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A reminder that this review contains significant spoilers. Be wary that several reviews out there reveal plot points that could be considered spoilers which is disappointing but understandable because discussing the film meaningfully is difficult without getting into specifics.
To cut to the chase, I left 28 Years Later rather underwhelmed. It’s by no means a bad movie and it certainly kept me engaged for its almost 2 hour length but what were the major issues and did you share them?
Well, firstly it didn’t have the emotional resonance or uplifting quality of 28 Days Later which was a story about the nature of how families are made and end as much as being a fresh-for-the-time new style of zombie movie.
For me it wasn’t up there with the original in the way that Boyle’s Trainspotting 2 or even Top Gun Maverick was, where the film moved the characters’ life story forwards in a meaningful way. This sequel doesn’t build on any of the characters from the first movie.
The trailer was a masterpiece at building anticipation for the theatrical release but the film is a much more mixed affair that seems designed to prepare the ground for the next two movies in the 28 years later trilogy more than be a satisfying film in its own right. Cynically you wonder whether the motive was to amortise the production costs across multiple films so the same sets and actors could be reused for multiple productions, a little like the way the old big Hollywood studios used to.
The first act is a rites of passage walkabout style trip to the mainland where we see that the infected have evolved in different ways so are now less homogeneous than in the first two movies. Here we see the hallmark Garland investigation into and dystopian take on why things have come to be how they are however we never see any real explanation of why there are three kinds of infected – your regular fast one-arrow-kills, but now also super slow slithering worm eaters and ultra Viking style zombies who are hard to kill – ooh that would be a good film title, someone should do that.
Thematically, it dealt with family illness and death and curiously took what looks like a stance in support of assisted dying, though we’ll need to see the sequels to better understand Dr Kelson’s euthanasia of Comer’s character Isla which felt rather sudden with the interjection of the line about her being in pain just before she is killed by Ralph Fiennes character.
There are also clear references, which are literally spelt out on the wall, to the now disgraced UK celebrity Jimmy Saville and a suggestion of the impact of fervent religious belief on how his deviant character came to be formed.
But despite the nod to a thematic or moral basis to the story the issues kept coming.
Some scenes are so different they seem tonally inconsistent; of course there’s the ending’s tongue in cheek fast cut bizarre fight scene which seemed like a pastiche of film styles from Tarantino’s Kill Bill to Guy Ritchie’s Snatch via The Matrix but equally the humorous scenes with the Swedish soldier Erike seemed like they’d been grafted in to add some light relief and a connection to our ordinary world.
Some of the dialogue is exposition heavy to the point where you wonder what the script editor was doing or whether the budget wasn’t sufficient to show rather than tell however at 75 million dollars it wasn’t a cheap movie.
It incorporated the incredibly moving and disturbing Taylor Holmes rendition of the Rudyard Kipling poem boots that features heavily in the trailer however it jarred in the film since there wasn’t any sense of a disheartening coerced march to war that Spike was being led on by his father; it felt like while his father may have wanted to bask in the limelight of his son’s over dramatised glory, perhaps to gain standing with the lady folk of the community, his motivation was genuinely to educate his son; in fact he convinces the leader to take him on the walkabout 2 years earlier than it seems was the norm. So the use of the recording was more style over substance.
More generally, music and sound is a significant part of Boyle’s movies and the sound design was immersive but the music, while eclectic from melodic vocal to thrash metal didn’t engage me like the 28 days soundtrack where John Murphy’s haunting theme was accompanied by iconic pieces like Forray’s In Paradisum and Eno’s An Ending. The soundtrack’s Remember by Young Fathers is a stunningly beautiful piece though its use in the euthanasia scene diluted its power for me.
Technically some scenes lacked visual contrast which might reflect the technical limitations of using an iPhone as the camera body with insufficiently controlled internal light reflections though that artifact didn’t have the emotional impact of the amateur home video or cctv soft grainy style of 28 days so again even in the technical decisions we see style over substance.
Getting onto plot points, the infected pregnant woman’s infant birth was clearly introduced to create a sense of hope and a final act of compassion and selflessness with the illness and death of the mother. The naming of the baby Isla after Jodie Comer’s character just hammers home a somewhat jaded message that her spirit continues.
The scolded son Spike becomes the better father and is in fact referred to by his mother as her father in some of the few genuinely touching scenes of the movie. On the other hand Jimmy, the son of the zealous priest we are introduced to at the start of the movie, in the prologue 28 years earlier we suspect has gone down a less wholesome road.
So packing in the themes to the extent they feel underdone and like tropes.
The second act felt unbelievable and there is a dilapidated church sleep scene that is almost a callback to a similar scene in 28 days later however while in the first movie there were dream sequences in this there is an unexplained reality sequence where we see the consequences of what happened overnight but without any clear understanding of what exactly happened. Confusing.
There is also a blood stained scream style mask that appears on scarecrows and on a person, the significance of which isn’t made clear – the whiteness and shape made me wonder whether it was both foreshadowing and connected to the skulls we see in the Kelson skull tower memorials to the dead.
But again another loose thread in the shotgun blast of this film’s ideas.
The gasolene fume filled gas station scene seemed engineered just to get an explosion. We very briefly develop a connection with the Swedish soldier Erick via an awkward partly formed gag about Scotch on the rocks but why does he deserve to die? Because he wanted to kill a baby when thinking that course of action would keep the people he cared about safe? Maybe the message is to never lose respect for the sanctity of life which is admirable but then his death happens so quickly we feel like that message is diluted.
And more generally why are there navy patrols of the UK? Did the infection not spread to continental Europe as suggested in 28 Weeks Later? Either we’re asked to believe 28 Weeks Later never happened and the infection was kept confined to the UK or somehow the infected were herded to the UK for containment. In either case it doesn’t seem far-fetched to consider the isolation of the UK as an allegory for Brexit but it’s just one more not fully realised idea added into the mix.
The film did some things well.
The jump scares and scenes of sustained tension held me with editing that kept forward momentum throughout.
There was a convincing sense of civilisation having rapidly regressed within a generation to a more primitive state – an agrarian community that atavistically borrows technologies and literature from its pre-infection history.
Again maybe commentary here from Garland on how quickly a civilised world can become uncivilised.
Some performances were accomplished too, particularly from the young boy Spike played by Alfie Williams. Jodie Comer too gave a convincing performance of a loving mother struggling with disease and confusion.
So in a nutshell a curious story mix of tense horror and coming of age exploration of family dynamics with some fine performances but within a production context of permitted indulgent flights of fancy by the writer and director with tick-in-the-box sensational scenes to drive the trailer and ensure audiences get the frequent dopamine hits they’ve become used to through other mediums.
Maybe it’s nostalgia but I feel like 28 Days Later caught lightning in a bottle and this film had a go at recreating that magic but despite some accomplished performances the themes are never sufficiently focused or developed leaving us with a decent horror and some hackneyed tropes about the wisdom of the innocent untainted perspective of the child and preciousness of life – though even the latter is confused by the euthanasia angle.
Overall a rating of 6.8 for me – worth watching but without the uplifting quality or enduring rewatchability of 28 Days Later.
GI Chow 