In 2002, 28 Days Later jumpstarted the zombie craze of the 2000s, introducing the world to the concept of fast zombies, a more intense and immediate threat than the lumbering zombies of George Romero’s imagination. In this universe, penned by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, zombies are not the walking dead, but people infected with a “rage virus”.
These viral fast zombies aren’t eating the living, just infecting them, ensuring the rage virus spreads far and wide, and it does. The United Kingdom is levelled by the virus, while continental Europe and the rest of the world tries to stem the tide, as depicted in the sequel, 28 Weeks Later. Now, returning to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland as the driving creative force, 28 Years Later is itself a piece of “zombie IP”, a new entry into a long dormant franchise, intended to inject said franchise with new life. And you know what? It totally works, with an asterisk about the ending which we’ll talk about in a bit.
28 Years Later sends us back to the initial outbreak in 2002, when young Jimmy (Rocco Haynes) is watching Teletubbies with his buddies. They’re beset by the infected, and Jimmy escapes and runs to his father’s church. There, his father, a priest, welcomes the apocalypse and is consumed in view of his terrified son. We then leave Jimmy, except for cryptic references scattered about the wild zombified world.
Twenty-eight years into the future, just slightly ahead of our own time, the rage virus has been mostly neutralized, with the UK remaining as a quarantine zone where infected still roam. On an island off the coast of England, in a suggestively cultish commune of survivors, twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is engaged in a coming-of-age ritual with his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), hunting infected on the mainland. Meanwhile, Spike’s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is plagued by headaches and nosebleeds, and in a desperate attempt to get her help, Spike takes Isla to the mainland to find a mysterious doctor, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who ritualistically burns the dead.
The bulk of the film is Spike’s journey to try and save his mother, it’s a little bit of childhood wistfulness in the midst of a zombie horror landscape. The infected have evolved over the decades, which means there are now corpulent zombies and “alpha” zombies, those which are bigger and smarter than the others (shades of Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead). Though film is called the director’s medium, here you most strongly feel the influence of screenwriter Alex Garland. Spike’s journey through a hostile natural world echoes Garland’s excellent science fiction film, Annihilation, though none of the zombies are as singularly haunting and horrible as Annihilation’s nightmare bear (truly the most indelibly awful movie creature in recent memory). And the action beats are comparable to Garland’s recent work in films like Civil War and Warfare.
But Danny Boyle is present, too, particularly in the interpersonal dramas and Spike’s strange coming-of-age in a world still rocked by disease and pandemic. There’s also a tonal cheekiness which is very Boyle, which makes a nice counterpart to Garland’s more dire contributions. The whole film, from combining Spike’s innocent desire to save his mother with a post-apocalyptic zombie landscape to the blending of Boyle’s and Garland’s sensibilities, which are complementary yet distinct, is a neat tonal trick. 28 Years Later is never what you expect it to be, but it’s always what it should be, proof that franchises don’t have to become stale and repetitive, they can burst with new life and ideas, if you just let filmmakers express those ideas. The film still commits a major franchise sin, though, as it does not have a proper ending in order to lead into a sequel. But other than that admittedly annoying quirk, 28 Years Later is a cool, interesting addition to 28 – Later lore.
At least until the very end. Here we enter spoiler territory, if you don’t want to know, this is where you get off.
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Jimmy the survivor comes back at the very end of the film. With a sequel already shot and readying for next year (28 Years Later: The Bone Temple), 28 Years Later has an abrupt stop in place of a real conclusion, and the film ends when Spike is rescued by a now-grown Jimmy, played by Jack O’Connell (recently seen in Sinners, he’s a double villain winner). Now called “Sir Jimmy Crystal”, Jimmy and his cohort are dressed like British radio/TV personality and alleged sex offender Jimmy Savile.
Jimmy Savile is a real monster, and the choice to so evocatively reference him is shocking and a little baffling. Whatever purpose this choice serves—if there is a purpose beyond shock value—is left to future films to unravel. There is nothing here beyond the shock of recognition. Considering the alternate future within the film, it is entirely likely the Jimmy Savile that exists within 28 Days Later was never revealed as a monster (the allegations didn’t come out until after Savile’s death in 2011), so is this supposed to be proof of that alternate reality? If so, did we need to evoke Jimmy Savile to establish it?
At least as it exists here in 28 Years Later, it seems like referencing Jimmy Savile is done purely to scandalize anyone aware of who Jimmy Savile is. To some it may seem nothing more than cheap thrills, a more generous read is that it could be a metaphor for how real monsters penetrate society—Sir Jimmy Crystal is almost certainly not a good guy. We just don’t have enough information to know what thematic purpose this choice serves, because the film simply stops. Maybe a sequel will flesh it out, but it shouldn’t have to, that work should be done here. 28 Years Later shows a way forward for franchises that isn’t dead f-cking boring, but it is still guilty of setting up future films in the franchise rather than just telling a good story itself. 28 Years Later is 90% great story unto itself, 5% cult stuff that seems destined for the sequel, and 5% WTF with that ending.
28 Years Later is now playing exclusively in theaters.
