28 Years Later ★★½

A lot has happened since Danny Boyle and Alex Garland got together to revitalize the zombie movie genre with 2002’s 28 Days Later. For one thing, in the 20-plus years since, zombies have never really left our pop culture consciousness. While they’ve largely staggered their way over to the small screen, the genre has nonetheless continued to be picked apart and deconstructed in countless ways. But if anyone has the potential to add something new to the dialogue, it’s Alex Garland.

Over the past two decades, Garland has become a successful director and something of an auteur in his own right. Even though both Boyle and Garland reject the term, I’d say he fits the auteur bill more than Boyle does since there’s a strong sociological and metaphysical thread tying Garland’s work together – whereas Boyle’s filmography is all over the place tonally, stylistically, and thematically (not a criticism, just an observation). Given that it’s been quite some time since I fully connected with a Danny Boyle movie, I have to admit that it was Garland’s involvement that really got me excited about this franchise clawing its way out of the cinematic graveyard with 28 Years Later.

It should also be noted that Boyle is bringing his frequent cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle back and he helps create some stunning images. Like the first movie, this one is created with the help of consumer-grade equipment, including the iPhone 15 Pro Max. But unlike the first one, this movie is lush with oversaturated color that brings the English countryside to a kind of eye-popping cinematic life I haven’t seen before.

Now, if your memory is a little fuzzy about what happened in the first two installments, don’t fret. The second entry, 28 Weeks Later, which had minimal input from Boyle and Garland, is essentially retconned into insignificance by some title cards, and no characters from either film show up here (Cillian Murphy’s survivor from the first one is due to appear in the next entry). All you need to know is that Great Britain has been turned into a quarantine zone and for nearly three decades now the survivors have been forced to fend for themselves amongst the remaining infected.

Cut off from the rest of the world, which has kept the outbreak from spreading and continued on uninterrupted into the 21st century, Britain has essentially been sent back into the Middle Ages – or at least the pre-industrial era. You don’t have to squint too hard to see some Brexit commentary in this set-up. After a brief 28-years-ago prologue, we’re dropped into a village on Holy Island, a real location off the northeast coast of England, where a good number of survivors are busy farming, making bows and arrows, and manning a big wooden gate that opens out onto a long, narrow causeway that is only walkable during low tide and serves as the sole connection to the mainland.

The post-apocalyptic life doesn’t seem too bad in this island village, but that may be due to the upbeat music that accompanies the idyllic day-in-the-life montage that gets the plot moving. (All of the music cues in 28 Years Later feel unnecessarily aggressive.) But then again, things aren’t great for our 12-year-old protagonist Spike (newcomer Alfie Willson), who has a bedridden mom (Jodie Comer) and a dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who is emotionally unfit and too self-centered to be the kind of father his son needs or the kind of husband his dying wife needs. He’s more interested in taking his kid on his first trip to the mainland – a sort of rite-of-passage into manhood – where Spike will kill his first zombie and the two can do some scavenging amidst all the hyper-masculine bonding.

The movie is more or less divided into two pieces. The first half is Spike and his dad going on this manhood test and it’s where we’re reintroduced to the infected and get to see, through the 12-year-old’s eyes, how the virus has mutated over the years. Basically, we now have two zombie flavors (and they’re all bare-assed naked). There are the fast zombies, who hunt in packs and are led by an “alpha”. Then there are the big, round, “low and slow” variety, who crawl around on the ground and forage on bugs and worms. When we first meet this bottom feeder variety, we’re also met with the implication that the infected are breeding.

All of this is fairly compelling and it’s doing what good sequels to horror and monster movies should do, which is finding ways to keep your creatures interesting. World building is great, but if you don’t show a curiosity towards your monsters, then it all ends up being repetitive. This was the problem with 28 Weeks Later, as well as the Quiet Place franchise, which over the course of two sequels has come across as being actively disinterested in its monsters. If there’s one thing 28 Years Later gets right, it’s that it keeps coming up with opportunities to add unexpected new wrinkles to the antagonistic world they created.

Boyle and Garland were famously unsure about how to end the first movie. They shot multiple endings and decided to go with the one that suggested that the zombies would die of starvation after a couple weeks of not having humans to chow down on. The first sequel stuck with this idea, even though it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The new movie corrects this mistake and realizes that the infected could even sustain themselves on worms and insects, if not the same kind of wild game that the uninfected survived off once upon a time. This wisely takes advantage of what makes the 28 zombies unique. These ones didn’t come back from the dead. They’re just human beings with a “rage virus”, and there’s no reason why they wouldn’t continue to have some basic survival instincts.

You could say that the second half is full of even more unexpected additions to the 28 lore, but some of the big swings it starts taking just didn’t connect. I’ll tread lightly here in order to keep things spoiler free, but the second half starts when Spike learns that a mysterious Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) lives on the mainland, his location recognizable by a fire that he keeps burning. Spike takes his mom and sneaks away from the village in the hopes that Kelson can help cure her illness. Along the way they meet a bewildered Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) who basically fell off a boat, and learn a thing or two about the outside world as well as some more reproductive quirks among the infected.

The character of Dr. Kelson is highly implausible but also – since he’s played by the overqualified Fiennes – kind of undeniable. He functions as a sort of beacon of humanity in this nightmarish world, but this character also brings us to a point where the entire movie suddenly runs out of steam. As good as Fiennes is – or maybe because of how good he is – it becomes apparent that this movie is lacking in some crucial acting areas. The second half asks a lot from the young Alfie Wilson, who can’t rise to meet the challenge. I take no pleasure in criticizing kid actors, but I never really believed his character and couldn’t help but feel let down and disinterested right when the movie is supposed to be peaking. I’ve also never been on board with Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Even in good movies, like Nosferatu, he’s often my least favorite part. And while I usually enjoy the work of Jodie Comer, her character is hampered with a very writerly affliction – the kind of illness that flares up and subsides whenever it’s convenient to the story.

But the biggest problem is that this barely qualifies as a movie to begin with. During the Dr. Kelson business, you may start to wonder, where is this all going? And then, soon after, you realize, that rather than being a movie in the traditional sense – with a beginning, middle and end – this is a long episode in a new series that you didn’t know you were tuning into. It’s particularly egregious because the film begins with a prologue introducing us to a character that doesn’t reappear until the final minute or two when we’re treated to an obnoxious, tonally bizarre cliffhanger that managed to almost fully erase the sizable amount of goodwill that had been built up over the previous 110 minutes.

Granted, the fact that this is all set-up and no payoff may not bother people who were raised on franchise filmmaking and enjoy the buzz of a wild, out-of-nowhere cliffhanger. Even though I went in being fully aware that this was the first of three new 28 movies, I instinctively feel cheated whenever a movie fails to tell a complete story. In fact, I don’t recall the last time I left a movie feeling so angry over the last few minutes of a movie. But I guess even zombie movies qualify for a serialized, Lord of the Rings-style treatment these days.