“Don’t, let, your, eyes, drop they will get atop of you,” a line contained within Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 poem, “Boots,” which was intelligently chosen as a linchpin for “28 Years Later.” The original poem (given life by the 1915 recital of American actor Taylor Holmes) chronicled the monotonous and hellacious march soldiers endured on the battlefield, paired with the mental trauma of returning home. Danny Boyle’s film, which comes 17 years after “28 Weeks Later,” is being released in a world emerging from the shadow of its own pandemic height.
While we are still figuring out the ramifications of isolation and how it has impacted our social contract, some places within the realm of the “28 Weeks” world have moved on from the Rage Virus. Great Britain is locked in time; surrendered to a permanent quarantine where the infected roam, regressing into a caveman-like state, all the while specifically evolving terrifyingly. It’s a film that initially reveals its hand with mania, but settles into a nihilistic tone about death in all its forms. The ravenous snarls of humans turned into relentless, bloodshot eyed animals.
Boyle and writer Alex Garland hone the story into one particular set of survivors who have found a safe zone on an island off the northeast coast of England. It’s a throwback as the community harkens to the days of old-age 1800s colonialism. The one general store has sparse things and cautions people to “take things if they absolutely need them.” Villagers hunt for food and cultivate crops on their farms. There’s no heavy ammunition, so everyone relies on crafting their own arrows. Some of the townspeople take turns standing guard above a heavy door to be a lookout. However, nobody dares go to the mainland unless it’s a rite of passage to learn how to kill the infected. One long causeway at low tide is all that separates people from one furious outbreak.
The opening scene of “28 Years Later” shows a group of children cautiously watching the Teletubbies, only to be interrupted by the horrors banging right outside their bedroom door, alluding to the secluded world we witness in this film. The lives of the people on this island are rooted in simplicity; they know survival as the consistent pillar, shielded from a world that has broken away from it.
Boyle is interested in zeroing in on a particular family. Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has decided his 12-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams), is ready to experience what the untouched mainland has to offer. Isla (Jodie Comer), Jamie’s mother, is resigned to her bed as some illness has taken over her body. She loves her son very dearly, but the combination of the pain in her body and hallucinations in her mind has stopped the chance at an everyday life for Isla.
At first, the film serves as a reintroduction to Boyle’s world, which is both hauntingly beautiful and terrifying. Given that most of the citizens of Britain are either dead, infected, or evacuated, nature has taken over. Thus, Jamie and Spike watch through massive landscapes where foliage has swallowed buildings and streets whole. It feels right up until the point where you realize the (relatively naked) infected are also roaming free. As a growing-up ritual, Jamie wants to ensure Spike can hold his own. Anthony Dod Mantle primarily maintains the intimate, up-close feel of 2002’s “28 Days Later” by shooting the film with iPhone 15 Maxes (of course, with attachments).
This is particularly noticeable during the fighting sequences, where arrows pierce some of the infected in a 360-degree turn. Chase sequences feel unclean and claustrophobic as they shift between different points of view, humans and their feral counterparts. It’s a welcome return to a hallmark which made the first two films in the franchise stand out from their outbreak, zombie-adjacent counterparts.
“28 Days Later” / Photo Credit: Sony Pictures
When you think “28 Years Later” is going to be about the push and tightrope-like pull of frozen civilization, Boyle and Garland flip the film to a different type of journey. It takes a bit to get there, as the plot stops at a slight detour to set up some familiar strife. Despite that, Boyle’s cuts to black-and-white clips of Laurence Olivier’s film of “Henry V” come into focus. Spike hears a myth of a surviving doctor living on the mainland (played by a meditative Ralph Fiennes). It might be the only way to save Isla, or at least nail down what’s wrong with her. In harnessing the little he’s learned from Jamie, he sets out to find the doctor with his mother in the condition she’s in.
It’s where “28 Years Later” centers in its narrative power as Comer and Williams are equally terrific, portraying their characters. Isla is fragile, but protective and loving in the moments she can be present. Spike has bitten off more than he can chew, but won’t stop at anything to help the person he sees suffering. Once they come together with Fiennes’s Dr. Ian Kelson, the film almost becomes a living wake to mourn all of those who died in the previous installments.
Boyle and Garland prompt us to confront the uncomfortable nature of morality, as well as the implications of world events, which can place us in unexpected situations. The infected are people overtaken by a virus that has reduced them to the bare necessities of feeling. In turn, those who inhabit the island have had to start over, left to fend for themselves. “28 Years Later” includes some humor in the form of a Swedish NATO soldier named Erik (Edvin Ryding), who looks at Spike and Isla like aliens when he realizes they have not “gotten back to normal.” There’s a loss of innocence inside Spike, where all he’s known is to be militant. That and the (almost) final note of the film make it clear there are some things just as heartbreaking as being attacked by a pack of crazed infected.
This is all to note: “28 Days Later” plays like the first installment of a new trilogy (because it is). There’s a big hanging revelation I won’t spoil and a bonkers tonal shift at the film’s conclusion. While new foes show themselves like a menacing, relentless devil over a shoulder, the gravestones of a life once lived are equally as harrowing. In dipping back into the universe he began, Boyle proves that the Scythe of the Grim Reaper stings in losing the ways we lived, too.
