28 years have passed since the rage virus consumed the United Kingdom.  Life has moved forward for Europe and the rest of the world, and having placed the islands under strict quarantine, the remaining uninfected were left to regroup and reform their own societies.  On one of the northern islands, one such group has come together and made a new life for themselves, but resources have grown scarce and sometimes treks to the mainland are necessary.  The town is abuzz when Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) leaves as an escort to his young song, Spike (Alfie Williams), on his first trip off of the island, but coming face to face with the terrors of the mainland are far different than hearing about them in the stories. 

Danny Boyle reteams with screenwriter Alex Garland for 28 Years Later, a soft reboot/legacy sequel to their 28 Days Later (2002), setting the franchise up for a new trilogy with Nia DaCosta already set to direct 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026).  At 115 minutes, it is the longest of the films to-date including Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s now “heretical” entry, 28 Weeks Later (2007).  The series gained a boost in awareness in the early days of Covid-19, but a tangled legal web of who owned what held the series back from is continuation, and also made the original entry a tough film to find as it was not readily available on streaming and the physical release had long been out of print.  With contracts sorted and a tentative idea of the future of the franchise being reported about in the trades, Sony Pictures went cautiously wide with title opting out of any public or festival previews and keeping the film under a very tight embargo. 

As with any sequel, this film becomes the largest entry into the franchise to date, opening up the world by narratively closing back in on it.  Garland and Boyle are at home in their imagination of a post-collapse society that highlights the silver linings of human nature while also providing the darker elements a lab tested environment to fester.  Unfortunately, though, this experiment has mostly run out of steam so 28 Years Later opts instead for more conventional punch than thematic expansion.  Oddly enough, given the streak of righteousness and pretensions shown by Garland in this current era of his career, focusing on a seat filler and popcorn pushing title maybe just what the doctor ordered.  His narrative lens captures a nuanced story, but he is not stuck beating his metaphors and thematic devices to death across a feature length run time so that when the story does scratch at its themes, it actually feels prescient because Garland can not keep insisting on his singular – often surface level – opinion no matter how nicely and alluring he dresses those ideas up. 

Looking then through cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle’s actual lens which the promotional material touts is a series of iPhones on custom built rigs in a callback to Boyle’s early adoption of digital, consumer grade technology which he saddled Mantle with back in 2002, it all feels like a gimmick and does not do the film any favors.  Perhaps the title will look better at home, on the small screen, but in the cinema it looks like absolute garbage.  Dialogue scenes go on without a change of focus, leaving scene partners in the blurry outskirts of the frame.  To complicate matters, the action scenes look similarly juvenile and raw with shaky and jittery images not unlike the tapes teenagers would make of themselves wiping out at the skate park.  This issue is further exasperated by Jon Harris’ editing style which also adopts a stuttering style, employing jarring freezeframes, strange cutting patterns, and unfortunately caving to some of Garland’s worst tendencies and self-importance as it weaves in the filmic history of British violence as experts from Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots” plays out over voiceover; an effective device when used in the trailer but ego stroking in the context of the film.  He is trying to draw allusions to the rage virus is just an extrapolation of the violence inherent in us all by connecting all of the wars of the past to the current war against the infected being waged by our stranded heroes, and using scenes from the gorgeously mounted historical epics, he is forcing this far less interesting to look at film into the conversation with actual artists.  Boyle, thankfully, helps to dilute this esoteric and edgy vision that would have bogged down the film had its been a singular Alex Garland-credited picture. 

Boyle brings a humanity to the story which helps to bring audiences into this broken world.  Placing an incredible weight of the shoulders of young Williams, the gamble pays off.  Kids in horror movies almost always shine a light on weaknesses in the story as they are an easy ways to get smart characters into trouble through poor decisions.  Spike is treated very much like an adult, and when his youth is called to the forefront of the scene, it is always for purposes of character and the more impulsive decisions he makes are justified with supporting business.  The young actor handles himself well across all the aspects of genre and theme which is required of him, powering through some of the more beguiling nonsense which Garland hurls his way and elevating the more competently composed scenes injecting a pure empathy into this innocence lost , coming of age tale.  

The final act of 28 Years Later is a perfect tonal summary of the film within the context text of the larger franchise; both its best and most frustrating work.  The introduction of marooned Swedish navy man Erik (Edvin Ryding) marks an interesting turn in the narrative as it tries on a specific brand of comedy that mostly fits the overall tone of the film, but is most clearly Garland embracing his self serving curmudgeonly outlook not unlike how Clint Eastwood writes his late stage men of the earth characters into situations where he can take thinly veiled pot shots about a society which he refuses to engage with and is moving on without him.  This topples into the medical marvel of an infected mother (Celi Crossland) giving birth to an uninfected child, aided by the later-revealed-to-be cancer-riddled wetnurse Ilsa (Jodie Comer), Spike’s mother.  It does not need to make sense as Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) will soon hand wave any questions away by citing the magic of the placenta, and while that may stop us from picking further at that point in the moment, it sets a troubling stage for how Garland is going to shoehorn his take of the divine feminine into this series’ later throes. 

Ultimately, though, the narrative stays anchored with Spike, and while a revenge plot of a scorned father begins to get teased at, there is an absolutely bonkers final scene that feels more like an end credits stinger that had been stapled on to the final, and honestly, quite powerful scene of Spike forging his own path in this fractured world.  Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), in a lush purple suit, decked out in gold, and crowned with a tiara, comes to the boy’s rescue and it totally undermines any good will that the film had fostered in audiences to this point.  It opens up more questions than had the film simply ended with Spike on his own, and it creates another tonal riff from everything that came before that it leaves audiences feeling confused and annoyed instead of excited.  While 28 Days Later can be credited with informing much of how modern culture represents and understands zombies, 28 Years Later is far less subversive or exploratory and in the wake of The Walking Dead (2010-2022), a show whose style which Boyle had absolutely helped to inform, his genre defining franchise seems to be heading into more derivative direction than ever.