28 Years Later: A Bold New Chapter

If nothing else, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Years Later is audacious. Coming nearly two decades after its previous installment, this latest film isn’t content to simply serve a conclusion to the original series—instead, it sets up a new trilogy looking at the different factions surviving in a post-apocalyptic Britain following the onset of the zombifying rage virus. Boyle’s stylized direction combined with a surprising coming-of-age story from Garland makes for a bold entry into the franchise.

Taking place as the title implies almost three decades after the events of 28 Days Later, the movie follows Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old boy living on a small island connected to England by a causeway. Life on the island seems peaceful if provincial, a village from the past where food, medicine and tools are strictly rationed and everyone has a job to do, from guarding the causeway to scavenging on the mainland for supplies. Spike’s father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is one of those scavengers, and against the wishes of his ill wife Isla (Jodie Comer), he’s preparing Spike to follow in his footsteps by taking him on his first trip to the mainland. 

What we see there is far from the deserted cityscapes of 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later. Instead, Boyle and Garland take us to an overgrown countryside placed outside of time—a feeling that’s purposefully amplified, as Jamie and Spike’s trek inland is intercut with battle scenes from Henry V (1944) and World War II footage, all set to a recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 poem “Boots.” At the same time, modern statecraft creeps in via the patrol ships maintaining a quarantine of the British Isles: in a post-2020 world, it’s an image of isolationism that resonates. 

On the mainland, Spike notches his first kill but attracts the attention of what Jamie terms an Alpha—a massive and apparently faster, stronger and more intelligent breed of the infected (also, extremely well hung). Along with the sluggardly infected crawling along the forest floor, it’s an evolution of the virus that we haven’t seen before, and one that Boyle makes strikingly unsettling as he silhouettes the Alpha on hillsides and shows infrared flashes of its carnage. Paired with an experimental score from Young Fathers, a cacophonic mixture of sounds driving the movie’s tensest scenes, that imagery becomes nightmarish.

Spike and Jamie narrowly escape the Alpha by seeking refuge in an abandoned house; from their vantage point in the attic, Spike points out a fire burning in the distance, rather obviously cueing up a later plot point. At daybreak, the two attempt to return to the island over the causeway. It’s an absurdly beautiful scene that’s a marked contrast to the grounded, folk-horror look of the movie thus far, cementing the tonal and visual shifts of the movie: as the Alpha chases Spike and Jamie across the strip of land over the sea, the sky above them is filled with an aurora borealis of colors and streaked with stars, elevating their race to celestial heights.

After their return to the village, Spike’s idolized view of Jamie twists as his father celebrates their kills with the townspeople and, falling down drunk, makes out with a young woman in an alleyway. Clearly traumatized by his experiences on the mainland, Spike struggles to accept his father’s perspective of the infected as soulless, inhuman creatures and his apparent disregard for Isla. When he learns that the fire he saw on the mainland was set by a man known as a doctor, Spike sets back out with his mother to seek a cure to her mysterious illness. 

Here the fault lines in Garland’s script show, as the plot shifts gears once again to chart what is, at its heart, a Disney-Pixar journey. Luckily, Comer and Williams save the movie from its more mawkish overtures. As Isla, Comer is at turns overcome by her illness and regressions to childhood, at others the loving and attentive mother that Spike wants to get back. She and Williams form a believable relationship between mother and son, as they both try to protect and care for each other despite the horrors surrounding them. Williams himself carries the movie—whether he’s showing false bravado for his father or true courage for his mother, he’s every bit a young boy surviving harrowing circumstances.

When Isla and Spike finally get to Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes)—after several overstuffed plot additions including a Swedish soldier and zombie pregnancy—we find him surrounded by towers of bones. The fire Spike saw in the distance was one of many Dr. Kelson set over the years, burning the bodies of the dead (infected and non-infected), cleaning their skeletons and constructing what he terms a memento mori, or reminder of death. Fiennes deals skillfully with some cliche dialogue, over-explaining a concept that would’ve been better served with a lighter touch, but his role as a kind of spiritual guide to Spike and Isla drives home the film’s thematic grappling with humanity in the face of apocalypse. 

There’s not enough breathing room for all the character arcs, cultural references, and motifs Garland angles to fit in, so 28 Years Later as a whole seems more like the first part of an 8-episode miniseries than a fully composed film. A prologue to the film is included simply for a callback at the end that sets up the sequel, a move that undercuts the conclusion to Spike’s story arc and emphasizes the franchise of it all. Yet the throughline of the movie as a bildungsroman succeeds thanks to Comer and Williams’ performances, and when paired with some of the most extreme filmmaking of Boyle’s career, 28 Years is both a strong revival and promising start to the new trilogy.

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