After more than two decades of dipping in and out of genres that have taken him from the Milky Way to Mumbai, Danny Boyle has returned to the juicily gruesome world of consuming violence, human and otherwise, with “28 Years Later.” Once again, flesh-eating creatures are wandering, crawling and, most worryingly, running amok, ravaging every conceivable living being. Humanity remains on the run with some souls safely barricaded in isolation. It’s a sensible precaution that — along with all the gnawed bodies, shredded nerves and broken relationships — makes this futuristic freakout seem as plausible as it is familiar.
Pitched between sputtering hope and despairing resignation, the movie is a classic boys-into-men coming-of-age story updated for the postapocalypse and future installments. On a lushly green British island, a ragtag collection of adults and children are doing their best to keep the tattered remains of civilization intact. Inside a protected hamlet, they live and congregate much as their peasant forbears might have centuries earlier. They share precious resources; nuzzle sexily in the dark. There are threats and some provocative mysteries, like the figure who appears in a ghoulish mask that’s suggestive of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
This is the third addition to a cycle that opened with “28 Days Later” (2002), a violent parable also directed by Boyle in which humanity is stricken into near-oblivion. (The 2007 follow-up, “28 Weeks Later,” was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.) The 2002 movie opens in Britain with animal-rights activists set on freeing some lab chimps. Even after an on-site scientist helpfully explains that the animals are infected with rage, the activists keep blundering toward doom. As they restrain the scientist, he shouts, “You’ve no idea—” just before a chimp chows down on a would-be liberator in a flurry of blood-red imagery.
Like the new movie, “28 Days Later” was written by Alex Garland and draws on different influences, most obviously zombie movies. (Boyle directed the screen adaptation of Garland’s novel “The Beach”; they also collaborated on “Sunshine,” a very different dystopian fantasy.) In interviews, Boyle readily discussed the inspirations for “28 Days Later,” realistic and otherwise, citing the Ebola virus as well as “The Omega Man” (1971), a thriller set in the wake of germ warfare. Even so, he pushed back against genre-pigeonholing “28 Days Later.” “See, it’s not a film about monsters — it’s a film about us,” he told Time Out. That our monsters are always us is as obvious as the all-too-human face of Frankenstein’s creature.
Whether zombies or not, the infected in “28 Days Later” kill indiscriminately, much like the undead that George A. Romero first sicced on us in 1968 with “Night of the Living Dead.” One striking, nerve-thwacking difference between these generations of insatiable ghouls is their pacing. Along with Zack Snyder in his zippy 2004 remake of Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” Boyle popularized the now-familiar fast zombie. Romero’s tend to stagger and lurch with their arms raised like scarily ravenous toddlers, moving slowly enough for some of their swifter would-be victims to escape, though not always. Quickening the pace of the creatures added genre novelty, and it expressed the real world’s ever accelerating rhythms.
The pace complemented Boyle’s filmmaking, which tends toward speed. That’s very much in evidence in “28 Years Later,” which opens with some pro forma background about the state of the world (it’s still bad) and a freaky episode in a house that echoes the opener in the previous movie. The scene here begins with a group of obviously terrified children shut up in a room watching “Teletubbies” on a TV. It’s an unsettling scene that grows all the more disturbing as noises from outside the room grow progressively louder. As the thumps and panicked voices rise, increasing and then converging, the editing rapidly goes into overdrive and grows choppy, finally becoming a grim churn of tots, Teletubbies and flesh-eaters.
It’s a shock of an opener that announces this isn’t for the faint of heart and introduces Boyle’s expressionistic approach. Partly shot with iPhones, the new movie sometimes has a degraded visual quality that dovetails with the more helter-skelter violence and abrades the realism of even the quieter passages. There is, you intuit, something off even on the island, where the 12-year-old Spike (the very good Alfie Williams) lives with his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), and father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). They seem like good, kind parents (both roles are smartly cast), but Isla suffers from enigmatic episodes that send her into hallucination-ridden fugue states. During her episodes, she can seem as wholly possessed as the undead.
Divided into two complementary sections, the story follows Spike through twinned journeys onto the mainland, the first during a hunt for ghouls with his father. With Jamie, Spike leaves the island on a causeway that connects it to the mainland during low tide. It’s a questionable initiation rite, but this interlude shrewdly works your nerves, as does Jamie and Spike’s lack of better weapons. The islanders rely on handcrafted arrows, presumably because no one grabbed a hunting rifle before hunkering down. They seem committed to the heroic romance of their own struggle, as Boyle suggests by inserting snippets from Kipling’s poem “Boots” as well as images of marching boys and clips from Laurence Olivier’s film of “Henry V.”
These nods at a past that’s by turns historic and romantically mythic, feed an undercurrent of tension that Boyle builds on, one kill at a time. By the time Spike and Isla have set off on their own adventure, their world has been repeatedly washed in blood. Their time on the mainland brings both brutal and pacific shocks, and death upon death. A giant called Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) rises like a messenger from the future, while Ralph Fiennes shows up like the ghost of Earth’s past. For his part, Spike faces manhood caught between dualities — between innocence and guile, benevolence and sadism, a violent bequest and a possible alternative — as he looks toward the uncertain horizon … and at least one already shot sequel.
28 Years Later
Rated R for extreme violence, human and otherwise. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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