Are zombies the horror genre’s best canvas? You bet your juicy-and-delicious brains they are. These rambunctious carnivores are nothing but skeletal mannequins awaiting artists to dress them up in their finest Sunday metaphors. And yet, reductively and redundantly, most often the theme is little more than “Hey, you know what? Regular human beings are the real monsters.”
This was the point of 28 Days Later, which came out 23 years ago, a fact that betrays the producers of 28 Years Later as being bad at math. In the two decades since the original film dared to ask “What if zombies…but fast?” we have been besieged by zombification, beset on all sides by an undead horde of similar TV shows, movies, and video games. The fear in writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle returning to the scene of the gray-matter munching is that they’d have nothing much to add.
Wrong!
28 Years Later is insane. It is a whistlestop tour of different tones and genres so impossibly innovative and vibrant you’d be excused for assuming its director wasn’t pushing 70. The wild cinematography and visual idiosyncrasies don’t play like gimmicks or distractions but genuine creative exploration. Once revealed, the theme is tragically optimistic, probing the question of what coming-of-age in a gutted-out nightmare could (and should) look like. That is something upsettingly relevant to ponder right now.
28 Years Later picks up in a secluded island village in the United Kingdom, where 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and his mom, Isla (Jodie Comer). Jamie has decided Spike is old enough to travel to the mainland, which is still pretty filthy with zombies. Isla protests that there’s no reason to rush Spike into corpse killing, but she’s in the thralls of an undefined illness, and Jamie is a stupid-doo-doo-jerkface. The father-son murder vacation does not go super-awesome, but leads to a revelation that prompts Jamie to take his mom into the undead forest.
For all its intestine-covered trappings, 28 Years Later is a threadbare tale about leaping across the chasm of adolescence and adulthood. What does that look like for a child raised amid fear, hate, and violence? Survival for survival’s sake makes sense in the early days of an apocalypse, but what will the next generation do with this broken world? If anyone knows, it is a bald, iodine-covered Ralph Fiennes.
Nowhere near as scary or action-packed as most audiences would likely prefer, the film is littered with an innovative underlining of key ideas. Clips of wars that span from near-medieval times to WWII are interspliced with pensive monologues about memories and faith. The ratio of jump scares to exposed male genitalia is about one-to-one. Switzerland catches a few hilarious strays. Comer is given permission to go cuckoo bonkers. Is this not what the people want? Who cares?! It’s better than we deserve.
Boyle is the same age as George Miller was when the latter dropped Mad Max: Fury Road, and the effect is eerily similar. The films are wildly different, connected only by a post-apocalypse setting, but both feel like masters of their craft returning to the franchises that catapulted them just to show how much better they are at filmmaking now. Contrast this with Scorsese making the same machismo gangster movie with the same actors in an ever-so-slightly different setting or Wes Anderson popping off another quirk-fest so similar to his other stuff it’s like his filmography was a wet Gremlin.
Without spoiling anything, the last few minutes of 28 Years Later is so glorious and goofy that if you people don’t make this thing a big enough hit that we get to see what comes next, I will simply never forgive you. Quieter than you’d think, smarter than folks expect, and shockingly vital, this one gets a gold star.
Grade = A
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Murjani Rawls at Substream Magazine says, “Boyle and Garland prompt us to confront the uncomfortable nature of morality, as well as the implications of world events, which can place us in unexpected situations. The infected are people overtaken by a virus that has reduced them to the bare necessities of feeling.”
Jenn Adams at Strong Female Antagonist says, “This long-awaited sequel may not be destined to become a genre-defining classic, but it’s an elegant and nuanced depiction of those left to rot in a forgotten world and the humanity that springs from the most dire circumstances.”
Kate Sánchez at But Why Tho? says “Boyle is looking to titillate his audience’s bloodlust that comes with infection horror, but the sentimentality always lingers. This is a film about growing up, about processing loss, and, more importantly, keeping your humanity in a world that has declared you need to lose it to survive.”
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