28 Years Later feels a bit like three different movies in one.
The first movie, which begins after a brief prologue reminding us how Great Britain fell to the Rage Virus depicted in 28 Days Later, involves Spike (Alfie Williams) and his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), traveling to mainland Britain from an island connected by a causeway that floods at high tide.
This movie, which is a more traditionally minded zombie-action1 movie in line with what we see in 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, serves two purposes. The first of them is to provide a new layer of worldbuilding by director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, the writing-directing duo from the first film. This is Spike’s first trip to the mainland, and through his virginal eyes, we learn that those infected by the Rage Virus have, it seems, mutated: There are big, fat, grub-like infected rooting around the earth on their bellies, subsisting on bugs and such. They’re not too dangerous. More dangerous are the fast ones, the runners from the original film. Most dangerous, though, are the Alphas: big, honking brutes, strong enough to rip a deer’s head from its haunches, spinal column still twitching.
The second purpose is to immerse us in the ethos of the film, which is a profoundly British movie. The residents of Holy Island have, as an enclave, attempted to maintain as much of Old Britannia as possible, including portraits of a long-dead monarch who ruled in a now-ruined city. It’s a movie that is obsessed with the idea of what it means to conceive of oneself as British, how British myths and the British past inform the British present, how the cinematic imagery of Britain—of archers on battlements firing at onrushing hordes; of boys readying themselves to head to the trenches of World War I; images of valor, or maybe “valor”—still defines the idea of “Britain.” It’s no coincidence that Rudyard Kipling’s poem about the Second Boer War, “Boots,” is a recurring motif; a haunting recording of the poem is used both in psychological warfare training by the U.S. military and in the trailer for 28 Years Later, helping it to win a Golden Trailer award.
Boyle, never one to shy away from tricky editing maneuvers, splices in fragments from other films to demonstrate this internal idealization of Britishness, the cuts suggesting a sort of fragmented-but-unified view of the world, of Britain as the last holdout against the barbarian hordes. That point-of-view trickery extends to the filming of the action sequences; Boyle used an array of iPhones filming simultaneously to create the impression of a sort of bullet time that shows impacts from several points of view at once. It’s a neat effect, one that allows the director and his editor, Jon Harris, to maintain the kinetic force of the film without losing clarity on any individual moment.
“There are strange people on the mainland,” one character tells Spike. “It’s why our home is so precious.” Between this and the visual imagery, it’s clear that 28 Years Later is intended as a metaphor for (and critique of) Britain’s immigration debate and Brexit fights, though maintaining such a metaphor is always tricky when one side of that debate is depicted as, you know, monsters.
Which brings us to the second of 28 Years Later’s three constituent films, the purpose of which is, at least in part, to humanize the zombie hordes, to draw a connection between the universality of parenthood and child-rearing. I won’t get too deep into spoiler territory here, but, following his first trip to the mainland, Spike decides to take his ailing mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), on a dangerous journey to find a man who might be able to help them, if he hasn’t gone totally insane.
That man is played by Ralph Fiennes, and it’s worth highlighting just how delightful it is when Fiennes gets the chance to dip his toe into more humorous waters. 28 Years Later isn’t a comedy, of course, but it is a little nuts, and Fiennes plays his hermit with the nuttiness such a film requires—a sort of preternaturally, again, British combination of manners and stubbornness and ceremony. (You spend 28 years collecting corpses and fighting off terrifying monsters and see if you don’t get a little nuts.) Jodie Comer is a force of nature here as Spike’s ill mother and the unexpected emotional center of the movie.
Also worthy of praise is Alfie Williams, in a role that the movie either lives or dies by since the engine of the movie’s back half is what we might refer to as a Dumbass Kid Plot. (This is the kissing cousin of the much-lamented Idiot Plot—that is, a plot that only works if idiots populate the movie—but more dramatically satisfying because kids are, by their nature, dumbasses.) But Williams doesn’t play Spike as a dumbass; he plays Spike as caring, confused, and a little out of his depth. He has been failed by the people and the community around him, but he is trying to be better.
The third and final film is more of a coda, really, a promise of the sequel dropping in January of next year and reportedly called 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Again, I won’t spoil anything here, but the energy in this final five minutes is radically different from what we see in the rest of the movie: something more like 28 Days Later set in the universe of The Warriors or A Clockwork Orange. It also sends audiences out on a high note: I was practically clapping in my seat. I wanted more, now.
I will be curious to see if general audiences are clapping along beside me, as 28 Years Later is a decidedly different sort of movie from its predecessors, which are two of the best zombie movies of the new century. Yes, there’s action and blood and violence and all that; yes, man, as always, is the real enemy, though that theme is more muted here insofar as the failures of Spike’s dad are general failures of parenting rather than zombie-inspired madness. But 28 Years Later is more experimental than either of the films that came before, decidedly weirder, a movie that tosses off Wicker Man vibes amid the Rage-induced carnage. Boyle and Garland have crafted a doozy of a picture here, and I can’t wait to see how this planned-for trilogy plays out.
There is an ongoing debate as to whether or not the Rage-infected count as “zombies” since they are not technically the reanimated dead but the living gone mad; regardless of the mechanism, the 28 x Later series hews to all the conventions of the zombie film, particularly in that it is more concerned with the cruelty of the uninfected toward each other and the ways in which this cruelty dooms humanity.