28 Years Later

A comprehensive (and exhaustive) review

Well, after 18 long years, we have another instalment in the ‘28’ franchise coming to cinemas. As I said in my last post, I was super-hyped for this film’s release. I am a zombie movie fan, and have been since I saw Danny Boyle’s first film 28 Days Later in 2002.

It ushered in a new wave of popularity for the zombie fiction genre, most notably spawning one of the most watched TV shows of all time, The Walking Dead, that lasted for a solid decade or so.

That cultural moment has seemingly passed. The fad died down and zombie films shrunk back into the niche graveyard from whence they had been resurrected. So it is an interesting time to revisit the franchise that started the whole zombie revival, after it had run its course.

The first trailer [above], which utilised a hundred year old recording of a recital of the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘Boots’ was incredible, and really amped up my hype for this film. I recommend that trailer, even if you never intend on watching the film.

This essay is partly a review of the newest and third film, 28 Years Later, as well as being my assessment of what made zombie movies so popular in the first place. To my mind, these two points intersect on several occasions and are inexorably linked. I will do my utmost to convey why I feel that as concisely and clearly as I can throughout.

SPOILER WARNING! I will be revealing plot points for 28 Years Laters from the outset. If you don’t want the movie spoiled, I suggest avoiding this review until after you have seen the film.

The film starts out with a harrowing scene that was included in the first trailer. A worried mother tells her child to stay in a living room with a host of other young children, instructs them to not open the door and leaves.

The children are watching the Teletubbies, a show for toddlers and young children that became popular in the 2000s. I liked this usage of a pop culture artefact to set the scene and establish situational context. Along with the accents we hear the characters speaking in, it firmly fixes the characters in a particular time and place: namely the UK in 2002 (the time of the Rage Virus Outbreak).

It also serves to mostly bypass the events of the first (and mostly maligned) sequel 28 Weeks Later by linking the outbreak event of the first movie to this new one. The events of ‘Weeks’ are mentioned in passing, but it becomes clear that this film is being made as a sequel to the first film, rather than as the third film in a canonical trilogy.

The children are nervously watching the show when they hear noises outside the door. One character, a young boy called Jimmy, damns the rest by walking up to the door and saying ‘mum’, giving away their position to the infected outside. This saves his own life however, as he is hidden by the door when the infected break through. This gives him enough time to escape, but not before witnessing all of the children being brutally killed by the Rage monsters.

As I said, it is a harrowing scene and a Hell of a way to start a horror movie. It really reminds the viewer of the brutality and stakes that our characters will be facing in this world, reminding us how terrifying the infected are as villains.

The boy witnesses his mother dying next as she screams at him to run. He obliges and does what any child would do after witnessing the violent death of a parent; he runs to the other one, to his father.

His father turns out to be the town’s vicar and is praying in the church. A devout believer, he clearly believes that Judgement Day has arrived and that the infected represent the fulfilment of St John’s prophecy in Revelations. He embraces death with gratitude and praise, thankful for the coming of the promised Armageddon.

I found it interesting that the father was praying alone. His wife, child and presumably many of his parishioners were not seeking refuge in the church alongside him, nor were they sharing in his exaltations regarding the Second Coming. Rather, they were sheltering in one of the townhouses without him. His son knew exactly where to find him, which infers that the characters knew he was there and not with his family. Presumably, some discussion, disagreement and arguments about where loyalties truly lie would have ensued at some point in the characters timeline over this.

The film never explains this part, but I think the film is trying to make some broader point on either religion, blind faith, ideological belief or a combination of all three. I will return to this point in due course.

After gifting his rosary to his son, the vicar is killed and turns into a zombie almost instantly, reminding us of the rapidity that the Rage virus can fully infect a human and thus the stakes again. Jimmy survives by hiding in a crawlspace and the film’s title card signals a time jump of nearly three decades.

I liked this cold open as it served to reacquaint the returning viewers with the world, lore and stakes with very little dialogue. It also serves to catch new viewers up to speed in much the same way. Many legacy sequels do this poorly and use clunky exposition dumps but (like the Firefly sequel movie Serenity) this film manages to do it in a mostly ‘show not tell’ manner and weave it into a compelling story in and of itself. It is wonderfully shot, acted and put together. I was impressed with this movie at this point.

Then the film introduces us to the protagonist Spike, a twelve year old boy and his father played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Both of these actors give incredible performances throughout but I wanted a lot more from one of them (more on that presently).

Spike and his family live on the real life island Lindisfarne in the county of Northumberland, Northwest England alongside a small community of survivors. Known as ‘Holy Island’ historically, this island marks another (tenuous) connection to religious faith in this film with some of the island’s religious iconography being shown on screen.

They also show lots of British iconography too (photo of Queen Elizabeth II, a Union Jack Flag, etc) and you get the impression that these proud Brits are actively trying to keep British cultural identity alive, preserving it from absolute extinction as the mainland dies to their west. Again, I think this is trying to make a point about ideology, values and identity. What that point is, I can only speculate. It is interesting that an island of proud Brits resolutely defends their borders from outsiders who wish them harm and are actively trying to preserve a traditional sense of British national identity behind said border. I’ll let the reader draw their own conclusions from my observation.

The island is connected to the mainland via a tidal causeway, meaning the islanders can access the English mainland at low tide but are mostly entirely cut off from the infected. They only have a narrow path to patrol which is only briefly accessible twice a day with the flowing tides.

Spike is coming of age and will be embarking on a ritual quest to venture to the mainland and kill an infected, which is apparently a rite of passage all boys go through to become men in this society. They make a big deal out of reminding the audience that the rules of this settlement dictate that if anyone is lost on the mainland, no search parties will be sent. If you are stranded, you are on your own. The safety of the island is paramount and no lives will be risked for any others. This point is really drummed home, which made me suspect it would be an important plot detail or set-up that we would revisit at a later time. A Chekhov's Gun, as it were. It should have been, but it wasn’t. Which begs one of two questions: ‘Why did I remember it?’ or ‘Why was it even there?’. I digress.

We learn that Spike’s mother, Ilsa, is unwell and bed ridden. She is clearly cognitively impaired in some way: forgetful, delusional and prone to mood swings, confusion and headaches. Jodie Comer does a great job acting throughout the movie, elevating the good elements of writing in the script to exceptional levels and the bad writing to serviceable (more on that later). I am also forever impressed by her vocal talent for accents. As a Liverpudlian, she has a strong ‘Scouse’ accent that is incredibly distinct in and of itself. How she can not only suppress her strong innate dialect, but also flawlessly adopt another strong accent like ‘Geordie’, always impresses me.

If I’d never seen her in anything before, I’d have been convinced by this performance that she was authentically from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, if not Sunderland or Middlesborough. As an aside, if any Americans reading this actually watched the film, how well could you understand the Geordie accents in it? Most Brits struggle with understanding it at times, so I can’t imagine how it was for you guys. Answers in the comments, please.

On the mainland, we have a father and son hunt where Dad is teaching Son how to be a man. A male role model, a caregiver and provider and a positive representation of masculinity. All rare things in modern Hollywood, and something I welcome the return of. I expected the whole film to flow along this vein. Troubles and conflict between adult father and his rapidly approaching adult son. A tale of growth, fatherly love and a man coming to terms with the fact that his son is becoming a man himself, accepting that his son must fly the nest to make his own path. That would be a great personal tale a storyteller could set within the context of a zombie apocalypse. But alas, that is not the story that this film tells.

The boy kills some slow and fat zombies that were easy pickings and the rite of passage has been travelled. As they are returning home, the duo are cut off by a group of more formidable zombies, and have to fight, retreat and hide until morning as they have missed the low tide that would allow them to make it home. I had been all in on this movie up until this point, but this is where it started to turn for me.

I love zombie fiction, but the issue writers clearly have when branching a single idea out into a franchise is adding new novelty to the villains. I love the crazed, mono-purposed monsters chasing our survivors in the first movie or TV season. But when they have to explain how they are still around after decades or when they have to add some new evolution or mutation variant to zombie canon, I often find they lose me. One of the ways writers try to do this is by making the zombies ‘smart’. Day of the Dead did it. The Walking Dead did it (in their final season tbf). Zak Snyder’s awful film Army of the Dead did it. Et cetera, et cetera.

I hate it. I don’t want the zombies to evolve to be smarter; that’s not why I like them as foils. I like them because they are dumb animals that look uncannily like human beings. I like them because they are a ravenous, unthinking and unstoppable force of nature. I like that there is no possibility of reasoning with them and that they will just keep coming relentlessly. They are scary precisely because they are an unstoppable stampede, an avalanche, a tidal wave of death that never stops. You have to run or fight. It’s primal, pure and simple. If zombies become smart and problem solving tacticians, they cease to be ‘zombies’ entirely and become something more predatorial and vampire-like as a villain. Something that hunts with wit and guile, rather than pure, uncontrollable bloodlust.

And this film did the ‘smart zombie’ trope, which I count as its first real sin, but by no means its last. Not only smart, they seem to infer that the ‘Alphas’, the new evolution of Rage monster they introduce, can command lesser life forms at will by what I can only explain as telepathy. Not only lesser zombies (I could buy that they are pack animals who obey an Alpha’s commands like wolves) but also corvines of some breed (ravens or crows). The Alpha seems to control an entire flock of them and employ them to chase down our father and son protagonists, like Dracula controlling bats or the Mummy controlling scarab beetles an old supernatural monster movie. In a franchise that is so beloved precisely because it is so ‘grounded’, I found this fantasy-like plot choice to be deeply irritating. Even worse, it is never explained (much less discussed) throughout the rest of the movie. I think this scene was in here for no other reason than because it ‘looked cool’. [sigh].

When they get back to the island, there is some more good character work and world building through subtle dialogue, although the way they arrive at the existence of Doctor Kelson seemed somewhat convenient if not contrived.

The discovery that there is a bonafide doctor living on the mainland and within walking distance convinces Spike that he may be able to finally cure his mother’s illness. His father dismisses this idea, saying that Dr Kelson is a dangerous madman, a crazy vagrant who should be avoided at any and all costs.

Undeterred, and angry at his father for his drunken antics the night before, Spike sets about disobeying him and hatches a plan to sneak his mother off the island to see this crazy doctor. Up to this point, Spike has proven himself to be a smart, reasoning and level-heading boy. Wise beyond his years. Considerate, honest and good-natured.

None of this is reflected in how he escapes the island, which is by distracting the guards by setting fire to one of the island's resource huts. We saw the same hut earlier, and in it were handwritten signs saying that resources were limited and precious to the community, so people should only take what they are in absolute dire need for. And Spike burns the whole thing down in an uncharacteristically selfish and childish act.

He then lies to his confused and vulnerable mother to trick her into walking to the dangerous mainland. When she has a moment of lucidity, she rightly flips out at Spike and demands they go back. And, even though he nearly died on his last inland incursion (and would have had it not been for his father), he claims that he can keep his mother safe as they journey to Dr Kelson. By his own admission the night prior where he verbalised to at least two characters that he was not ready for mainland survival, he lies and puts his mother's life in grave danger. This annoyed me because his character seemed to completely undercut all that it had been set up as up to this point. So dumb.

The film continues to descend into deeper and deeper levels of contrivance and ridiculousness from here. There are some nice and wholesome character moments between mother and son and some heartfelt moments of both joy and sadness that arise out of Ilsa’s mental decline, but it is mostly standard zombie survival stuff. Walking through the woods and inexplicably talking VERY loudly. Jump scares and lucky escapes. Et cetera.

They make camp for the first night out. Spike, being a child and unready for the responsibility of this quest, naturally falls asleep whilst keeping watch over the camp. Predictably, one of the slow moving zombies approaches him menacingly. This is where I suspected that his father (in this father/son tale) would appear out of nowhere to save the day in the nick of time. He would teach his son another lesson about venturing off alone, staying alert at all times or needing more eyes to keep watch when sleeping in shifts, etc.

I expected his father to catch up to them and scold him for being stupid for sneaking out and putting his mother at risk. I expected that the three of them would be reunited as a family and work out their differences. I expected the father to concede that taking his wife to see the doctor might be the only way to save her life. I expected apologies and forgiveness from all of them to each other and a rekindling of their familial bond. I expected a flashback to show a father and husband who, upon discovering his wife and son were missing, defies the rules of his community and ventures out to save them, therefore calling back and validating the previously seen Chekhov's Gun plot point. The film seems to go to great lengths to set up a plot beat like this and any father as devoted as this man is presented would stop at nothing to find his son and wife, community rules be damned.

But none of that happened. In fact, we don’t see the father again until a brief scene at the very end of the movie. Instead, we learn that the zombie was killed by Ilsa, although she only vaguely recalls doing it. Presumably, this would be explained as a moment of lucidity, maternal instinct and muscle memory that suddenly came over the woman in the face of danger, snapping her back momentarily into the healthy survivalist who would have successfully navigated this post-apocalyptic world for decades before she got sick. That explanation is my own, by the way, because the film itself offers none.

Spike then nearly gets them killed again, and this time is saved by a Swedish Navy member called Erik who had recently (and conveniently) shipwrecked nearby. His character exists to deliver some funny lines of dialogue and juxtapose an England that had been quarantined since 2002 with the modern world beyond that now has smartphones, social media and Instagram models. Beyond some decent laughs and some cheap digs at modern internet culture, this character serves very little purpose to the story at all.

And now, the film does another zombie evolution trope that I hate: a pregnant zombie. It isn’t expressly said what the nature nor origin of the gestation is, but I think they infer that the Alpha has mated with this female infected. She is in what appears to be a hospital gown, however, which may suggest she was bitten while pregnant like the woman in Dawn of the Dead (2004). In that film, the woman gives birth to a zombie baby, leading to a moral dilemma when the father cannot overcome his protective paternal instinct and tries to protect it. That was at least an interesting take on the trope.

This film has it that the ‘miracle of the placenta’ (an actual quote from the movie, I shit you not) protected the baby from the Rage virus completely, and the zombie mother gives birth to a healthy human baby. Seems dumb and ridiculously convenient to me, but I am not an expert in midwifery so I’ll reserve critiquing it too hard.

A baby in a zombie apocalypse, or in the universe of A Quiet Place for that matter, always strikes me as a game changer. They are too vulnerable and wouldn’t survive out in the wild in that kind of world. They would only be safe in heavily fortified settlements where they could be protected at all times. Rick Grimes said as much to Herschel in The Walking Dead Season 2 when he was trying to talk him into letting the group stay on his farm. ‘My wife is pregnant. That’s a blessing here but a death sentence out there, and you know it is’.

He’s right. Babies cry REALLY LOUDLY all the time, and that kind of noise attracts monsters. Of course, this film happens to feature the only human baby that never cries ever, even when it hasn’t been fed at all for at least a day. The baby in the apocalypse thing is dumb, stop doing it.

What is also dumb is how when this rabid, infected, crazed pregnant lady is giving birth, she somehow forgets that she is a rage monster and reverts to being a sister who recognises the holy bond of motherhood with Ilsa. They, a human and a zombie, HOLD FUCKING HANDS while the latter is having contractions and pushing. Then, when the baby is in Ilsa’s arms, the zombie mother remembers all of a sudden that she only exists to taste human flesh and tries to attack the group and her newborn baby. Erik shoots her, and then gets his head ripped off by Big Daddy Alpha, who is evidently pissed off. Spike, Elsa and the Zombie-Jesus baby desperately flee and are saved for the second time in as many minutes by a character we only spend a few scenes with: Doctor Kelson (played by Ralph Fiennes).

Kelson disables the charging Alpha with a blowdart that delivers a concoction of sedatives including morphine that he has somehow managed to procure in a forest out in the middle of nowhere, thirty years after the last pharmaceutical product was manufactured in the whole land. He also is covered head to toe in iodine, because it repels the Rage virus apparently, and no explanation as to how on Earth he got that is offered either. Maybe he is actually Voldemort and he just magicked it all into existence? Or maybe it was another miracle of the placenta? I digress.

Alpha is neutralised by the drugs temporarily but doesn’t fall over, which is weird. He just stands there, covered in mud and blood, with his enormous penis just dangling away. I could only ask ‘why’? I asked that question a lot during this film, but no more than at this moment. Why didn’t he drop to the floor when drugged? Why did he stop dead like a statue? And why is he hung like a donkey?

More to the point, why didn’t Doctor Kelson capitalise on this crucially small window of opportunity and kill this seemingly impervious tripod.

He has taken so many arrows to the torso that he could call Boromir a pussy with a straight face (‘for Gondor’), and he has been indiscriminately ripping people’s spines out of their bodies all movie. And, he clearly has a mind to hunt down those who stole his baby and off’d his zombie bride (I just figured out why she walked all bow-legged like). This would be the perfect and perhaps only chance to take this walking three legged table off the board for good, so why does Doctor Kelson insist they skulk away before he wakes up. KILL THIS ELEPHANT DICKED MOTHERFUCKER NOW!!! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING???!!!!

I read one commenter on this point who said that, because he is a doctor, Kelson wouldn’t kill the Alpha because it would violate his Hippocratic Oath. This justification (or egregious instance of apologetics) is in error for two reasons. One: The Infected are no longer human, which is explicitly said in this movie (as well as the first) and is commonly known across most characters we meet in the series. Two: Kelson is about to straight up murder a non-infected human being, so his oath clearly don’t mean shit to him.

Sheesh! This film is frustrating. Nearly done.

Doctor Kelson turns out to be a lovely, kind and thoughtful man who is as crazy as a bag of schizophrenic cats that have just consumed their own weight in ketamine. He has been collecting dead bodies (infected and non-infected alike) for thirty years, cremating the flesh from their carcasses and building enormous monuments out of their bones. Suffice to say, he has been alone all this time (I can’t imagine someone who lists ‘human taxidermy’ and ‘cremation’ as their hobbies gets too many matches on Tinder).

The structures are impressive, and I’d love an explanation as to how specifically he constructed them, but they have about as much artistic merit as your average Tracy Emin piece. We never do get an explanation for how he kept a large, smoky furnace going and an entire construction site a zombie free zone for thirty years. Maybe he creeped them out too much with his cremation and human taxidermy hobbies.

He quotes latin, speaks of honouring the souls of the deceased and conducts what appear to be close to ritualistic burial practices. It is cult-like and has an air of primitive religious practice about it, like head-shrinking, scalping or voodoo. I think Alex Garland, the writer of this script and famous critic of some of the contemporary forms of quasi-religious thinking western society has been engulfed with in recent years, is trying to make a point about ideologies here. What that point is exactly, I have no idea. That they’re bad? Maybe. Whatever he is trying to say, it is presented in a frustratingly opaque way.

People perceived Doctor Kelson to be barbaric, crazy and dangerous, but he turns out to be a polite, helpful and courteous good Samaritan, eager to help strangers. Is Garland saying don’t judge a primitive book by its cover? To be less critical of customs and rituals that are foreign to us? Maybe, I don’t bloody know.

That night at camp, the doctor diagnoses Ilsa with breast cancer and says it has probably metastasized to her brain, hence her brain fog. How she or her husband never spotted the lumps in her breast is never explained, but Ilsa does reveal she had a suspicion that her illness was some form of cancer.

Spike evidently has never heard of cancer and asks about a cure. Without much dialogue, Ralph Fiennes brilliantly communicates that his mother is far beyond the help of medicine, even in the non-apocalyptic world, let alone now.

Then, without even a thought of helping her son make it back home before she goes full Ophelia-Mode, she nods at the doctor who sedates Spike with his magic morphine blowdart before killing Isla. She apparently wanted the pain to end so much that she left her 12 year old son with a starving newborn baby in a zombie apocalypse with only a crazy human taxidermist for company. WT actual F?!!

The doctor then leaves the paralysed boy holding the baby all alone right next to the fire that can be seen for miles and disappears for a spot of late night cremation and bone extraction. He then brings Spike his mother’s pure white skull, handing it to him like it’s a brand new Playstation 5 on Christmas morning, and tells him to find a place for her on his murder monument of morbidity. In Spike’s place, I would kill that motherfucker the second the drugs wore off, regardless of my mothers dying wishes. He didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to her. What is this movie, man?

Spike doesn’t smoke this fool like any sane person would, but rather climbs the rickety ‘Burj Skullifa’ like Ethan Hunt and places his mother’s skull at the top, facing the sun. Whatever kind of emotional moment they were going for here, it fell flat for me. So dumb.

There’s another dumb and superfluous scene between Doctor Doofelshmirtz, Spike and the zombie Jesus baby that could have been avoided if the crazy GP had listened to me and killed Alpha Mega-cock when he had the chance, then Spike goes home.

He hangs the baby up on the fence with a note that tells his Dad ‘peace out’ (I’m paraphrasing) and then he fucks off to see the wasteland of Starmer’s Britain, sorry I meant Zombie Britain, Freudian Slip. The baby cries for what I am sure is the first time in the movie. Good job too, else it would have remained undiscovered and Spike would have left it there to die of starvation or cold. Weird scene.

We finally see Dad again, who reads the note and runs out into the sea before screaming like Darth Vader at the end of Episode III. Presumably he is angry that he has to wait a few hours for the tide to recede so that he can decide NOT to go and save his son for a second time. Where the fuck was this guy all movie?

And the movie should end here. Potential sequel set up. Some weirdness, contrivances and dead end plot points but generally a watchable albeit frustrating horror movie. I loved the first half an hour or so but grew increasingly exasperated by it as it went on. If it ended here, I might have given it a passing grade, a serviceable C-Minus or a 5 ½ out of 10.

But this film didn’t even have the decency to end here. Christ Almighty. If you haven’t seen it yet, and by some miracle you read this far into my exhaustive review; you will not believe what I am about to write.

Spike is cooking a fish on a campfire by a roadside when zombies start running down the hill towards him. He kills one then runs down the road to escape but finds it blocked by debris that he could easily climb up but doesn’t because it wasn’t written in the script. Then, a ridiculous looking man in a ridiculous brightly coloured 80s tracksuit and a ridiculous blonde wig appears at the top of the rocks. Spike spots the rosary hanging around his neck, identifying this character to the audience as the boy Jimmy that we saw on outbreak day at the start of the movie. It is another nod to religion which accompanies a group of people who are clearly cult-like and follow an odd ideology and have peculiar mannerisms and customs. I still don’t quite know what point is being made, but Alex Garland is clearly making it.

Jimmy makes some kind of offer to help Spike in exchange for something vague and then his minions appear all around the rock edges above the road. They too are all dressed in brightly coloured 80s tracksuits and blonde wigs, by the way.

An attack order is given and they engage in what can only be described as a parody of a bad 80s Kung Fu movie, killing the zombie in the most outlandish, over-the-top and ridiculous ways. Silly camera shots, quick zooms, quicker edits, bad wire work. The tonal shift will give you whiplash. The zombies are defeated and this cult of weirdos set themselves up as key players in the upcoming sequel and the film ends.

Now, as it has been noted by many, these characters are clearly all intentionally made up to be lookalikes of the disgraced British children’s TV presenter Jimmy Saville. Saville was a sexual deviant, predator and a vile paedophile whose crimes the British establishment covered up for years, even long after his death.

In this universe, his crimes would have never become public knowledge so we must presume that this group didn’t know that about him. Still, it seems an incredibly and uniquely odd choice to make (in a strong field of weird artistic choices), making this group a bunch of cultists who modelled their entire image on an old, creepy and long since retired children’s TV presenter. Not to mention it being a cultural reference that is unique to the UK in an internationally marketed movie. No-one will understand any of this outside of the UK, and those of us here will think ‘Are they a pedo cult, then’? As I said, it’s an odd choice.

It also undercuts the seriousness and the grounded nature that this movie/franchise upheld before it, and makes a mockery of some truly excellent dramatic performances from some seriously talented actors, not least Ralph Fiennes. It is like a scene from Scary Movie being tacked on to the end of a war movie, just a 180º flip in tone. I hate it so much.

The ending is so dumb that I have lost what little faith I had in the sequel, The Bone Temple, being any good, even with the reported return of Cillian Murphy’s character Jim from the first film. It’s directed by The Marvels director Nia Da Costa too, so I wasn’t holding my breath anyway. Christ help us all.

All in all, I waited 18 years for this film and it was a massive let down. I liked some of it a lot, but I hated a whole lot of it more. Shame. 4/10.

Thanks for reading - The Common Centrist