Of all the earlier Danny Boyle movies that I thought his latest, 28 Years Later, would bring to mind, I didn’t expect it to be Millions, his funny and poignant coming-of-age story about a young boy dealing with the loss of his mother and coming to understand the beauty and cruelty of the world around him. This new film’s protagonist undergoes a similar journey, albeit one with lots more blood-puking rage-zombies.
That’s a bold choice to make when blood-puking rage-zombies are, presumably, why audiences are buying tickets to see 28 Years Later, which reunites Boyle with his co-writer Alex Garland. It’s been 23 years since 28 Days Later, and as these two modern masters of genre subversion have matured, they’ve also figured out a way to check off the boxes of thrills and gore and suspense while also finding something real to say about perseverance, hope, and love.
The zombies have evolved, too: the original film switched up the George Romero template by turning its walking dead into runners, and while many of them continue to move at a rapid gait while flailing their arms about and making unholy screeches, the film introduces some newer models. They range from deadly “alphas,” harder to take down and perhaps even retaining some of their human intelligence, while others crawl about like grubs, making them easy pickings for the handful of survivors.
One of those survivors is Spike (Alfie Williams), who lives with his parents in a gated fortress on an island in the Scottish Highlands, separated from the mainland by a causeway that disappears when the tide is high. Spike’s mother Isla (Jodie Comer) hasn’t been doing too well, physically or mentally; meanwhile his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) thinks the 12-year-old is mature enough to travel with him to the mainland to thin out the herd of zombies. (Years addresses the ending of 28 Weeks Later by suggesting that the contagion has once again been contained to the United Kingdom, with the rest of Europe presumably having solved the problem for themselves.)
This particular version of a Garland and Boyle coming-of-age tale delivers in both the societal sense — the entire colony comes out to cheer on Spike as he ventures outside the gate for the first time, and they throw a roaring bacchanal for him and Jamie after they’ve made their way home — and in the personal one, with Spike facing uncomfortable truths about his parents, the world, and his place in it. A former doctor (mad or not, the film refrains from saying), played by Ralph Fiennes in a keenly observed performance, introduces young Spike to the concept of “memento mori,” and places the apocalyptic mass slaughter into poignant context.
For all its emotion and drama, however, 28 Years Later delivers on the squishy restraint of 28 Days Later, with the great Anthony Dod Mantle once again behind the camera and Young Fathers providing another hard-pounding score. Earlier iterations of the creatures were content to infect others and move on, but now they feed, whether it’s the crawlers supping on worms or the alphas ripping the spines out of their prey (four-legged and otherwise), as though they spent their mortal lives playing a lot of Mortal Kombat.
Much of the film’s dramatic weight is placed on the young shoulders of Alfie Williams, and he bears it with grace and empathy, showing us the man inside the child and vice versa at various points in the story. Some bracketing material (involving Sinners’ Jack O’Connell, who gets premium billing but minimal screen time) promises a new direction for the series, but Williams’ performance is enough to engage audiences and keep them coming back for future installments. The blood-puking rage-zombies will undoubtedly draw in their own fanbase.
Director: Danny Boyle
Screenwriter: Alex Garland
Cast: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes
Producers: Andrew MacDonald, Peter Rice, Bernard Bellew, Danny Boyle, Alex Garland
Executive producer: Cillian Murphy
Cinematographer: Anthony Dod Mantle
Production design: Gareth Pugh, Carson McColl
Editing: Jon Harris
Music: Young Fathers
Sound design: Brendan Feeney, sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Columbia Pictures
In English
115 minutes
