This article contains minor spoilers for “28 Years Later.”
Excitement has been building for Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later,” in theaters June 20. Sure, the trailer, which uses a 1915 reading of a Rudyard Kipling poem to striking effect, is uncommonly exciting. And it’s been a while since we’ve seen actually scary zombies on a big screen. But for many viewers, the anticipation is further compounded by the history behind “28 Years Later.”
The release is a new chapter in a franchise that began in 2003 with Boyle’s “28 Days Later,” now widely credited as creating a zombie revival, so to speak. Shot on a relatively tight budget, that film imagined a Britain taken over by ferocious, flesh-eating hordes. Some of the building blocks are familiar by now: Survivors band into small, often mismatched groups; scavenging expeditions loot empty stores; everybody runs from relentless pursuers of the fast-moving variety at one point or another. But “28 Days Later” still feels radical, thanks to Boyle’s inspired direction. The movie interspersed quickly edited close-ups of violence into much longer moody, melancholy scenes whose haunting power has not faded, and was often driven by the superb soundtrack. Tellingly, the composer John Murphy’s spooky instrumental “In the House — In a Heartbeat” has been reused (including in a Louis Vuitton ad) and recycled (including by Murphy himself in “Kick-Ass”) many times since.
Now Boyle has reunited with the “28 Days Later” screenwriter, Alex Garland, for what Garland has described as a trilogy. (The two men were executive producers on a first sequel, “28 Weeks Later,” that was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and released in 2007.)
In a video interview, Garland said that while “28 Years Later” is a stand-alone film, a second has also been made, directed by Nia DaCosta. He explained that these two installments are narratively connected and were shot back to back. (DaCosta’s “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” is expected in January.) As for the third feature, Garland said, “the story is written. The script is not written.”
Now that we are back in the “28” world, here’s what to know about the premise, the new film’s universe and what you might expect.
Wait, are we even talking about zombies?
Technically speaking, the franchise does not feature zombies but people who have been infected with a “rage virus.” It leaked from a lab in the opening scenes of “28 Days Later” and spread at lightning speed — infection is easy and almost instantaneous. “The genre they belong to is zombie movie, and I personally have no feeling of offense when they’re called zombies,” Garland said of the red-eyed antagonists. “But they’re also not, because zombies were an idea that was supernatural: They were dead people who’d been reanimated,” he added. “And these are not dead people — they are sick people. Nia’s film has more of a preoccupation with that aspect, which Danny’s film alludes to at a certain moment as well.”
Is Cillian Murphy back?
Murphy — whose career took off when he played Jim, a London courier who makes his way to the remote countryside in the north, in the first film — had been rumored to be a part of “28 Years Later,” but his involvement is limited to an executive-producer credit. Boyle has said that the actor will feature in “The Bone Temple” and the third part of the new trilogy.
Can I watch “28 Years Later” if I haven’t seen the previous movies?
Yes, though familiarity with the basic premise helps, most notably the fact that we are dealing with live people who may have been dramatically transformed but still possess, in some cases, personality traits as well as biological functions that have an impact on the story. Another central element is that Britain is cut off from the rest of the world to contain the virus.
So the epidemic hasn’t gone global then?
In “28 Weeks Later,” an international force tried to circumscribe rage to Britain, but that film’s ending suggested it had spread to Paris. Actually, never mind: “I just ignored that because personally I was more interested in the idea that Britain had been quarantined,” Garland said. His working assumption is that authorities nuked the French capital to prevent the infection from taking over the continent.
What is the new movie about?
“It could be reasonably called a version of a coming-of-age story — just a very strange coming of age,” Garland said. The main character is 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), who lives with his parents (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jodie Comer) on an isolated island linked to the mainland by a narrow causeway that becomes submerged during high tide. The place is real, by the way: It’s called the Holy Island of Lindisfarne (simply Holy Island in the movie), and lies on the English northeastern coast, near the border with Scotland. “I actually ended up writing a whole chunk of the script staying in an Airbnb on that island and walking around it,” Garland said.
How’s isolation working out for Britain?
Not great, at least based on Holy Island, where the survivors have regressed to a pre-technological stage — bows and arrows are a weapon of choice. Garland explained that, for the most part, the idea was to revert to the world that existed in the mid-20th century, before the social changes of the 1960s and ‘70s. Some of the questions he and Boyle discussed were how much can be lost, and what would be misremembered. “One of the things the film is interested in is the nature of amnesia,” Garland said.
What is there to look forward to?
Not everything has gone back: Evolution has been working its magic and mutations have emerged. Some of the film’s creepiest scenes involve the “slow-lows,” thus named because these overweight creatures crawl and don’t move fast.
What the heck is going on with Ralph Fiennes?
One of the new film’s most memorable characters is Dr. Ian Kelson, played by Ralph Fiennes. Garland wholeheartedly agreed when I brought up Colonel Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now.” But don’t draw hasty conclusions from that analogy — “28 Years Later” delights on confounding expectations.
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