When 28 Days Later hit theaters more than two decades ago, it offered a quantum leap in zombie movie tropes: Gone were the slow-moving, brain-eating, quasi-mystical monsters of George Romero’s moody imagination; they’d been replaced by sprinting, swerving, freakish creations infected with a virus let loose by rogue animal rights activists. The virus, we are told in the film’s prologue, is not so much a disease as an idea—rage. The film unfolds as a travelogue that culminates in a terrifying vision of a post-apocalyptic authoritarian society, man’s true nature let loose by the collapse of civilization. And it only took twenty-eight days.
That movie, released just after 9/11 and all that it wrought, earned its bleakness, and its cynicism. Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, who were both relatively young at the time, 28 Days Later was a genre masterpiece about the horrors man can unleash upon the world when the fragile veneer of modernity is discarded. A follow-up from a different creative team, 28 Weeks Later, mined similar territory to mixed results.
It would have been all too easy, and perhaps even appropriate (have you been reading the news?!) for 28 Years Later, the new and long-in-the-works sequel from the original creative team to return to the darkness and nihilism of their original.
Instead, Boyle and Garland offer something more daring, more audacious—a measure of tenderness, and even hope. Rather than a story about how man is the real monster, it’s a story about how monsters might be the real men, and humanity, for all its faults, is worth treasuring, or at least memorializing with love and care.
Like 28 Days Later (and Garland’s Civil War), 28 Years Later is a travelogue. It’s structured episodically, almost like a zombie riff on Huckleberry Finn. It takes place in a world where the zombie menace has been contained to the United Kingdom, and the rest of the world has returned to something like normality, with warships and the internet and iPhones.
Within the quarantine zone, however, human survivors have been left to their own primitive devices, and little societies have begun to emerge. One, on an island connected by a thin causeway that is only accessible at low tide, resembles something like a normal English village, albeit with fewer resources and a tower watch to observe zombie activity.
Out of this village, a man named Jamie (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) awake one day with plans to visit the outer world. It’s a perilous journey, and Spike is a year or two younger than is normal for a first trip outside the village. But he and his father brave the wilds of the mainland, taking out zombies with their bows and arrows. Meanwhile, at home, Spike’s mother Isla (Jodi Comer) is sick, and it’s clear that his braggart father is tired of dealing with her infirmity. So Spike finds a way to sneak off the island with his mother, intent on finding a possibly mad doctor he’s heard about across the hills.
This summary makes the film sound far more conventional than it is. On the contrary, 28 Years Later is one of the zaniest, weirdest, least predictable, least conventional summer releases I’ve seen in years, maybe ever. It’s philosophical at times, almost silly at others, and occasionally veers into phantasmagorical weirdness. It’s a tonal mish-mash that shouldn’t work but somehow does.
Yes, there are multiple thrilling zombie attack sequences; if you’re here for the gore and the skin-chewing suspense, you’ll get it. But Boyle and Garland have bigger ideas on their minds. In 28 Years Later, they investigate essentially the opposite question that drove 28 Days Later—instead of wondering what happens when society collapses, they are interested in what happens when society, of whatever kind, begins to form anew.
The movie’s most moving—and yes, this is a bugnuts zombie movie that is tearfully moving—comes near the end, when Spike and his mother finally reach the doctor, played with tender intensity by Ralph Fiennes. He’s no longer a doctor, but more of an artist, specifically an artist of death, who has spent nearly a lifetime trying to commemorate the lives lost to the infection. That death was born of the rage virus, but in his care, it’s been reimagined as a kind of shrine to the human experience and all the joy and sadness and pain that it entails. It’s strangely, shockingly beautiful, a note of hope and acceptance from two filmmakers who are now much older.
28 Years Later is terrifying, and also surprisingly life-affirming. And it only took twenty-something years.
