28 Years Later was always going to be a fascinating, frustrating work of film that landed people’s butts in theatre seats. The franchise started with 28 Days Later way back in 2002, a cult classic and iconic horror film starring then relative newcomer Cillian Murphy. His skyrocket to mainstream fame after Oppenheimer’s rousing success in 2023 kickstarted audience interest in the franchise, which had languished for nearly two decades despite the second film 28 Weeks Later being a critical and financial success.
While I generally like director Danny Boyle’s work – Trainspotting, 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire, and of course the franchise in question, 28 [unit of time]s Later – I feel much less positively about collaborator and scriptwriter Alex Garland. I hated Annihilation, was indifferent about Civil War, and I’m attributing my anger at 28 Years Later to bad screenwriting.
Spoilers for 28 Years Later ahead.
There’s A Lot To Love Here
The thing that annoys me so much about 28 Years Later is that there are so many interesting things about it. The wider themes are interesting. There are allusions to isolationism and the idea of ‘returning to nature’ that make me wonder if all those podcast bros and fitness influencers who preach about eating raw meat and returning to the wilderness know exactly what they’re proposing. Many have read it as a take on Brexit and Covid, even on the opposition of paganism and Christianity, and there are worthy discussions to be had about those things.
The cinematography is also broadly excellent. The film, in keeping with the franchise’s tradition of shooting with weird/’bad’ technology, was filmed entirely on iPhones, which ironically makes it look incredible. Brief infrared shots of the infected in the darkness made my friends and I catch our breaths. Those bullet-time shots of the infected being taken out by arrows arewild. The colours are also beautiful.
And I have to laud Boyle’s skill with directing young actors, because 14-year-old Alfie Williams’ debut performance in this film is outstanding.
The viral (ha) trailer used an incredible recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Boots. That same recording is integrated into the film, adding hints of experimentation that could have been interesting if the tone of the movie had been consistent throughout. There are a few abstracted sequences that play with non-sequential editing and storytelling, and I was almost into it, except for the fact that they felt messy and meaningless in the wider context of the movie. They felt like they were tossed in to add an illusion of arthouse sensibility, and then quickly forgotten.
But 28 Years Later Suffers From An Inconsistent Tone
But these surprisingly bold swings are what makes the overall badness of this film so frustrating. While critical reviews have been polarising – some criticssay the film is Boyle’s best work, while othersfeel it’s an absolute stinker– I fall distinctly on the side of the detractors.
One sequence in particular, I found so egregiously cloying that it made me feel real anger. I was so upset I nearly walked out of the cinema, except that I didn’t want my friends to nag me about it afterwards. The writing goes quickly downhill once Ralph Fiennes enters the movie proper in the third act. Now, I have no complaints about the quality of Fiennes’ acting. He did a good job with the script he was given.
But that script was godawful. Spike (Williams) and his mother Isla (Jodie Comer), after a long, grueling journey to get to him and treat a mysterious illness, finally come across Dr. Kelson (Fiennes), a former doctor who’s a little eccentric after being alone for almost three decades. Kelson rescues them from an Alpha infected, diagnoses Isla’s illness as terminal cancer, and sedates Spike before euthanising Isla at her request.
He then cremates her body and gives Spike her skull to put on top of Kelson’s bizarre pyramid of skulls, a monument to the dead. Every bit of this scene is trite and feels completely out of place given the tension and horror of every minute of the movie before that. It’s tonal whiplash at its worst, and the sharp pivot to saccharine truisms like “memento mori” and “memento amoris” feel like a cheap way to get an emotional reaction out of the audience. I hated every second of it.
And the tonal whiplash continues! At the very end of the film, Jack O’Connell finally shows his face, revealing himself to be the child from the beginning of the film, now leading a seemingly insane cult of bloodthirsty killers that backflip all over the place while murdering infected in gruesome and flashy ways. It’s an incredibly campy scene, one that I would likely have appreciated, even loved, if it had been in a movie that wasn’t this one.
This scene hasits own layers of very British meaningthat flew over my head. My complaint about tonal inconsistency stands.
Alas, this is the film we got. I liked the other films in the franchise, but I didn’t go into this one expecting anything other than a zombie film. Somehow, despite having next to no expectations, I came out not just disappointed, but actively upset. Maybe that’s the risk Boyle and Garland took with their big swings – audiences might end up not just confused, but actively antagonistic towards the end product. I wish I’d just been confused. Instead, I felt like the movie had somehow transmitted the rage virus through the screen and straight to me. Can’t wait for the next two installments!
