scene seems more like an overture and, indeed, has very little to do with what follows for most of the film’s near-two-hour running time. We then jump forward 28 years to an island community off the northeast coast. By this time, we learn, the Rage virus has been contained to Britain, while European armies patrol the coast to prevent any of its inhabitants from leaving. The island itself is cut off from the mainland via a path that only appears at low tide, and its citizens keep a constant vigil at the ramshackle but heavily fortified entrance.
The island is home to 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), who lives with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and mother Isla (Jodie Comer). Confined to her bed, Isla is given to violent fits and delusional behavior, slipping in and out of rational consciousness. It is during one of these rare moments of clarity that she learns of Jamie’s plans to take Spike over to the mainland, which does not go down well. Indeed, the islanders also warn Jamie that Spike is a little on the young side (“14 or 15 is more in keeping”), but off they set anyway, man and boy each armed with a bow and a quiver’s supply of arrows.
The trip is filmed like a father-son safari, with Spike in awe at the sheer expanse of the mainland. “It’s so big,” he marvels. “You can go for days and weeks without seeing the coast,” Jamie tells him. The zombie hordes, meanwhile, exist for Spike to make his first kill, starting with one the fat, bloated ones that writhe around on the forest floor and seem to survive on worms. “Head and heart,” his old man reminds him as he lines up the shot. Things have changed a bit since Jamie was last there, however, and the undead have mutated; a new strain has appeared — stronger, faster, more intelligent, more alpha.
Back at the island, Spike is welcomed as the returning hero, with Jamie significantly, and drunkenly, embellishing his son’s bravery. It also becomes clear that Jamie is cheating on Isla, a betrayal that Spike takes personally. Believing that Jamie is simply waiting for Isla to die so that he can move on with his life and be with his mistress, Spike takes his mother on a perilous journey to the mainland, where he believes a mysterious doctor (Ralph Fiennes), the last physician still alive in the area, will be able to cure her.
The first film always seemed a little far-fetched, given the speed with which seemingly rational people took up cross-dressing and cannibalism in the space of less than a month. But nearly 30 years does the trick, and Alex Garland’s script makes great play of how life in Britain has become stunted. Flirting with folk horror, he makes the islanders little better than the infected, inviting comparisons with The Wicker Man as they carouse in the community center while a faded portrait of Her Majesty the Queen looks down. Spike, meanwhile, has never heard of smartphones or the internet — both of which are flourishing in the real world beyond Britain’s borders — and, ever playful, Boyle often drops the ancient sound of a dial-up modem into the ominous score by Young Fathers.
Good horror, though, should always be about something else, and while it takes awhile to emerge, the zombies come to represent mortality, channeling the spirit of Damien Hirst’s 1991 shark piece The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. As Spike goes further upstream, in search of the strikingly Colonel Kurtz-like Dr. Kelson, he learns a lot about life and death, witnessing the birth of a baby and seeing a man’s head and spine ripped from his shoulders. It’s a very violent film in that respect, but the emotion is more affecting than the blood, most of it generated during Fiennes’s powerful 30-minute screen time.
Most threequels tend to go bigger, but 28 Years Later bucks that trend by going smaller, eventually becoming a chamber piece about a boy trying to hold onto his mother. It still delivers shocks, even if the sometimes over-zealous editing distracts from Anthony Dod Mantle’s painterly cinematography, but the biggest of them all is the jaw-dropping final scene, a clapback to the film’s beginning and an indication of how crazy Britain has become in its lonely isolation. It’s a very specific cultural reference, and seemingly comes from nowhere, but Brits in particular are likely to have a very, very visceral reaction, as it happens.
Title: 28 Years Later
Distributor: Sony
Director: Danny Boyle
Screenwriter: Alex Garland
Cast: Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Edvin Ryding, Ralph Fiennes
Running time: 1 hr 55 mins
