Review: 28 Years Later (Patreon)

Alex Garland has long been fascinated by the death of Man as a social animal. Throughout 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle amplifies that fascination — the man who made Trainspotting was always going to be good with stories about antisocial (or postsocial) Man. The characters in 28 Days Later mostly face no assurance of aid or rescue. Planning is pointless. The characters don't even know if their country is the only one afflicted by the Rage virus (notably an extremely human phenomenon), or if the entire world is beset by this plague (although the movie implies that Rage is a purely British problem). When they do find the last vestiges of humanity in a militia led by rape-promiser-in-chief Christopher Eccleston, they discover that the boundary between humanity and the Infected is not only porous but borders on non-existent. This would work if it weren't for the last minute of the movie, where the characters attempt to flag down a jet to rescue them, suggesting an escape from this scenario. But even then, there's no moment where the jet touches down and rescues Cillian Murphy and Naiomi Harris. As Roger Ebert says, it would be satisfying to see the jet turn around and gun them to pieces.

28 Weeks Later fucks everything up, mostly by dint of minimal involvement of Garland and Boyle. While the movie flirts with the idea of an American occupation of Britain, it doesn't have a single moment where the idea is realized to a greater extent than "gosh, Americans sure like to shoot people, don't they?" The movie also lacks any dramatic throughline or emotional stakes, only justifying itself with a crass, typical-of-Aughts-Hollywood teaser ending where the Infected storm Paris. A complete waste of Robert Carlyle and Rose Byrne that not only can but must be skipped ahead of 28 Years Later.

At this point, I should probably say for the sake of full transparency that I missed the last 15 minutes of 28 Years Later. Around the point where Spike crowns the skull tree with the skull of his mother, I nearly passed out from dehydration and had to rush to the bathroom. Fortunately, my oldest friend George Oakes obliged me when I messaged him on Instagram asking for a synopsis of the last 15 minutes of the movie, thus enabling me to write this review and turn a buck. This review is only possible because of George, as well as my friend Laura, who paid for the tickets (I covered the popcorn), so I dedicate this piece to both of them.

28 Years Later suffers from the first two movies' tendency to feel more like a kaleidoscope of cinema than a concrete story (moreso than Days, less so than Weeks). The prologue where a little boy named Jimmy cowers underneath the floor of a chapel while his father, a thanatotic vicar, gleefully feeds himself to a swarm of Infected. "Father, why have you forsaken me?" Jimmy weeps, in a pretty explicit summation of the movie's themes. The scene is wholly disconnected from almost the entire plot with the exception of the very end of the movie — in one of the most bizarre payoffs I've ever not seen in a movie due to intense dehydration.

The next 45 minutes or so of the movie follow 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who hail from a surviving colony of humans on an island off the British mainland. Since the first movie (which took place a probably undisclosed amount of time earlier), the Rage virus has been contained to the British mainland, and the rest of the world has left Britain to fend for itself, in a likely rebuke to Weeks. The monoculture of the colony where Spike and his father live — notably a uniformly white Northern English cult — treats hunting trips to the mainland as right of passage for boys. The survivors of the virus have evolved from a post-social pod to a new society where violence is a language — and notably, one only spoken outright by men and boys.

The first act is promising — a real piece of character drama closer to Days than Weeks, but crucially, closer to Garland's Civil War and Annihilation than to either of Years' predecessors. Shots of Spike and his father hunting and crossing the narrow land bridge to the mainland are intercut with clips from Laurence Olivier's "Rule, Britannia"-ass Henry V. While Days flirted with ideas of hypermasculine rape culture during the apocalypse, Years sees the survivors forming a wholly patriarchal society where disabled, chronically ill women like Spike's mother Isla (Jodie Comer) are consigned to rooms where they can die out of view of the public. Thank god Britain's not like this in reality.

Spike ultimately opts out of his colony's way of treating women, instead choosing to search for Ralph Fiennes' Dr. Kelson to treat his mother's illness. All I'm going to tell you about Kelson is that he carries around skulls, which is pretty sick, IMO.

The last two thirds of 28 Years Later flirt with ideas of care in a world where care is always too late and parents and children swapping roles — promising ideas, but not ones fully realized. For all Danny Boyle's talk about this movie being standalone, I suspect we can't properly judge 28 Years Later until Nia DeCosta's sequel comes round. In the meantime, what we have is a fine Part One — one of the more interesting zombie movies of recent years, but not one of the most complete ones.