28 Years Later
The opening scene bridges the gap between the two films by giving us a brief blast of low-fi, shaky-cam brutality that could've come straight out of the original, and is indeed set during those early days. As soon as the title card transports us to 28 years in the future, we get a glimpse of the small society that has survived and flourished on the small tidal island last seen at the very end of the first movie. Once a day at low tide, a fortified land bridge connects the island to the mainland, allowing them to gather food and supplies. This isolated community doesn't care much about what's going on outside their immediate area, even if they are aware that boats circle the country to keep the rage virus quarantined from the rest of the world. The islanders are happy to live simply without power or modern conveniences, and they've long since learned how to deal with the remaining zombies shuffling around near the coast.
12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is headed off to the mainland with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to go through what passes as a coming-of-age ritual around here: killing his first zombie. The villagers cheerfully see him off and plan his return celebrations, already alerting the viewer that maybe the zombies aren't so scary anymore. Spike and Jamie encounter several different kinds, from the classic, sprinting zombies to a bloated, insect-eating variety that can only slowly crawl around on the ground. Even though they are all still technically dangerous, Jamie gleefully instructs his son on the best ways to get his first kill, trying to pass on his stereotypically masculine values even as it's clear that Spike is not at all into harming these strange creatures for no reason. He is far more interested in the vastness and variety of life outside of his isolated island life, and how maybe this larger world could hold a cure for his sick mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), confined to her bed back at home. Spike sees a fire off in the distance while on the mainland, and comes to learn that it likely belonged to an insane doctor living among the zombies. Frustrated at his father, who seems to want to be free of both his son and wife, Spike sneaks his mom over the landbridge and sets out to find the doctor in the hopes that he will have a cure.
While the pace is largely slower than you might have expected, it does have its moments of people running from zombies, none of them particularly scary but still effectively tense. The camera work is shaky and distorted, much like the original, with frenetic editing and exploding colors that give a sense of grandeur to the proceedings. Each zombie kill is accompanied by a kind of stylized camera glitch meant to accentuate a bullet or arrow going through a head, which is maybe cool once but wears out its welcome pretty fast. It's an overall style that very much plays as an updated homage to the unique look of the original, famously shot on cheap camcorders 23 years ago.
Things wildly shift again as we finally meet Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who is more kooky than crazy, a man obsessed with honoring the deaths of both humans and zombies alike. To him, all life is precious; he appropriately fears the dangers that zombies bring, but suggests that their lives have a lot more value than just things to be hunted and killed. This all leads to a slightly rushed but bizarrely beautiful final act that may have people leaving the theater in tears, which isn't something many (including myself) thought would be happening from the start. Fiennes, indisputably one of the world's best working actors, is an absolute delight as always, playing Dr. Kelson as a excitably curious and very funny man who is eager to share his wisdom with the young and impressionable Spike. It was a bold choice to end the movie with these scenes, and if anything, it scores major points for unpredictability.
The story is grounded in Spike's coming-of-age tale, a boy who has so far lived hidden away quite safely in a dangerous world, and is just now learning what life and death mean in a place like this. He rejects his father's philosophy of cruelly killing your enemies to protect your own at all costs; he can't accept his mother's experience of life and death as nothing but pain and suffering; it's Dr. Kelson who finally reaches him, teaching him that all life is something to be cherished and that death is just a part of it, a reminder to make the most of things while you are alive. It's a refreshingly creative subversion of the now-cliched zombie story, although it sometimes clashes with the more typical action-based scenes that Boyle and Garland likely felt they had to include in the first two-thirds of the movie in order to avoid an audience riot. This results in a bit of tonal whiplash, made to feel even more severe by the film's last five minutes, which set up what seems to be an even stranger sequel.
It's certainly never boring. While some might find it a little jarring due to their own expectations, "28 Years Later" is a worthy sequel that mostly avoids the tropes of a weathered genre and takes some bold swings that mostly pay off in surprising ways. Bring a tissue, but for tears instead of blood.
