Movie Review: 28 Years Later

28 Years Later

Thirty years after the rage virus swept through Great Britain, a boy living in a survivalist village on a quarantined island uncovers the secret of a strange man living on the mainland.

The Road meets Apocalypse Now meets some Children of Men. This is the third installment in the 28 world, with the first film’s director, Danny Boyle, back on the helm. Though there was plenty of narrative and thematic overlap with the first two films, you could tell the second film, 28 Weeks Later, deviated in some big ways from the first. Maybe there were audience expectations that Years would be a return to form and reintroduction of the things that made the first movie so popular. I guess it’s not a terribly unusual situation in continuing franchises but some of those expectations would bleed into the script itself, which colors what I’ll talk about here.

The prologue opens with a bunch of stressed-out kids watching TV, which is understandable since they’re watching the Teletubbies. Horror scenarios mixing with elements of childhood is an annoying trope and I tallied as a small strike against the movie right away. Zombies break into the house and one of the kids escapes to the local church where his dad, the priest (Britain is Episcopalian, remember), is in full-on crazed religious guy mode, welcoming the apocalypse. Strike two. Dad preaches babblesauce to his son, gives him a cross, and sort of helps him hide as the zombies break into the sanctuary and overtake dad, who willingly gets infected. Jimmy, the kid, says “Father, why have you forsaken me?” Most people will get the reference, but…c’mon, can we get something creative here? Strike three.

It doesn’t look promising but there will be some brighter spots. We jump 28 years later, don’t you know, to a quarantined island off mainland Britain, and 12 year old Spike is being taken out to the mainland to kill some zombies with his dad, as a rite of passage. Jamie, the dad, directs Spike as he gets his first kill: a fat, crawling, east Asian zombie. Naturally, the pair get in over their head and escape to a dilapidated cottage to escape a zombie horde. Spike notices a drawerful of silverware but Dad says they don’t need any more of that at the village. Come again? Given the state of technology and resource availability there, that’s exactly what they need more of. Easily fixable in the script: “Good find, Spike! But we don’t want the weight to slow us down. I’ll mark it as something to grab later.” And why in the world do they not have any melee weapons, just bows and arrows? No bats, spears, poles, plumber’s hammer?

Leading up to Jamie and Spike returning, there’s scenes of villagers assembling a welcome back party in their makeshift function hall. I think Boyle was dropping a handkerchief here, because this is a zombie movie and audiences would be primed to think something will go awry with the outing and the party-planners will get bummed. Characters hoping for a whisper of a positive turn of events will always have their hopes dashed in these stories. Not so: Jamie and Spike returned unharmed, and there is revelry as Jamie exaggerates the exploits, much to Spike’s disapproval.

Spike sees Jamie cavort with another woman, and Spike confronts Jamie about the next day. Jamie slaps him, I think after Spike threatens him with a pocket knife. I think this is Boyle’s depiction of “toxic masculinity,” or it’s just bad writing, because at this point Jamie was replaced with his evil twin after the party. Or the shift in character has something to do with the the Brexit/Britain allegory. I want to assume the latter, because I can’t believe an experienced director can be so stupidly clumsy with his character development. Or else a previous, more sensible edit of the movie didn’t test well with sensitivity experts and they really wanted a “man angry, man bad” scenes and there wasn’t enough time for reshoots to accommodate the change effectively. More about the allegory angle later.

Spike steals Isla, his ailing mom, away to take her to the mainland by himself, to see the maybe-doctor legend figure he and Jamie had spotted during their outing. This is bad not only because a preteen kid and his unreliable, hallucinating mom are stepping into zombie territory, but there’s a chance the guy will turn out to be a malicious character. You would think a village of survivors, barely making things work, would want to work towards finding out if the guy out there is genuine. A doctor’s knowledge would be essentially priceless. I mean, it’s likely the village has been there for a long time and they’ve had plenty of opportunities to figure out what is going with the guy, but nah.

At first I thought Spike setting fire to a building to distract the gate guards was ridiculous, but it makes sense that a desperate and kinda angry kid would do something stupid like that. It worked and Spike and Isla hit the road. They eventually cross paths with a Swedish soldier, Erik, the lone survivor of his demolished squad. Remember the rule: the military must never be competent in these stories. Erik’s a bit of a jerk but rather sensible, even if he was incorrect about the zombie’s baby being born.

One reason Boyle put him in the script was because he needed to find a way to get the audience attached to someone who eventually gets killed. That method is obvious to me when it happens, and it’s a legitimate ways to induce a reaction from viewers. Up until that point, there weren’t any characters with enough screen time that got offed. The village doesn’t get overrun by zombies, the second of three handkerchiefs dropped, because, alongside dopey military squads, safe spaces will always get eliminated in zombie stories. I don’t think it’s very effective because Erik’s not a terribly sympathetic character, yet I don’t think this was the main reason Erik is there. I explain later.

The pair eventually find the doctor, Kelson, who represents the third handkerchief, the Colonel Kurtz character, who doesn’t turn out to be pervert or a mass murderer. A little eccentric—who wouldn’t be, in his situation—but accommodating and knowledgeable. He sedates one of the more dangerous zombies, and “alpha” that is stronger and more intelligent than the standard issue undead. Why didn’t Kelson, or Spike or Isla, kill him, or even raise a question to Kelson about just leaving him there, but again…nah. Why would they want to easily kill a super strong, homicidal, feral being that would target them later on?

Kelson exhibits his battery of bone and skull monoliths: his way of memorializing the dead. He diagnoses Isla with late-stage terminal cancer, and she and Kelson work out a morphine suicide. At dawn, Kelson instructs spike to add her skull to one of his monoliths. It was a rather touching moment of ascent in Spike’s arc, if a bit morbid. This the other reason Erik was included. Kelson had used Erik’s skull to demonstrate, to Isla and Spike, but the audience as well, in a tangible way how his memento mori works. Skipping that and having Spike do the first skull interment we see wouldn’t have made it as effective; we see how much Spike values Isla, and how much Kelson cares for Spike, in comparison to how Erik’s remains are regarded.

To no one’s shock, the formerly-sedated alpha zombie arrives at Kelson’s memorial yard and nearly kills Kelson and Spike. Spike returns to his village, drops off the zombie mom’s normal human baby with a note for his dad, and leaves permanently. Jamie promptly chases after Spike but can’t get past the high tide that covers the landbridge to the mainland. Now you might wonder why he never went after Spike after he took Isla? I’m wondering, too, but there are no answers. Again, this seems like a later editing decision…Boyle probably had Jamie behaving very much in character and chasing after Spike and Isla when they escaped, but he’s a cheater and he smacked his child. A competent storyteller would recognize that this behavior, even out of character, is setting the stage for Jamie’s redemption. Boyle is very much a capable director, which makes me think cutting Jamie out nearly entirely from the script after his sudden jerk phase came down from some do-gooder story consultant with unresolved daddy issues.

Thematically, 28 Years Later is kinda up in the air. Scenes of Spike and Jamie’s travel to the mainland, along with other village kids training with bows and spears, are interspersed with real-world footage of (presumably) 20th century British soldiers and Medieval reenactments with likewise weaponry. A friend of mine suggested that this points to the film being an allegory of Brexit, or British politics. This does make a bit of sense, since most cultural opinions give a pass to certain versions of colonialism—or considering it “badass” (Genghis Khan)—but admiring Britain’s colonial past is an immediate no-no. Before this article on Vanity Fair loaded the retarded paywall blocker, I was able to read something about Boyle mentioning Brexit. There’s also this New York Times article, not blocked for me at least, that also mentions the same, although there’s no direct quote about it from Boyle. I’ll assume that was the author’s, Chris Norris’, take on things, and we all know cathedral journalists have high standards for honesty in their writings, right?

MauLer and co. cover a lot of what I say here, but more in depth. At the 4:41:25 mark, to about 4:44:00, they discuss how the movie could have been much better by keeping Jamie’s actions in character, or having Jamie address his infidelity and anger.