Coming of Age in the Time of the Pandemic
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland still have a couple of tricks up their sleeve in their tonally daring 28 YEARS LATER
Twenty-three years ago, Danny Boyle’s and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later revolutionized the zombie movie in the same way George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead did in 1968. Except that Boyle’s and Garland’s creatures were not zombies: they were living, breathing humans driven by an extremely contagious virus to extreme forms of visceral, animalistic rage. The virus robbed them of everything that made them human: emotions, reason, etc. Both gave their creatures speed, paving the way for the many iterations of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead franchise and its many imitators. 28 Days Later was also, alongside Michael Mann’s Ali (2001), one of the first films to fully embrace digital photography, taking full advantage of its flexibility; its harsh images, once transferred to celluloid, gave their vision of post-apocalyptic London a dreary, gloomy, surreal feel.
Today, 28 Days Later feels pretty prescient, a look at things to come. Since then, COVID ravaged the planet, most Brits were bamboozled into voting for Brexit, and most of humanity has embraced its old tribalist ways. Boyle and Garland return to the world they created in 28 Years Later not to play its predecessor’s greatest hits but to ask what’s next and what if as they take into account those recent events in their world building. The whole of Great Britain and its smaller islands are now isolated, quarantined, by the rest of the world with international patrol boats and jet fighters keeping watch over their waters to make sure that no infected or uninfected ever crosses them. Communities of uninfected live a tribal, almost medieval existence where children are trained from a very early age to hunt and kill the infected with bows and arrows while the women tend to their homes and the community’s well being. The mainland, as they call Great Britain and possibly Ireland, is considered No Man’s Land. Technology as we know it is non-existent. The world may depend on smartphones; these isolated communities don’t even know of tin can phones.
28 Years Later opens with a prologue that starts…well, 28 days after the pandemic broke out. A roomful of young kids in the Scottish Highlands are watching the Teletubbies. One of them, Jimmy, is a bit uneasy and one can see why as we hear a commotion outdoors: sirens are blaring, glass and furniture is breaking, and people are screaming. All of a sudden a horde of the infected break into the room. Jimmy escapes to his father’s church to no avail: his father declares this to be a glorious day, the day of judgement he’s been longing for and gives himself over to the infected. Jimmy again escapes but we don’t see or hear much of him until later in the film, setting up part two of the trilogy, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, scheduled to be released next year.
The prologue also serves to set up the child-centric nature of the story Garland and Boyle are about to tell. The action shifts to a Northumberland isle connected to the mainland by a path that can only be crossed at low tide. It’s a special day for 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) who is about to embark on a rite of passage with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson): the hunt for the infected in the mainland, an occasion reserved for children 14- or 15-years old. Jamey is equally devoted to both father, who has proudly prepared him for this day, and his bedridden mother Isla (Jodie Comer) who suffers from increasingly painful headaches, hallucinations and even disorientation.
Spike successfully kills his first infected, a new overweight variant that crawls all over the ground, feeding off worms and, if available, humans. Things go downhill from there. Walking down these luxuriant hills and dense forests in search of their prey, father and son spot in the distance what could be their next target. That target is an Alpha, a highly evolved, powerful, tall and very naked variant, one that is particularly fond of ripping his victim’s skulls from their bodies, spinal cord attached, a la Predator or a one of the characters in Mortal Kombat. The Alpha soon calls out for his soldiers, chasing father and son through the hills and forests until they find refuge in an abandoned farm where a rightfully scared Spike freezes in place, missing his target leaving his father to pick up the slack. Out of arrows, they hide in the farm’s roof. Safe for now, Spike sees a fire in the distance; his father dismisses it. They return home after the roof collapses on them; as the tide begins to cover the causeway, they are persecuted by another infected which is soon disposed of.
A huge celebration full of beer, food and some debauchery in Spike’s honor is waiting for them. Jamey indulges in some wild storytelling about his son’s feats. Bothered by his father’s lies, Spike leaves; back home, he finds out from a relative that the fires in the mainland are caused by one Dr. Kerson (Ralph Fiennes), a former physician who might have gone insane and devotes his time burning the bodies of the dead. Confident that the doctor may be able to cure what ails his mother, Spike grabs his bow and a good number of arrows, wakes his mother up, creates a distraction, and leaves with her for the mainland in search of Kerson.
While the first half is designed as a ruthless, tense, gory answer to all those great adventure stories involving boys one read as a kid or watched on the big screen, the second half is far more somber. The first half focused on the father-son relationship and how it ends in mistrust; the second is about a son’s love for his mother and his willingness to do anything for her. There are indeed some tense moments in this second half, including one inside a flammable gas infested store of a petrol station, and another one inside a train where Isla discovers a pregnant infected who is about to give birth. Boyle and Garland reveal their cards once Kerson makes his entrance. Much like 28 Days Later turned, in its final stretch, into a brutal critique of male toxicity and militarism, the final third in 28 Years Later turns into a moving, and devastating, meditation on death and the need to hold not only onto the memory of those we loved but on the collective memory of those who once wandered these lands as well. For 28 Years Later is really a coming-of-age story, one where its protagonist learns some lessons about parental love, trust, courage, loss and remembering. There is poetry, both in the dialogue and the imagery, here.
One of Danny Boyle’s many qualities as a director is hitting the bull’s eye when casting and launching the careers of so many promising actors in his films. And with Alfie Williams he struck gold. In his debut as a lead actor, Williams is both fearless and fearful, curious and determined, angry and confused and spirited. He evokes the love any kid his age feels for his mum. He takes us on a journey that feels emotionally familiar to us. We can feel how his character grows up in front of us. And I love the eccentric roles Fiennes has opted to play on the big screen lately; underneath their quirks, Fiennes finds wisdom in these characters and sometimes that is more than enough. But more than an eccentric, Fiennes’ Kerson represents the last vestiges of a compassionate, empathetic humanity, one that can provide comfort and hope in dark, perilous times.
The tonal shift may cause whiplash in some viewers: I was pleasantly taken by surprise, not to mention intrigued, by it. While the first half, with its aggressive cutting and fancy kill shots where brief freeze frames punctuate the brutality and savagery of each arrow strike, offers horror buffs everything they could wish for in terms of splatter and suspense, the second, more lyrical half, with its panoramic shots and rich colors captured beautifully by Anthony Dod Mantle’s anamorphic, full screen iPhone photography, turns expectations upside down. But even in that first, brutal half, Boyle plays with our expectations as he and editor Jon Harris intercut scenes from old wartime British films, including Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V, in their montages with a 1915 reading of Rudyard Kipling’s war poem Boots by actor Taylor Holmes. Boyle is not interested in delivering the same old, same old. We already have enough movies and TV series about zombies and infected, raging humans that can deliver on the guts and gore. Boyle wants to find out what other stories he can tell, what other ideas he can explore within the genre’s confines. In this case, that footage and that reading hints at a critique of Good Olde England’s millenia-old image of itself as a warring, conquering nation and how it contrasts with its isolationist streak. It’s not subtle but it is effective; it takes us out of our comfort zone, much like the film’s second-half does.
28 Years Later leaves enough tantalizing ideas for the rest of the trilogy to pick up on. But at the same time, it stands on its own narratively. It doesn’t end, like most franchise films do, with a ludicrous cliffhanger that will be resolved in an equally ludicrous way in the next film. To the contrary, it sets up further world building and I can’t wait to see what Nia De Costa (the director of the Candyman remake), will bring to the table next year in chapter two.