28 Years Later…
It was in 2002 that the Rage Virus escaped from an animal experimentation laboratory in Cambridge and within a month had infected the whole of the mainland British Isles, a quarantine put in place to stop it spreading to the continent, a handful of survivors on the surrounding islands through sheer determination persisting with their lives of hand-me-downs and poorly fitting boots and make-do-and-mend, thinking, planning, checking and rechecking with the knowledge that a single lapse could end them all, the time now 28 years later…
On the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne, Isla is desperately ill, confused, prone to fits and outbursts of temper and lucidity, her husband Jamie unable to help her and their son Spike torn between concern for her and the knowledge that despite his age, two years younger than it would normally be, he is to make his first trip with his father along the fortified tidal causeway to the mainland, to learn to hunt the infected and forage for what useful items they can find after all this time.
Directed by Sunshine’s Danny Boyle from a script by Alex Garland, the team who created the original viral horror of 28 Days Later… comes their long-awaited continuation of the horror with 28 Years Later… a very different film yet one which dovetails with the original, an evolution of the threat and the virus as seen by a family who survived the initial outbreak as children and their own son who was born into a world gone mad, where nothing will ever be normal again.
Taking place in the decaying ruins of a dead civilisation, the semi-sanctuary of the Holy Isle is a contrast to the devastation beyond, its rituals and roles of hunters, gatherers, farmers and watchers designed to protect those within and instil awareness of the protocols which will keep them all alive, interspersed with flashbacks, memories of the way the world once was or might have once believed itself to have been, a simpler and happier place of order and honour.
With Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jodie Comer as Jamie and Isla, the film belongs to Alfie Williams as Spike, old beyond his fourteen years and determined through his terror, 28 Years Later… deliberately wrongfooting expectation with a prelude of young Jimmy (Rocco Haynes) and his family watching Teletubbies as their mother tries to calm them in the initial outbreak while knowing that nothing will ever be safe again, their father taken by the religious fervour of the glorious day of judgement even as he is torn apart, a contrast to the opening of the first film of a restrained monkey forced to watch violent images.
Any presumption that this film would be a retread of the first thematically or structurally swiftly dispelled, it again focuses on the fractured family unit, Spike taking it upon himself to make the quest not to safety but into danger when he comes to believe there may be help for his mother on the mainland returned to the wild and overrun with the infected, among them the more dangerous alphas, stronger, smarter and harder to kill.
A former general practitioner believed to have been driven mad but who found a way to exist, enduring among the hungry savages in the Bone Temple he has constructed, Doctor Kelson is another normal and well-adjusted character for Ralph Fiennes to add to his roster of such, a step towards acceptance of what has happened even as the infected themselves seem to be changing, and like the first film, for all the anguish and trauma, the terrified moments of questioning how many times anyone can be lucky in the long term, it is persistently hopeful, even elegiac as it serves as a memento mori, the awareness of the inevitability of death.
Planned and filmed back-to-back with the next in the sequence, again written by Garland but directed by The Marvels’ Nia DaCosta, the groundwork is laid in an encounter Jamie and Spike have talking shelter and in the final scene as Sinners’ Jack O’Connell is introduced as another chaotic factor in the post-apocalyptic wasteland in a genre-shifting rug-pull, the threads of which have already been woven into the fabric in plain sight, 28 Years Later… perhaps not the sequel which was anticipated but undeniably the one which has crashed through the windows.
28 Years Later… is currently on general release
