28 Years Later Review – Danny Boyle’s Uneven Return to the Rage Virus

28 Years Later

Director: Danny Boyle

Writer: Alex Garland

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Alfie Williams

Seven-six-eleven-five-nine an’-twenty miles to-day.

Four-eleven-seventeen-thirty-two the day before.

Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up and down today.

There’s no discharge in the war.

The poem “Boots” by Rudyard Kipling plays over a loudspeaker, overlapped with instrumental music that is designed to make you feel out of sorts. Actor Taylor Holmes (in 1915) is reading it, it’s poetic and repetitive rhythms signify psyschological distress, we feel the pain of isolation of the past 28 years, snippets of the past, a young boy watches his entire family get murdered by flesh-eating, rage-induced zombies, he looks for solace in the church, only to be told it’s a blessing, the end of days, they are all being saved. Flashes of war. Flashes of community. The land has been quarantined off; there’s the mainland, a place in ruins from the downfall of society, and a small island just off it, where those who survived the rage virus live, exiled from the rest of the world.

Watch the official 28 Years Later trailer here.

We meet Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son, Spike (Alfie Williams), they’re having breakfast, excited about bacon, to show just for a moment their world is different than ours. Alfie’s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is sick in bed, wailing in pain, while her husband acknowledges her pain but does nothing to alleviate it other than ensuring their child is taken care of. While the story is largely reflective of Spike wanting to save his mother, taking a prestigious actress like Jodie Comer and reducing her to a symbol of pain and suffering is something that needs to end in post-apocalyptic films. There’s no emotional arc for her. Her grief, her pain, and her perspective are filtered through men, and in a film that is structured around humanity and death, it becomes increasingly more frustrating to experience how little room women are given in narratives.

We see a taste of world-building, the community they live in, with the status of hunters as heroes there, we see them working together to build upwards as Alfie and his father make their way towards the bridge created by the tide to go hunt the infected. We learn the rules. If they don’t come home, nobody goes looking for them. We see their relationship, how his father is nurturing to him, but at the same time teaches him what he must do in order to survive. We experience Alfie’s first kills, the evolution of the infected, and the way a father will protect his son and sing his praises even if he stutters on shots. It’s about survival, and the sacrifice that must be made to do so, both in spirit and in mind.

Danny Boyle's long-awaited 28 Years Later has a lot of hits, but also a lot of misses that may set the franchise’s trajectory heading in a different direction. The film is poignant, a reflection of isolation and grief, loneliness, and how one deals with sickness. We learn there’s a doctor deemed crazy by their society, Alfie is determined to take his mother to him to find out what is wrong, and while we do, here is where we receive our lesson of memento mori and Western societies' staggered perception of death, the entirety of the film could have left on a profound note of remember you too will die. And to look at death differently, in the understanding that they—both the infected and non-infected—are humans in the end.

The production design was pure Boyle; the whole movie invokes the same tension and lingering sadness that the first ten minutes of 28 Days Later had. There’s discomfort in delirium, compositions laid how to make you feel both abandoned and alone, but hunted at the same time. We experience an expansion of the zombies in this film; they have both evolved and devolved, some being reduced to oversized, petulant slobs that can only crawl across the ground, desperate to ingest anything alive. Others are now deemed alphas, strong and feral leaders of the zombie packs that have extreme difficulty in taking out. They have learned to stalk their prey. They are gaining intelligence, somehow, despite their rotting bodies, they can impregnate each other, and honestly, I’m sick of the trope that zombies losing their humanity but regaining their intelligence is supposed to be something we are afraid of. It dilutes the core reasoning why zombies were something to fear in the first place—a mindless death that cannot be reasoned with, creating beings that cannot be contained or controlled, the slow erosion of humanity and safety is the reason why zombies are terrifying. Making them intelligent brings them too close to humans; zombies should be utterly alien in their unthinking hunger. We keep evolving zombies like we are afraid the audience won’t stay scared unless the monsters grow, but in doing so we are trading in dread for spectacle. If I wanted to watch a movie about humans hunting other humans, I’d just watch an old war film.

My favourite part of the entire movie was, in addition to the Fiennes' screentime,  which on the messaging on its own is borderline comparable to this month's film “The Life of Chuck”, is the incredible sound production and the score by Young Fathers. The music and sound were immersive, pulling me into the film alongside the believable acting and set design.

A well-made film is marred by its last 5 minutes, which sequence would have served better as a post-credit scene, brilliant in execution with a grown-up Jimmy (the child from the beginning of the movie) played by Sinners Jack O'Connell but took away the overall intense feel of the movie.