There’s a line in the original film 28 Days Later I think about from time to time. It’s delivered by Christopher Eccleston’s villainous Major West as his platoon and our protagonists sit around a dinner table assessing their new reality in a post-apocalyptic zombie nightmare. “This is what I’ve seen in the four weeks since infection: People killing people. Which is much what I saw in the four weeks before infection, and the four weeks before that, and before that, and as far back as I care to remember. People killing people, which to my mind, puts us in a state of normality right now.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. Though dismissed by our protagonists in 28 Days Later as absolute madness, this new entry is determined to double down on the sentiment and extrapolate.
Coming to us 18 years after the last film 28 Weeks Later (whose events are basically yada-yada’d past in the opening text crawl), 28 Years Later is third film in the series and is itself the first of a new planned trilogy. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, this entry re-teams the original pairing from the original film to create a surprisingly fresh entry into the woefully well-worn zombie landscape they themselves helped reignite decades ago. This new chapter is often lyrical, occasionally abstract and deeply fascinating, a zombie movie in concept but less so in practice, which I suspect will be polarizing for generic movie goers expecting a typical summer tentpole zombie movie.
The film begins in recognizable horror movie framework. We flash back to the beginning of the virus outbreak in a small Scottish town as a group of trembling children are sequestered in a cramped den, trying to ignore the murmurs and screams outside and focus on the surreality of a Teletubbies episode. Things quickly breakdown. Pure horror ensues as infected pour through the windows; everyone dies except a young boy who narrowly escapes, runs through the village and seeks shelter at the local church where he finds his priest father who zealously interprets this scourge of infected as some kind of religious prophecy. As you might imagine, it doesn’t go well for his father but the boy hides and presumably survives (but we won’t know for sure until the final scene of the film).
From that cold open we get the traditional series time jump in the form of a title card, this time “28 Years Later”. We open on a small Scottish hamlet surrounded by water with a narrow footbridge connected a few hundred yards from the mainland. We learn the path is only open a few hours a day during low tide, which is how the island community has stayed isolated. It against this backdrop our entire story will take place. No modernity, no skyscrapers, no London. Instead, a small, quarantined community that’s learned to create its own pre-historic world, complete with hunting, fishing and (most important to the filmmakers) its own myths, history and lore.
This is where the film shifts from traditional horror fare to a larger story about capital “S” Society and how generations define themselves through the stories they tell, the religions they foster and ultimately the myths they create. Penned by Garland, whose last decade has been spent behind the camera directing his own stories of increasingly abstract and esoteric themes, he uses the trojan horse of a zombie franchise to backdoor the story he’s really interested in telling. We meet the 12-year-old boy Spike (played by the incredibly talented young Alfie Williams) on the day he is to leave his island sanctuary for the first time for a “hunt” with his strapping father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Spike is green; he’s no natural killer and is ill prepared for the ritual, (in fact we learn most boys don’t go until they’re 14 or 15) but Spike worships his father and wants to earn his approval. Boyle shows us escalating montages of young island boys training with bows and arrows, cut against footage of medieval archers fighting faceless hoards and footage of military marches as the soundtrack of the nightmarish Kipling poem “Boots” pulsates in quickening intensity. The film often uses these editorial flourishes like these- not to advance the plot, but more so to intuit thematic symmetry and correlation.
Turns out, the “Hunt” is zombie target practice and this where the film shifts gears completely. Through a psychedelic and terrifying journey, Spike and his father learn there is a hierarchy among the infected; seems everyone has been evolving over the last 28 years. Not all the “monsters” seem be ungovernable and mindless. Some seem to have agency and in a shocking scene later in the film might have more humanity than we could have imagined. And that’s what the events of the remainder of the film ultimately asks us to contend with. As Spike begins to examine his militaristic indoctrination, we’re forced to ask: was Major West correct? Is this just people killing people? Is this cycle just…continuing? The one thing I can say for sure is that I’ll have advance tickets to the next film to find out more. | Joseph Roussin
