by Deputy
I am a late bloomer when it comes to film appreciation. I grew up so destitute we often did not have electricity or a place to live, so as a result I did not see movies much as a child and I do not have that childhood connection with Cinema as a means of storytelling that many develop. More than anything I was a reader, as the American public school system does a reasonable job of making sure all schools have a library to pull from.
So, I have been catching up to hundred years of cinema in my adult life, seeing things others will tell me with wide eyes was a must-watch and that I am not whole as a person until I have experienced this film. 28 Days Later was described to me exactly thus.
With that all in mind, I went several weeks back to see 28 Years Later, on a whim, with an old friend who happened to be in town for the evening. And I don’t think I have ever walked out of the theater more befuddled by the choices a film has made than I did with this one. So confused I sat down and watched 28 Days once more, and then 28 Weeks which I had been told to skip, in the hopes either could shed light on something in this film.
Am I just out of touch? The reviews are almost all positive on this one. It has an 88% Tomatometer score. Have we really let things fall this far? Did I watch the same movie as this review calling it a brave and stunning piece of art? Are we so far down the sequels-and-cinematic-universes rabbit hole that anything with a scrap of a message to say gets rave reviews?
But even if that were the case, this is the belated tertiary film in the series. Sequel to the sequel. We began with an earnest, tightly edited, edge of your seat tense low budget horror film, got a bloated budget meandering GWOT follow up, and now we have whatever this is, and whatever comes next as the sequel to this film, titled “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” was filmed concurrently with this one.
It begins with the Teletubbies. The opening shot is a bunch of Scottish children watching a VHS recording of the Teletubbies when the outbreak happens in 2002. We get five minutes of following a child named Jimmy who manages to escape until he runs to the town church to find his father, who gives him a cross chain from his own neck and sends him off while saying lines about judgement day that are too hammy for Father Maxwell from Hellsing Ultimate Abridged. This plot line is then dropped.
28 Years Later plot number two starts, following a child named Spike and his father Jamie as they prepare for Spike’s first time off their little island fortress for coming of age don’t-call-them-zombies hunt on the mainland. Spike’s mom is against it but is bedridden with a vague illness, which nobody can tell us much about as the island has no doctor and is practically medieval in lifestyle.
This entire sequence is steeped in nationalism, a tattered flag of St. George flies o’er the ramparts, a 60s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II hangs in the community center, and there are maddening half second cuts to grainy, black and white footage of British troops marching in the world wars while Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots” is solemnly played from an ancient recording.
As they walk across the low tide path to Mainland Britain, I though “awesome, the movie is the zombie hunt, that’s a great premise”. But I was wrong. The hunt goes fine, kid kills a fat naked crawler who is somehow fat and naked off eating grubs and worms, and they head home. While on the way home they spot a fire in the distance and Jamie tells Spike not to worry about it. A massive herd of CGI deer knock over the house they are hiding in overnight, and they are forced to run home while chased by, drum roll please, the “Alpha”.
This character is later named “Sampson” by another character in the film and is credited that way, so we will use that. Sampson is seven to eight feet tall, pure muscle and naked as a jay bird. Sampson has been implied to be watching Jamie and Spike for the whole day, and chases them home before the tide is all the way down, including a very tense and well directed scene where they are sprinting through the water trying to make the walls of the island before he catches them. Spike and Jamie reach the walls and Sampson is driven back by arrows from the top of the walls.
And at this point I said “oh, ok, we’re 45 minutes in and THIS is the plot now. They led Sampson back and showed him how to get to the island, so now they will be under siege and have to defend… nope. Not that either. The island celebrates Spike’s first kill, gets drunk which is all we have seen them do, Jamie gets drunk and gets frisky with not Spike’s mom Isla, Spike sees it and runs home where he finds a drunk old man sitting up, who tells him the fire he saw was a doctor Kelson. Spike confronts his dad about not taking Isla to the doctor, to which Spike replies that 20 years ago they went over there and saw a man burning bodies, which frightened them, so they never went back. The flashback shows what to anyone who has ever served in any government or volunteer capacity is clearly identifiable as a casualty collection point, complete with body bags and the doctor wearing scrubs, but whatever.
Spike gets angry that his mom is sick and there’s a doctor but nobody else is making that connection, so he burns down the supply shed dooming the island to a slow death and then sets out with his mom to find the doctor using the loss of all accumulated island supplies as a distraction (Good thinking little buddy, when your mom is all better you can starve to death together, I’m sure everyone will be really understanding when you show back up). This is the main plot, finally, over an hour into this hour and fifty-five-minute-long film.
We then jump to five soldiers in a concrete tunnel, who seem to not know what the fuck they are doing, and all but one die immediately. the one who survives runs off. Back to Spike and Isla, they have some difficulties mostly around Isla’s illness which is causing her to have issues with memory, timekeeping, whatever the plot needs really. She keeps seeing people who are not there, and missing not-zombies who are there. Spike and Isla run to a rural gas station, which is filled with propane, and is detonated by the soldier we saw earlier who was hiding on the roof.
He then introduces himself as Erik and exposits that he is Swedish Navy, part of the NATO blockade enforcing a quarantine around the infected zone, and they hit a reef and sunk. They landed and there will be no rescue because anything that touches infected soil will never be allowed back. Erik talks about how the rest of the world moved on and has all the amenities of modern life in 2025, a stark contrast to the hard scrabble life Spike has had.
They see a pregnant zombie (and my initial reaction was “oh god no” when they lingered on her), and later Isla decides to help her birth the baby in an overturned bus. The birth scene is very graphic, the mother zombie is docile for as long as the plot needs then turns violent again, Erik shoots the mom, and Sampson shows up again crushing Erik’s skull before being darted by…. Doctor Kelson! Played by Ralph Fiennes, coated in what we are told is iodine and nearly naked himself, he mentions that he has been living near Sampson for about two or three years and they should go before the special K wears off.
They go to Kelson’s camp, where he has a 25-foot-tall spire of skulls, surrounded by more skulls in an outdoor ossuary. He talks about how each of these skulls was a person so he is trying to honor them, whether infected or not, as he casually flays Erik’s skull and has spike choose a spot for it. He then checks over the baby which is uninfected by rage virus. This is handwaved by the miracle of the human placenta, which I found particularly offensive given how specifically graphic and gory the birth scene was, there is ZERO chance blood or bodily fluid particulate did not make it on that child. Dr. Kelson then inspects Isla, tells spike his mom has cancer, doses Spike so he can’t interfere, and leads Isla off to a painless (we presume) death and flaying. When Spike wakes up, Dr. Kelson gives him his mom’s skull for the skull throne, which he places at the very top in a way that was clearly meant to be very meaningful but didn’t earn that so is mostly just Spike staring into a way-too-worked-over-in-post sunrise.
Sampson finds and attacks Dr. Kelson’s compound, they go underground to try and hide and he punches his way in, he gets tranquilized once more, Spike takes baby back to the island and leaves it on the doorstep with a note because what they really need is another mouth to feed after the catastrophe that was him leaving. He declares in the note that he is going to roam the countryside of infected Britain, go where nobody has been in 28 years, etc. etc. it should fade out here, but it doesn’t…
Because we have a final scene. Spike is on the run from infected up a windy mountain pass. His poor little crossbow can’t kill this many. He comes to a stone fall blockade in the road and is doomed, literally back against the wall, when… Jimmy shows up from the opening scene. Now thirty and dressed in a blue track suit like the dream of big beat never died, with his father’s cross hung upside down from his neck because he’s rebellious, he and his band of four to six other no-longer youths beat the zombies chasing Spike to death with sports equipment while early aughts punk music plays. In a film made almost entirely of tonal whiplashes this was the biggest. We get a “welcome to the club kid” and then credits.
The theater was nearly empty but the silence was still somehow awkward. I could not believe that was it. That was the film of the summer. All the buildup, all the “is that zombie Cillian Murphy?”. All the waiting. And this is all that Alex Garland and Danny Boyle were able to come up with?
It felt like an Alex Garland film and a Danny Boyle film were taking turns. It felt like they were fighting over who got creative control of the movie. It felt like they wrote every idea down and forgot to trim the dumb ones. It felt like five vertical slices for five different alternate scripts of the film.
It wasn’t a horror film. there was blood, and gore, but it all felt rote. Perfunctory. There was nothing there to be scared of, any time Spike ever faced a moment of danger or adversity another deus ex machina showed up to save him. Jamie, Erik, Kelson, Jimmy at the end. The acting was all fine, Ralph Fiennes in particular was great as a hammy “what if Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now was sane?” kinda way. He quotes Shakespeare and generally acts admirably like someone who has been flaying skulls and talking to them for three decades.
But there was no substance. I have ruminated on this for weeks, putting this review off, because I can’t decide what the film was or wanted to be. The Dr. Kelson bits run a very heavy handed “Memento Mori” theme and try to say something about death and how we honor and move forward from the deaths of those we love. The earlier parts of the film had a lot to say about imperialism and nationalism and Brexit. There is the father-son bonding theme, then the father-son tension theme which is all admirably built but then never pays off as they never see each other again. Isla is a character who bumbles through the film until she seizes a kid she can’t care for from the apex predators that knocked humans off the top of the food chain, then decides to die almost before Kelson even hints that he could do that for her.
After pondering a while I turned to the internet. What did other people think of this? Who liked it and why, what did I miss? What I found was that more than reviews of this film, I was looking at either paid advertisements under the headings of major media publications, or people reviewing Alex Garland and Danny Boyle as writer and director, their bodies of work, their opinions, what their last films were like, how many British cultural touchstones they stuffed into the first thirty minutes of this film.
A film, if I may be so trite as to try and say something myself, has to stand on its own merit. I dabble in firearms collection, and the most important rule of buying old guns is you are buying the gun, not the story. It may have gone on Doolittle’s raid, and fired the first shot at Bull Run, and been in Black Jack Pershing’s scabbard through the punitive expedition. But it probably didn’t, even if there are papers, and all that means nothing when it comes down putting money on the table. Film has to be the same way. A Film must tell a good story. Complex characters, moral dilemmas, narrative tension, dramatic irony, all of these elements that come together in storytelling need to be present (or deliberately absent as an artistic choice in rare cases).
This film has little of any of that, which is the root of my disappointment, because I came to this movie theater and I paid the overpriced ticket and bought the overpriced popcorn, and sat through the 35 minutes of credits, because I wanted to be entertained. I wanted a narrative. I wanted something I could sink my teeth into and tear apart and look at all the little bits and how they interplay with each other. I wanted tasteful callbacks to the first film. I wanted what the reviewers said this film had. Something tangible. I wouldn’t have cared if I didn’t agree with what the film had to say, I just wanted a recent film to say something meaningful. To stand for anything. We are awash in a sea of vapid, meaningless entertainment and I wanted a lighthouse to show me the distant shore. I did not find that here, nor will you.
Maybe all will be revealed when Bone Temple comes out next year. Maybe the two together will make a woefully long but complete film, the cinematographer’s Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain. But I suspect it will not. This felt like a cash grab, like the soft reboot to start a new, spinoff trilogy following Jimmy-of-the-upside-down-cross and his painfully cool hockey stick wielding thirty-something gang. Maybe they can get Fatboy Slim to do the soundtrack, I’d probably pay $19 again for that, I haven’t heard Weapon of Choice in a while.
Deputy is a recluse who would prefer not to be known but is dragged, kicking and screaming, into participation by Tex on occasion. Picture is unrelated.
