Following the conclusion of the original run of Planet of the Apes movies in the '70s, European cinemagoers were surprised to find a new batch of Planet of the Apes movies arriving in their local picture palaces. These new movies weren't actually movies at all, but two episodes of the Planet of the Apes TV show stitched together to fill a feature length running time. 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland's belated (or five years early?) third instalment of their not-zombie franchise, might be mistaken for two episodes of The Walking Dead glued together and released into cinemas.
The series finds itself a victim of its own success. 2002's 28 Days Later spawned the 2000s/2010s zombie craze that would give us Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (which borrowed 28's fast-moving zoms), a second zombie trilogy from George A. Romero, countless parodies spearheaded by Shaun of the Dead, and a slew of post-apocalyptic TV shows, most notably The Walking Dead (whose pilot episode blatantly copied the opening of 28 Days Later) and its multiple spin-offs. You might even argue that the zombie craze and its post-apocalyptic crossover appeal allowed George Miller to return to the world of Mad Max. As such, there's very little in 28 Years Later that we haven't seen before. Its most interesting elements aren't on the screen, but bubbling beneath the surface.
As the title suggests, it's 28 years since the outbreak of a virus that turned its victims into homicidal maniacs (an idea taken from Romero's The Crazies but most successfully portrayed in the underseen 1984 thriller Impulse). The first two movies contradictorily created confusion regarding whether the virus had spread beyond Britain, so opening text here makes it clear that it was driven out of continental Europe and confined to a quarantined Britain. In a not-so-subtle allusion to Brexit, Britain has been left to rot.
The first movie was heavily derivative, mashing up classic British dystopian TV shows like Survivors and The Changes with Romero's The Crazies and Day of the Dead, and 28 Years Later continues this trend. From Romero's Survival of the Dead it lifts the idea of survivors living on an island off the mainland, in this case Holy Island off the North East coast of England. Just like the island from The Woman in Black, Holy Island is joined to the mainland by a causeway that submerges at high tide. Here we find our young protagonist, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), who lives with his macho father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his bedridden mother Isla (Jodie Comer, adding Geordie to her impressive roster of accents). As a coming-of-age ritual, Spike is brought to the mainland by his father for his first "hunt," where he's expected to fire arrows into the necks of the infected.
On the mainland we're introduced to a concept new to this series, albeit one cogged from Romero's Land of the Dead, that of an "Alpha" zombie who leads the herd with his extra intelligence. Now shed of their clothes, the infected here look like the cannibals of a '70s Italian exploitation flick, and the Alpha (Chi Lewis-Parry) resembles Luigi Montefiore in Joe D'Amato's infamous stomach-churner Anthropophagus, but with Dirk Diggler's prosthetic schlong flapping about between his knees. Along with the infected, the mainland is also home to Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, who seems to be steadily morphing into Leonard Rossiter with each new performance), a doctor dismissed as a mad quack by the islanders. Desperate for help for his mother, Spike drags Isla back to the mainland in search of this Kurtzian figure.
The action of 28 Years Later is rather underwhelming, and it doesn't help that Boyle, ever the fidgeter, uses distracting techniques like brief freeze frames in the middle of what should be kinetic action sequences. For a movie about a young boy and a sickly woman trudging through a zombie-infested wasteland, there's a curious lack of peril here. As an action-horror hybrid, this third entry fails to replicate the better moments of its predecessors, neither of which were all that great to begin with.
Where Boyle and Garland's film does succeed is as an interrogation of modern Britain's place in the world. It would be all too easy for a liberal filmmaker to cruelly gloat at the dire situation these people now find themselves in, but Boyle has always been a humanist first filmmaker. There's a heartfelt compassion for these poor bastards who have been abandoned by the world. You don't have to be British to be moved by the sight of the Angel of the North still standing amid overgrown foliage, or the Sycamore Gap tree, felled by vandals in 2023 but still standing in this alternate timeline (even my cold Irish heart was moved by the thought of what such iconography means to the English).
Much of the weight of this subtext is carried by the revelatory Williams, whose eyes carry a deep sadness but also a resilience. When a stranded Swedish NATO soldier (Edvin Ryding) mocks the primitive nature of the English of this world, it's the hurt on Williams' face that ensures we take the side of this downtrodden young English boy rather than the mocking European sophisticate. At a time when Britain's politics are dominated by some of the worst people in the world, 28 Years Later reminds us that the Brits are essentially good people, but also that they have a tendency to be lead astray by bad faith figureheads. This latter idea is introduced in the film's closing scene, a bonkers trump card that will ensure anyone familiar with the dark side of British pop culture will be returning for the next instalment, 2026's 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Starring: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes
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