Review: 28 YEARS LATER

Decades after the initial outbreak of the rage virus Britain is a quarrantined area. Survivors band in various ways but the ones we follow have found an Island protected by a causeway that the tide renders impassable. Island life is primitive but homely. Young Spike is being prepared to accompany his father across to the mainland to join him in scavenging for the settlement. While Spike initially nails a few of the infected his fear and nerves during skirmishes see him making mistakes and he carries guilt back with him to the island. 

When his initiation party gets under way, his concerns make him follow his father who has himself followed a young woman out to where the shadows are private. Betrayed at the sight, Spike goes back home and chats to his grandfather about what happened and a curious distant fire he saw on the mainland. Grandad suggests that the flame was maintained by one of the few trained doctors in reach. Spike thinks of his bedridden mother upstairs whose erratic, hallucinatory behaviour is probably just something that needs medicine. He has a lot to prove and a chance to do something really good. He takes his mum across the causeway.

When I saw 28 Days Later as a new film I and my companion were treated to a very ill fellow cinephile who kept sneezing ballistically while watching the instantly transferrable bug lay the land waste with hoards of angry zombies. That wasn't entirely why I didn't love the movie. I did like about two thirds, though, the first act and build were wonderful but then it fell into over-contrivance with pat dialogue and what felt like a rushed conclusion. Along with other titles of its vintage (hello to The Descent and Eden Lake), it gained in cult adoration what it didn't in box office returns and largely left me cold. I had no interest in the sequel 28 Weeks Later. 

So why go to this one? It was deemed different.

Well, so it is, mostly. It plays like an old rustic tale like Kes or Whistle Down the Wind but with Zombies and adult themes. Spike leaves the safety of his small society, let down by his father and needing to make his mother better, and wanders the dangerlands, meeting fellow travellers also pursuing survival. The memento mori of the herds of infected, whether obese and crawling like outsized reptiles or knotty limbed and voracious, preventing all but the most fleeting senses of the kind of reset the land needs.

Danny Boyle was one of the '90s wunderkinder, a flashy auteur bursting with pop culture and an eye for irony that often broke into the screamingly cynical. His Shallow Grave and Trainspotting remain durable highlights but his output after them put him in the patchy file. The embarrassing Coens rip A Life Less Ordinary and the meh The Beach left him nowhere to go until 2002's 28 Days Later in which he reinvented zombies to a decent return. The problem for me with that one is that he didn't leave his smartarsed observations at the door and tried to shoehorn the kind of toughness of Trainspotting in. It meant that the resulting tonal tension made it feel more like cable tv than cinema. And then we get the ending. I won't spoil it but it reminded me of nothing else but the kind of rugpull cliffhangers that The Walking Dead would end its seasons with. 

That said, this one does feel like cinema. There is a theme of anger and a quest for betterment from Spike which works but perhaps works toward the already announced sequel. Alfie Williams is outstanding as Spike. The ever dependable Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes and Aaron Taylor Johnson provide the screen with solid presence. All of this works but I was still left waiting for the next season.

Viewing Notes. The timing of the session had me getting an overpriced ticket to one of Hoyts' Lux cinemas with the reclinas. These days I'm fine with these as they can be easily adjusted for comfort. We were also treated to a free popcorn and softdrink which was a pleasant surprise. Currently on general release.