28 Years Later Is Totally Nuts

At the heart of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later stands an eerie monument, a slender tower of skulls serving as a memorial to the dead. It’s a grim sight, surrounded by trees covered in bones, but one designed to stir compassion as well. “There are so many dead, infected and uninfected alike — because they are alike,” says its apparent creator, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who in the years following Britain’s transformation into a zombie-filled hellscape became a gruff, buff, and somewhat daffy hermit single-handedly holding off armies of monsters with a mixture of weapons, guile, and medical know-how. When someone dies, Kelson burns off their skin, polishes their skull, and places it on the tower. This memorial speaks to the constant presence of death in these films, but it also asks us to stop and consider the immense loss these humans have endured. “Every skull is a set of thoughts,” Kelson says. “These sockets saw, and these jaws swallowed.” Most people seem to think he’s a lunatic, but maybe you have to be a little mad to hold onto your humanity in a world like this.

One could say the same for the real world beyond the screen as well. Those lusting for cool monster action and cheap genre thrills would do well to remember that the original 28 Days Later, directed by Boyle and written by Alex Garland, wasn’t that much of a zombie flick to begin with. Those infected by the so-called “rage virus” lurked in the shadows and usually popped up only to set in motion the extremes of behavior that were that film’s true focus. Boyle and Garland had little interest in showing us face-eating monsters chase people around; they wanted to depict how the remnants of humanity reacted to the total devastation around them. Shot on inexpensive digital video cameras and released in 2002 to audiences still reeling from September 11 and its immediate aftermath, the film was a masterpiece, but maybe the scariest thing about it was the title: 28 days had been all it took for civilization to fall apart. 2007’s slightly more genre-friendly sequel, 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, also had more than zombies on its mind. Released at the height of the Forever Wars, it was set in a London occupied (and, at one point, partly incinerated) by the U.S. military.

That sequel had ended with the ominous image of zombies invading Paris, but this problem appears to have been resolved in the ensuing years. Now, we’re told that the rage virus is once again contained to Britain, which has been quarantined, its waters patrolled by boats from other countries. Call it an involuntary version of Brexit. The story starts in a small island settlement isolated from the zombie-infested mainland by a long causeway that only emerges at low tide. Living under a tattered flag of St. George, the people here have reconstructed some semblance of society by relying on traditional tasks and traditional attitudes. They farm, they fish, they carve weapons and sing communal songs (only in this case, it’s stuff like the Tom Jones banger “Delilah”), while also guarding against any outsiders that might want to shamble menacingly across the causeway. At times, one wonders if Boyle and Garland have accidentally made a sequel to their underrated first collaboration, The Beach (2000), instead.

Occasionally, these villagers step onto the mainland themselves, as when the film’s protagonist, the 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), is taken by his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to hunt his first zombie using homemade arrows. As they’re cheered on by fellow villagers, Boyle cuts, in his energetically herky-jerk, mixed-media fashion, to fragments of heroic paintings and footage from Laurence Olivier’s 1944 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V (itself an attempt to lift British spirits during WWII). These aren’t well-organized waves of French archers or cavalry our heroes are facing, however. Since this movie takes place decades after the events of the previous entries, the infected have evolved, or devolved in some cases. There are rotund, slothlike ones that crawl pathetically and eat worms; they’re easy to kill, and Spike and Jamie make fine sport of them. Then there are the faster, more familiar ones. Most alarming are the alphas, who are stronger and smarter and much harder to stop. The alphas don’t just try to bite your face off; they also like to rip your head and your spine right off your body.

With its fears of the horde and its images of neighbors and loved ones turning into brainless, berserk beasts through contact with infected outsiders, the zombie story — along with other classic monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein — always held metaphoric power. But the genre had been moribund for some time before 2002, when Boyle’s picture and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil brought it back from the dead. In subsequent years, zombies became big business, but they never quite lost their symbolic import. Within that context, we can imagine Boyle and Garland trying to deliver on the modern film industry’s obsession with unkillable franchises while smuggling in their share of ideas about the state of civilization.

On that score, at least, they mostly succeed. 28 Years Later carries on the tradition of using genre as a Trojan horse to explore the sensation of life today. The new movie’s obsession with reminders of the fallen reflects not just the long wake of the pandemic era, but also the numbing, ceaseless spectacle of death on our screens, as we scroll past images of murder and cruelty beamed into our phones from places that are, at least for a little while longer, Not Here. Maybe it takes a wiry, iodine-slathered Ralph Fiennes polishing skulls with a thousand-yard stare to remind us that the world is made up not of unthinking avatars to be sliced and diced but actual human beings.

Some horror fiends will find themselves disappointed with a movie that’s too weird, too somber, too unresolved to deliver on the promised thrills. Predictably, 28 Years Later is said to be the first in a planned trilogy, and it does all the usual to-be-continued stuff, with ominous unexplained signs, dangling character arcs, and one spectacularly goofy final scene that will presumably be explained in subsequent entries. This is a lot of setup with relatively little payoff, with Boyle relying mainly on horror and action clichés to keep things moving along. (You could retitle this Saved at the Last Second by a Previously Unknown Character: The Motion Picture.)

But it’s not just the genre theatrics that are underbaked. Despite several moving moments, and excellent performances from Fiennes and Taylor-Johnson, the film has an omnibus quality that makes it feel like a collection of loosely connected ideas instead of something that coheres into an actual vision, or even a story. Maybe it’ll all come together in the end. Or maybe it’s not supposed to. After all, what would be more appropriate for our moment than a franchise movie that devolves into a series of anguished and disjointed screams? 28 Years Later is choppy, muddled, strange, and not always convincing. But I’m not sure I’ll ever forget it.