CDirected by Danny Boyle Starring Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Jodie Comer Review by Jon Kissel |  |
The world of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, then Weeks, and now Years, is so uniquely oppressive and unpleasant that the thought of coming back to the franchise after so much time did not fill this viewer with anticipation. Few zombie movies would be fun places to live in, but the animalistic, rabid infected of Boyle’s and writer Alex Garland’s imagining provoke the most skin-crawling sensations in the genre. Their effectiveness spurs a kill-them-all response that every critic who’s ever written thoughtfully about zombie movies would define as the exact thing someone like George Romero is trying to evoke, where the ultimate purpose is to get the viewer to consider how quickly they would shoot their neighbors in the face. With Boyle’s infected, the only correct answer is immediately.
In 28 Years Later, that critique is completely inapplicable, as the intervening time period since the first outbreak has turned the whole of the British Isles into a state of nature populated by snarling and naked infected desperate to either vomit blood onto their victims and thus turn them, or rip them to pieces. The film, written by Alex Garland, doesn’t linger long on a prologue dated back to the beginning of the outbreak, but the raw mechanics of it are too horrible to consider. Despite this reintroduction to the indiscriminate cruelty of the world, Boyle does attempt to provoke some amount of feeling for the infected as arrows pierce their skulls, incorporating a snapshot-like effect at the moment of death. However, they are so grotesque that it cannot work as anything other than an intellectual exercise. The most dedicated pacifist would not be convinced to spare a ravenous infected. Boyle’s and Garland’s attempts to give the infected a semblance of civilization, where packs are led by virus-enhanced alphas with pendulous hogs and a recognizable family unit screams when one of their members is killed, are equally faillures. 28 Years Later is the start of a new trilogy and, if this is the goal, the great challenge will be to make me feel anything from an infected.
The film is on moderately more interesting ground with the firer of the aforementioned arrows. The tide-protected geography of the island of Lindisfarne provides a haven for the few surviving humans, and that’s where the viewer finds pre-teen lead Spike (Alfie Williams). His mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is delirious with an indeterminate illness, but dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a peak post-apocalyptic specimen, eager to take Spike to the mainland for a coming-of-age hunt. The Kipling poem Boots has accompanied the trailers, read by a tinny radio voice that builds in intensity as the poem continues its evocation of the mind-destroying military mixture of drudgery punctuated by sharp terror. It’s played here too over the walk to the mainland, implying that the island community is some kind of authoritarian dystopia, or that Jamie is the soldier narrating the poem, or that Spike might one day turn into him. Boyle also intercuts archival scenes of British armies, like this is all that’s left of a once globe-spanning empire.
However, none of those ideas, intriguing as they are, come off. The island is actually a fine place to live, all things considered, there is value in searching the mainland for supplies, and each dead infected is one less vector of disease. Unlike in 28 Days Later, there’s no parallel drawn between the physical devolution of the infected and the moral devolution of the surviving humans. This journey is only Spike’s first of the film, as the subsequent celebrations reveal the sham that his parents’ marriage has become, and Spike responds by scooping up his mother and taking her to the mainland, where Jamie has earlier pointed out a smoke plume where an insane doctor is known to live. This pivots the film away from any kind of societal commentary and towards an intimate family drama, though both parts share the high-tension infected chases that the series is known for. One keeps waiting for the two halves to connect and they never do, providing the viewer with a tonal mismatch amidst strong acting from Comer, Taylor-Johnson, the doctor played by Ralph Fiennes, and newcomer Williams.
28 Years Later only comes alive in its final scene, a teaser for the next film and a glimpse of the kind of eccentricity that might have developed after two dozen-plus years of isolation. Despite its horror/sci-fi premise, the film is oddly staid until a gang of acrobatic infected-killers in very specific uniforms show up and give the franchise a more action-oriented bent. The thread has run out on the more biting War on Terror allegories from before, and the best thing about 28 Years Later may be as a bridge to the next thing. When he’s directing, Garland has fully turned towards the nail-biting chaos of muscular action filmmaking. As Boyle steps away for the sequel, this franchise may also be ready for something new. C
The film is on moderately more interesting ground with the firer of the aforementioned arrows. The tide-protected geography of the island of Lindisfarne provides a haven for the few surviving humans, and that’s where the viewer finds pre-teen lead Spike (Alfie Williams). His mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is delirious with an indeterminate illness, but dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a peak post-apocalyptic specimen, eager to take Spike to the mainland for a coming-of-age hunt. The Kipling poem Boots has accompanied the trailers, read by a tinny radio voice that builds in intensity as the poem continues its evocation of the mind-destroying military mixture of drudgery punctuated by sharp terror. It’s played here too over the walk to the mainland, implying that the island community is some kind of authoritarian dystopia, or that Jamie is the soldier narrating the poem, or that Spike might one day turn into him. Boyle also intercuts archival scenes of British armies, like this is all that’s left of a once globe-spanning empire.
However, none of those ideas, intriguing as they are, come off. The island is actually a fine place to live, all things considered, there is value in searching the mainland for supplies, and each dead infected is one less vector of disease. Unlike in 28 Days Later, there’s no parallel drawn between the physical devolution of the infected and the moral devolution of the surviving humans. This journey is only Spike’s first of the film, as the subsequent celebrations reveal the sham that his parents’ marriage has become, and Spike responds by scooping up his mother and taking her to the mainland, where Jamie has earlier pointed out a smoke plume where an insane doctor is known to live. This pivots the film away from any kind of societal commentary and towards an intimate family drama, though both parts share the high-tension infected chases that the series is known for. One keeps waiting for the two halves to connect and they never do, providing the viewer with a tonal mismatch amidst strong acting from Comer, Taylor-Johnson, the doctor played by Ralph Fiennes, and newcomer Williams.
28 Years Later only comes alive in its final scene, a teaser for the next film and a glimpse of the kind of eccentricity that might have developed after two dozen-plus years of isolation. Despite its horror/sci-fi premise, the film is oddly staid until a gang of acrobatic infected-killers in very specific uniforms show up and give the franchise a more action-oriented bent. The thread has run out on the more biting War on Terror allegories from before, and the best thing about 28 Years Later may be as a bridge to the next thing. When he’s directing, Garland has fully turned towards the nail-biting chaos of muscular action filmmaking. As Boyle steps away for the sequel, this franchise may also be ready for something new. C
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