By Joe O’Shansky
When 28 Days Later came out in 2002 its only antecedent was Paul W.S Anderson’s first Resident Evil flick. One was a misadapted video game, while the other did something very new, even in the well-worn realm of zombie movies, especially since it basically mixtapes the first three of Romero’s Dead trilogy into one movie.
For one thing, the zombies of 28 Days Later (“Don’t say the zed word.”) really aren’t zombies. They never actually died. Nerds dick fight about this point a lot, but I’m on board with the idea of a hypervirulent version of rabies turning everybody into a blood-vomiting Usain Bolt who must feast early and often.
But, yeah, they ain’t zombies.
What director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland made then felt fresh, if only for the aesthetic, going out of its way to shoot the whole bloody affair on consumer-grade, tape-based Digital Video cameras and using authentic locations in London that looked miraculously abandoned. Experiential and experimental lo-fi arthouse horror in the post-apocalyptic lens of the Dogme ‘95 movement. It’s great. But it did conform to a formula. Pick nits all you like (I just did) about whether or not every zombie flick in the last 50 years owes a debt to George Romero (they all do), but the fealty to the template of 28 Days, or Weeks Later, is something 28 Years Later largely avoids.
Beginning roughly around the events of 28 Weeks Later, we quickly flash forward to the now, 28 years later (Jesus), where the whole of Britain has been quarantined, after the rest of the world contained the virus decades before. If you wind up on mainland England, for whatever reason, you can never leave.
Meanwhile, an agrarian community resides just beyond the quarantine zone on an adjacent island which, when the tide recedes, reveals a traversable causeway to the mainland. Here is where we meet Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), husband to Isla (Jodie Comer) and father to his young man Spike (Alfie Williams). Isla is clearly ill, suffering nosebleeds and moments of mania. The post-apocalypse being what it is they basically reside in Middle Ages England, equipped with the appropriate fortifications and weapons you’d expect (bows and arrows and fire) all of which demands that Jamie become a scavenger, or more appropriately a hunter/gatherer, who often braves the trip to the mainland to get supplies and valuables to be traded or shared while killing anything in his way.
But, on this occasion, Jamie decides that his son is capable of joining him on an outing, like a rite of passage. What follows is a coming-of-age-story about how Spike sees the new world, and especially the relationship between his parents, when he begins to grasp the stakes of his mother’s illness and his father’s recklessness and decides to do something about it.
What the reunited duo of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have crafted here is a much more human post-apocalypse, about the bubble of control in a simple society. I mean, think about how all of civilization is the illusion of control, even now in a vast, complex and ever shifting and increasingly fucked up world. Like how when the lights go out it’ll be fight and flight. The apocalypse of the Rage Virus in these films (TDS?) is what it took to unite people in the aftermath, which is a huge thread in 28 Years Later, that the rest of the civilized world had become largely normal by then (a notion implied in the film, with all the military patrols and tech from the rest of Europe regularly keeping eyes on England).
Meanwhile, the island neighbors, possessed of the basics, working with very little information and who are seemingly happy to do so, rarely chose to leave their bubble. When Jamie and Spike do just that, the consequences of that choice are where Boyle and Garland mine fear.
The characters and the world are just as fleshed out as they needed to be and no more, with dialed in performances from Johnson, Comer, and Williams, and a human story that might defy the expectations of fans who want more of that over-the-top Rage action. Make no mistake, that’s still here, with a couple of really nice setpieces which amp up the tension. That said, a couple of things made me furrow my brow in confusion (I’m trying to avoid spoilers here) from an incident that should have gotten everyone killed, or even just some of the disjointed editing that felt like something was contextually left out. Fairly minor quibbles now, but maybe stuff that might bug me more with repeated viewings, but on the whole I really enjoyed it. It’s a film that takes you on a ride if you let it.
Boyle, in a hat tip to the consumer-grade cameras he shot 28 Days Later with, opted for an update with the iPhone 16 (outfitted with a dope outer lens array). The images are miles beyond the digital Hi8mm from back then, with often incredibly cinematic, wide-angle vistas rendered with the clarity of a much more expensive camera. Dark, naturally lit scenes suffer some artifacting, which reveals the limitations, intentional though they are. Ultimately, the film looks great, and apparently part of the reasoning for going with phone cams was the light footprint. According to Boyle, they were conscious of not trampling around in the pristine, idyllic and beautiful locations (which are apparently protected) with a huge crew and a ton of equipment.
As with the final product, that care shows. 28 Years Later is a unique and more than worthy entry to the franchise, and a nice springboard for two more planned films with even bigger…scope.
And dongs.
I’m sorry.