By Karl Quinn
28 Years Later
★★★★
MA 15+, 115 mins
It is 23 years since writer Alex Garland, director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald unleashed the Rage virus upon the world and redefined the zombie genre in 28 Days Later (despite insisting their film wasn’t a zombie flick at all). And in the first of a projected new trilogy, they prove there’s plenty of life in them old bones yet.
The filmmakers claim no prior knowledge of the franchise is necessary (Garland and Boyle were only executive producers on the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later) in order to enter the latest incarnation of the hellscape of England after the outbreak. And while it undoubtedly adds a little something to have seen the earlier films, they are largely right in that. As The Walking Dead made perfectly clear, you don’t need an origin story when the world you’ve created is as fully fleshed out as this. Even if the flesh is in a horrible state of decay.
You gotta run, run, run, run, run: Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Alfie Williams in 28 Years Later.Credit: AP
We start here on the island of Lindisfarne, off the coast of north-east England. That gives our leads – Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Jamie, Jodie Comer as Isla, and Alfie Williams as their son, Spike – the chance to do some cracking Geordie accents, something we just do not hear enough of on screen, if you ask me.
Isla is bed-bound, racked by a mystery illness that at first glance could be mistaken for early-onset Rage. Jamie is a hunter, a leader of the gated and so-far secure island community that seems to have clung to a version of civilisation fashioned some time between 1830 and 1940.
He’s taking Spike across the causeway – accessible only at low tide – that connects the island to the mainland, to hunt for slow-moving infected, and to dodge the fast-moving variety. It’s a coming-of-age ritual, with a rather higher degree of risk than a bar mitzvah or a blue-light disco. Of course, things unravel pretty quickly, as they encounter a horde led by an oversized, more intelligent leader, known as an Alpha.
Boyle is masterful at creating an almost unbearable sense of tension in these scenes. His use of jump-cuts, of varied focal lengths and exposures, and above all his use of music and sound design (think Trainspotting, times 10) all combine to create and sustain a state of high anxiety in the audience.
The mission is a turning point for Spike, but not quite in the way his old man had anticipated. His experiences, and the aftermath of them, open his eyes to the way myth is used to reinforce a particular version of the world. It causes a rift between father and son, and sets in train the second part of the film, in which Spike leads his mother back to the mainland in search of a doctor who is rumoured to be there, and who might provide a diagnosis and a cure.
At its core, then, 28 Years Later is a story about a fractured family, and the quest to reunite it, or replace it. It’s about the painful act of severance necessary to growth. It’s about betrayal and faith, and the need to believe in a better future even when it seems impossible.
If, like me, you are a fan of the genre you will see echoes of other examples here – of The Walking Dead and The Last of Us especially. But I see a big debt, too, to Russell Hoban’s magnificent and slender post-apocalyptic novel, Riddley Walker, in which a teenage boy wanders the Fens of East Anglia, and where language and stories have fractured and decayed but still hold sway. In all of these, there’s a fascinating kind of regressive medievalism at play, with hilltop forts, primitive weaponry, folk religion and a desperate bid to carve a life of normality in a time of perpetual siege.
There’s not a lot of room for humour in all this, though I couldn’t help but chuckle at how much the infected remind me of ravers at Confest, especially in scenes where they’re bathing naked in a river.
There’s also a hilarious scene involving a Swedish marine and the picture of his girlfriend on a barely functioning phone. It’s a throwaway moment (in all senses), but it says something about the things that are ephemeral and the ones that really matter.
And, ultimately, isn’t that precisely what the best zombie stories always do.
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