2002's 28 Days Later saw Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reverting to first principles after the sunsoaked torpor of 1999's The Beach, that starry studio project that once again demonstrated how no creative good can follow from flying your cameras out to high-end holiday destinations. Boyle seized upon the lightweight digital tech with which the Dogme crew had given the arthouse cinema a kick up the backside; rather than waiting for sand to be raked and Leo to emerge from his trailer, he was now free to prowl a damp, depopulated Britain, with Garland using the zombie movie's narrative framework to provide a brisk, pointed social commentary. 2007's 28 Weeks Later, a consolidation sequel which Boyle and Garland exec-produced for the emergent Iberian Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, was informed by America's post-9/11 misadventures in the Middle East, and proved more enthralling than the bulk of the Serious Studio Movies being produced on that subject around that moment with an eye to converting foreign policy disaster into Oscar gold. Now Boyle and Garland take back control, post-Brexit, post-Covid, confident that the UK hasn't got any less rageful in the quarter-century since the first movie. Both the third in the series and the first of a planned trilogy, 28 Years Later proposes that having been quarantined from mainland Europe to prevent the zombifying virus spreading further, Britain has reverted to a feudal state, its citizens retraining as archers and farmers while practising tribalism and social Darwinism. Somewhere in the mix is that pseudo-romantic Faragean notion of an elite-shedding return to the soil; early scenes are loaded with cutaways to the Olivier version of Henry V. Yet the St. George's flags we see are tattered and blood-spattered, and surviving this way of life is presented as a grim and grisly business, with monsters lurking at every turn. Thirteen years on from London 2012, Boyle intends to agitate and unsettle; less summer blockbuster than cautionary tale, 28 Years Later warns us to be careful indeed what we wish and vote for.
We're being invited, then, to huddle in the dark to witness a vision of society after deregulation and the collapse of civilisation; a movie that imagines the worst. There are still, granted, jolly Boyleisms: the first image we see is Teletubbyland, a bizarro-Albion gawped at here by youngsters being sheltered from the outside world, and this prologue climaxes with a characteristically Boyleish instruction ("RUN!"). Director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle - veteran of those old Dogme skirmishes - has picked up a state-of-the-art iPhone rig, digital 2.0, on his travels, and returned with better looking images than the original's grainy, blocky pixels. Yet what those images describe is far from a green and pleasant land, and these characters have little time to take in the scenery; the eye scans the frame for predators, not beauty. This Britain is a place of deeply strange ritual - such as pushing twelve-year-old hero Spike (Jake Williams) out into harm's way to make his first kill - and outright feral at its extremes. (One in-your-face development: after 28 years of violent twitching and lurching, the infected have shed their clothes, and now run amok with their arses exposed. Nobody needs to dress their hatred up anymore; it's all out in the open.) This is recognisably the same country that gave the world Penda's Fen and Andrew Tate, but the dream of London 2012 has tipped over into the stuff of nightmares: corpulent crawlers who emerge from the mud like bugs, a chase across a causeway as darkness falls and the tide comes in. The survivors seem drunk on Blitz spirit; even those who haven't been bitten seem to have internalised the madness of it all. Spike's bedbound mother (Jodie Comer) isn't the only figure who appears deeply unwell, and there aren't any of those pirouetting NHS nurses Boyle worked into the Opening Ceremony to oversee a recovery. It's a death cult. Any resemblance to the Britain of 2025 is etc. etc. etc.
The salvation is that Boyle continues to outrun his demons. A kick-bollock-scramble in the best sense, 28 Years Later doesn't ever hang around: lithe and assured in its cutting, positively free-associative in its music cues, it grabs fistfuls of plot and character details on the run, allowing us to catch up at our own speed. Its director has a way of finishing his own sentences with images: one character or another will start on the necessary exposition, and editor Jon Harris will cut to the fire pit or mass burial ground to which all this is apparently leading. Garland's script, closer to Civil War than Warfare, keeps changing shape, introducing familiar faces as trig points while Boyle's antsy camera takes in a near-overgrown Angel of the North and a newly desolate Sycamore Gap. This isn't the laborious worldbuilding we now expect from the first of a planned series; it's more like on-the-fly mapmaking. For a while, I worried that such restlessness would get the better of it, that movement would take precedence over thematic heft, but it ensures this belated sequel never doubles back on old ground the way last year's Alien: Romulus did, and Boyle and Garland eventually reveal that they've grasped the importance of the stories we tell ourselves. For the most part, the new film plays like a children's fable gone horribly wrong: The Hunger Games redirected by Ken Loach, or Boyle's own Millions as ambushed by George Romero. (It is a story that begs wide-eyed credulity, as with all those tales populists tell of American exceptionalism or British greatness.) It settles (a touch) with the third-act arrival of Ralph Fiennes, established post-Conclave as the ballast of Britfilm, as a Colonel Kurtz with a better bedside manner. Now we confront the spectre of mortality and the question of how we want to die: in a warm bed surrounded by loved ones, or torn limb-from-limb on some unfamiliar battlefield? It hardly counts as breezy summer escapism, so keen are Boyle and Garland to dramatise the instincts and impulses that got us here; I also wonder whether it risks what the listings magazines once described as regional variations, destined to be received very differently in the Tyne Tees and Thames areas. But it's the shake-up this lazy, somnolent summer season, coasting on former glories, sorely required: unpredictable, surprising, undeniably and admirably chancy. Through to its closing (and very British) cliffhanger - and no, I can't believe they're going there, either - 28 Years Later is wild indeed.
28 Years Later is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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