28 Years Later (2025)

*½/****
starring Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes
written by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

by Walter Chaw At its best, Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later is alive with the speculative cultural anthropology of the due-for-revision Reign of Fire. At its worst, it’s Ren Faire: The Movie, a guided LARP through a fantastical post-apocalypse, replete with unnecessarily elaborate lore, feasting scenes, braids for miles, and paste-thick accents. It’s almost entirely humourless sociology drunk on its own gravid religiosity, ending at a neo Sedlec Ossuary complete with mad curator who explains very carefully what a “memento mori” is. If my inner 16-year-old’s hormones could operate a typewriter, they would produce exactly this script, written by the returning Alex Garland. I did appreciate a flash of wit in a “SHELL” station sign vandalized to say “HELL”–shades of the spray-painted “S” before “LAUGHTER” on the side of The Joker’s semi rig in The Dark Knight (and of course Catwoman’s “Hell Here” in Batman Returns)–but that kind of gallows humor, evident even in Boyle’s own 28 Days Later, is conspicuously absent in this intensely self-important/self-serious piece. I was tempted to look at it more favorably as an epitaph for the human race–a companion piece to the Philippou Brothers’ Bring Her Back that likewise boils down to rituals of grief and remembrance–but comparing things to Bring Her Back ultimately does those things no favours.

I struggle with films that open with a priest kneeling between pews accepting the cannibalism of his zombie congregation while his little boy in hiding asks why “Da” has forsaken him. I get it. I got it. I’ve gotten the evangelical Christian aspect of zombies-as-metaphor since I saw Night of the Living Dead as a steadfastly average middle-American child, for Christ’s sake. (Literally.) There’s no point too subtle for Boyle, the poor man’s Ridley Scott (who was already the poor man’s Smart Filmmaker), to bloat into obscenity. He did, after all, give us Millions, which plays more as a prequel to this film than 28 Days Later does, come to think of it. Consider Swedish soldier Erik (Edvin Ryding), who serves no function as a human being but fulfils several functions as a symbol. He says he wanted to be thought of as a “man,” so he joined the Navy and promptly shipwrecked on Scotland. Then he says the hyper-macho “Alpha” zombies of 28 Years Later are like “stock brokers, fuckin’ Wall Street guys.” Get it? Zombies not only represent the insidious creep of prosperity gospel Christians but also represent the insidious creep of…prosperity…gospel, um, Christians. How about the coda for this mess, in which a gaggle of football hooligans, all dressed in colourful jogging suits, introduce themselves in a gout of violence to make up for the relative lack thereof in the film’s second half? Hackneyed doesn’t begin to describe it, but hackneyed is par for the course for Boyle. The leader of this pack? Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), a towheaded killer coded as the Devil who enters the fray for the prize of our young hero’s soul. That noise? It’s not coming from the film–it’s the sound your eyeballs make when they roll up into your skull.

The story concerns pre-adolescent Spike (Alfie Williams) going on his first “hunt” on the Scottish mainland with father Jamie (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) while his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), lies in bed growing progressively more insane. Their quarry, besides Spike’s manhood, is “the infected,” who have, in the 28 years since the original (see title), begun to evolve into different classes of angry, carnivorous people. Spike and Jamie want to bag a fat one but, in so doing, get the attention of an Alpha (the most heavily-muscled and athletic of the mindless cannibals), who causes Spike and Jamie to seek shelter until the tide recedes enough for them to return to their island fortress via a landbridge. I thought there would be an I Am Legend-like examination of a zombie civilization rising up to give the lie to the idea that they are merely hollow eating machines, but, no: the only redemption available in 28 Years Later is reserved for the human characters. Once safe, Jamie regales their small community with a heroic tale of Spike’s icy will and crack shot with a bow and arrow, a scene that reminded me in the best ways of the Empire Strikes Back sequence from Reign of Fire. Spike, however, is appalled at what he considers to be “lies” about his courage. (Little Spike is a moral absolutist.) Given hope one night that a dim fire across the water is evidence of Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a human survivor who happened to be a general practitioner in a past life, he contrives to get his mother into Kelson’s “office” to figure out why she’s acting like such a hysterical madwoman all the time.

When Spike disables one of his community’s watchtowers in order to affect an escape, I thought this would lead to a gratifyingly downbeat 28 Weeks Later denouement in which the best intentions lead to doom for everyone. Instead, we get Fiennes quoting Shakespeare and showing off his character’s arts and crafts skills (think building shit with popsicle sticks, except femurs and skulls). 28 Years Later is a moral retrofitted with a fable, and the worst of it is that it’s not even clear what the moral is. Men are violent? People are strange? How about the miracle baby born in the wild amongst a billion rats in the husk of a bus? I have only really liked a couple of Boyle’s films, though I can’t argue much with the craft of any of them. He’s the Ebby “Nuke” Laloosh of prestige independent filmmakers: a million-dollar arm, although I have an idea about that ten-cent head of his. When he resists proselytizing his piebald faith as if it were complex theology, he comes up with a nasty bit of noir (Shallow Grave) and a melancholy survey of growing older and losing vitality along with purpose (T2: Trainspotting). When he can’t resist, you get the ending of Sunshine plus all of Millions, Yesterday, and the increasingly vile Slumdog Millionaire, Lord have mercy. 28 Years Later is more of the execrable and less of the exalted: obvious in its intentions and clumsy in its machinations, it wants urgently to be holy art rather than glorious pulp–so much so that it feels uncannily like the artiste “slumming” in a disreputable genre unaware that his best work comes out of his gut, not his head. Alfie Williams is a true discovery, another of Boyle’s kid messiahs who’s too good for the part as written. Fiennes, meanwhile, is alone in understanding the film he’s actually in is Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. And now the breathless wait for 28 Years Later: The New Testament, coming soon to a mostly empty church near you.