28 Years Later

dir: Danny Boyle

2025

It hasn’t been 28 years since 28 Days Later, but 23 Years Later maybe would have confused too many people. I have no idea whether this has been successful financially or not, but I was very ultra keen to see it, very curious as to what Danny Boyle wanted to say after all these years.

And it should also mean that we get a bunch of long after the fact sequels to many of his previous films. Who doesn’t want to see what happened to the characters from Shallow Grave, or at least the ones who made it to the end of the film? What about updates to The Beach, to see how Leonardo DiCaprio’s really annoying character is doing, or Tilda’s character, who I am sure is running an ashram somewhere with an iron fist? What about 127 Hours? Did that guy end up chopping his other arm off, due to some horribly ironic circumstance?

I don’t need to ask about an update to Trainspotting, because that unfortunately already happened, with Irvine Welsh unable to stop himself from updating us again and again about what those rascals were up to both before and after the events of the original film, with one of those sequels already having been made into an unfortunate movie that I just don’t want to talk about anymore.

I wouldn’t want to ask about an update to Slumdog Millionaire, because I’m going to assume that it would be way too depressing. Everyone dead except for the jerk host of the tv game show, who's probably Prime Minister now.

This film doesn’t feel like the third instalment in a trilogy of movies – it feels like half of a movie that ends with the beginning of a completely different movie. It conjectures a Britain that has been cut off from the rest of the world, whose coastal waters ae patrolled by other nations in order to stop the infection spreading, so no-one can leave even if they’re clean.

People, as in the remaining alive people, have pretty much regressed to an agrarian state, very Middle Ages, very genteel, without the feudalism that would have made life short and brutish back then. I mean, life is no walk in the park, but they have their safety, and a community that supports everyone. And they may not have the internet or electricity on the holy island of Lindisfarne, but they also don’t have rage zombies.

I’m not going to get into the boring argument of whether they’re zombies or not. Who fucking cares? They run at people, try to eat them, then the victims go all crazy and try to attack non-infected people. Does it really matter if they walk slowly or run at them full pelt? Not to the victims, presumably.

The movie, this movie, actually opens 28 years earlier, when the epidemic first started, as a room full of kids cry while watching the Teletubbies. Sure, kids, I found it pretty scary myself, but the real reason these Aryan darlings are terrified is because of what’s happening outside, and, as cold opens go, it’s damn well freezing cold. The parents, just outside the door trying to save their kids from the rage zombie hordes, become the rage zombie hordes, and attack the children.

One of those children runs away, foolishly, to a church, thinking it might bring sanctuary. But it doesn’t, because the goofy man of the cloth therein is joyous, because this is Judgement Day, according to his religious delusions. Is he wrong? Who’s to say? At the very least he gives his crucifix to the boy and stashes him where the hordes can’t get to him.

Now in the present, all those many years later, a different boy is the focus of our attentions. He is Spike (Alfie Williams), and he has a dick for a dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), so… His ma Isla (Jodie Comer) isn’t doing too well either, what with her night sweats, confused state and obvious cancer. She is bedridden most of the time, so there’s that at least.

It is the boy’s turn for a rite of passage, a coming of age ritual etc etc, which for these strange people involves crossing to the mainland when low tide allows traversal of a causeway, and killing your first infected with a bow and arrow. This early in the film, something weird, something disconcerting happens in the editing. There’s an overlay of imagery from, um, some World War II stuff, the frightening staccato reading of the Rudyard Kipling poem Boots, footage from the Henry V that Sir Laurence Olivier starred in (lots of English bowmen sending flights of arrows at the French during the 100 Years War / Battle of Agincourt), and infra-red footage of rage zombies tearing flesh apart.

All very disturbing, but it leads to a scene where Spike’s dumb dad finds a slow moving sloth like zombie that’s regressed to a worm-eating existence. Spike doesn’t want to kill it, but he is urged on by his father, who’s too dumb to notice the other sloth zombie creeping up on him.

What’s weird is that it’s not clear that these zombies are a threat, unless you’re jealous about sharing the contents of your worm farm with them. They just crawl along, looking for worms, at a leisurely pace, not bothering anyone, let alone people with bows and arrows. But the dad kills, cavalierly, and the son does so reluctantly.

Yet when a child sloth zombie ambles towards them, and the father goes to kill it, the son rebels, arks up, begs him not to.

Weird. It’s almost like the zombies are a different species of organism, and that they’re reproducing beyond the spread of the virus.

Just so that things don’t get too boring, oh, don’t worry, there are plenty of fast rage zombies, and father and son get attacked by them, retreating as they do to the attic of a decrepit farmhouse for the night. They can’t go home until the next low tide anyway.

Does this give father and son time to bond? Does it fuck. The dad is too much of a dick, is in denial about what’s happening to his wife / Spike’s mother, and generally comes across as the emotional stunted “do as I say, not as I do” type of bad father that no-one should emulate, even in a post-apocalyptic world.

If the continued presence of rage zombies isn’t bad enough, some of them have evolved too. There are giant ones now, that run around naked with their CGI pythons lolling about, angrily trying to rip people’s heads out of their bodies with parts of their spines intact.

I know, gross. They, being father and son, are in the attic long enough to spot a fire nearbyish, which is all that’s needed to lead to the second part of the movie, where Spike takes his mum to find a doctor.

Before that they exit stage left, returning to the island, pursued by a giant. I had gotten excited during some of these scenes, not because of the giant and his massive appendage, but because before he pursues them, he’s shown standing next to what I thought was the Sycamore Gap tree, that famously long lived tree that was cut down by two drunken fuckwits, one fateful night. It turns out it had already been cut down by the time this production started, so the tree as represented is computer generated, which is sad.

When they return to the island, Spike is disgusted by the lies his father tells the amassed villagers celebrating during celebrations, and even more seriously he is horrified when he sees his drunken father betraying his mother with another lady.

After chatting with a family friend who was looking after his ma, Spike is resolved to take her to the mainland, search for a doctor he’s loosely heard of, with the misunderstanding that said doctor will be able to heal his mother.

I know it sounds daft. Look, if he didn’t do this dumb thing (perhaps ‘naïve’ would be kinder), there’s no second half of the movie. Wandering around on your own, as a fifteen-yearold, as rampaging hordes and giants attack you, when all you have to defend yourself is a bow and arrow, is suicidal: trying to do that while your very sick mother hobbles around with you, fading in and out of consciousness and lucidity, well, that’s lunacy. I don’t know if it’s a failing of the screenplay, because needs must. To get to where you want to be, which is, in the presence of acting great Sir Ralph Fiennes, whose character has constructed a shrine to death with so many thousands and thousands of skulls, well, you’ve got to bend a few screenwriting – logic rules. Spike knows little of the world as it was before, and nothing about the world outside of his Little Britain. He knows nothing of cancer or the internet or botox injections or anything.

He truly is an innocent waif in a world red in tooth and claw. And of course he will lose his innocence if anyone is to survive, especially him. His greatest fear is of losing his dear ma, but if these films have taught us anything (and, really, we shouldn’t be learning anything from movies, ever), it’s that people who lose their humanity are way worse than any rage infected zombies.

This film is fairly bonkers, and ends on a note so strange, so out of fucking nowhere that I could barely believe what I was seeing. I still don’t quite believe it now. I will just point out that twice this year Jack O’Connell played a crucial role in two horror movies (the other one being Sinners) and comes out of absolutely nowhere in order to do so, and I guess we’re lucky to have him(?)

Apparently most of this was filmed on iPhones, which is a great advertisement for a company that already has enough of our money, but I daresay a pretty penny was spent in post-production to get things where they needed to be. I also guess if the hard question was put to the crew / cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, they’d end up saying something like “yeah, it was all filmed on iPhone 15s, except for that scene, and the establishing shot in between those scenes, and everything at the Bone Temple, which was drone cameras, and a bunch of other shots, but other than that…” I seem to recall that 23 or so years ago when they made the first film, there was a heck of a lot of shaky cam digital stuff which added to the terrifying / frenetic feel of the film. Here they go fifteen steps further by doing a much cheaper version of the “bullet time effect” by taking certain shots with an array of iPhones in a circle just so that the arrow “kills” of the infected seem particularly shocking and gory.

I don’t know what they’re building up to. I have no confidence that the second film that will come out of this two-parter will be any good, slated for 2026, with the cumbersome title of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple; you’d think they could have tacked on a “Final Reckoning” as well just for shits and giggles. I really don’t think it’s going to get any better, probably, than the scenes with Fienne’s deranged character. His character makes little sense. His behaviour feels like its cribbed deliberately from Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now, and it doesn’t at all explain how he’s fended off rage zombie hordes for 28 years.

And yet, he’s the only person who doesn’t lie to Spike about anything, seeming like he wants everyone to just die already, yet lives in some kind of balance with the infected (except for one of the giants, who tries to rip his head off).

But to say that he’s death obsessed would undersell just how bonkers his entire existence and his life’s work is.

I think the early part of the flick was like a commentary on Britain’s instincts towards insularity / the fallout from Brexit, deliberately isolating itself from Europe in a heroic act of self-mutilation, which clearly neither of the first two films were about, and many elements, including how they fall prey to so-called ‘Alphas’, or having a character who only sees the living as the temporarily alive, soon to be dead, and England itself as a boneyard, is somewhat depressing but perhaps apt. This is essentially, unlike its originator, an action film with maybe poetic aspirations towards political or existential meaning; it’s just that I’m not sure how deep that meaning goes, or what it ultimately means beyond the obvious.

I think the main performance, Spike’s performance, is pretty much perfect for this story. Fiennes is as solid as we expect him to be, with an underwritten part that in no way explains how he exists where he is. Jodie Comer is pretty great in a role that is an amazing juxtaposition with the role she played in the recent pseudo-apocalyptic The End We Start From, again having to lug around a baby around an England no longer safe for man, woman or child.

It's okay. Not great. But better than just good. Still doesn’t make me want to watch the original again.

7 times there also wasn’t enough Mogwai on the soundtrack out of 10

--
“And it's true. There are many kinds of death. Some are better than others. The best are peaceful where we leave each other in love.” – you fool, death always sucks - 28 Years Later