If there’s one thing to be said about Danny Boyle, it’s that he’s had a pretty eclectic career—earlier on he scared people away from Edinburgh with Trainspotting, and he’d certainly succeed at making London look creepy in the precursor to today’s subject. But beyond that he’s had success with Slumdog Millionaire and Steve Jobs, which for a time seemed to make people almost forget that he made quite an impact on the horror genre with 28 Days Later back in 2002.
As with a lot of things, imitation can make something lose its old impact—but the first film still holds up for the most part, between characters you actually cared about and its innovation of living dead who could actually move faster than a constipated shuffle. Since then others from Zack Sander to World War Z would also do the ‘fast moving zombie schtick’, but the competent characterization part proved more optional. The sequel 28 Months Later had some enjoyability, even if plot holes began to pile up from the get-go—still, since then, we have indeed had enough time to make the title of Boyle’s return to filmmaking in general after hiatus nearly work in reality too.
Surprise surprise, it’s 28 years since Britain was devastated by the Rage virus in 2002, and since then the island has been reduced to scattered settlements eking out Neo-medieval lifestyles beyond the ruins of a former superpower, quarantined and isolated—there are potentially many Brexit jokes to make here, but I shall resist temptation. Our focus is on a family living in a survivor community on Lindisfarme island, with a somewhat morally ambiguous father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) readying his son Spike (Alfie Williams) to begin learning how to survive in this post-apocalyptic realm—and between this is the mysteriously ill mother Isla (Jodie Comer) who ends up being more important to things than you may initially think.
For the most part, the same sense of desolation and abandoned landscapes that Boyle pulled off in the first film is still here—we swap London for countryside where anything can lurk behind any tree, and where the ruins of the old world have been swallowed up into vegetation. Where 28 Days sometimes leant into a somewhat surreal atmosphere, here we go full throttle as we mix in demented collages of archival footage and more—fits for a world that left sanity decades ago, right? Almost like our own.
Alfie Williams is pretty darn solid for an actor of his age, and ironically I guess proves one of the most level characters as we go from our island colony clinging onto the old to the demented survivors in the new. This one’s much less of a horror or a thriller as previous ones may have been than it is a coming of age story that just happens to involve rage-fuelled undead, and generally the performances and presentation are done fine enough.
That leaves the film seemingly about to end on a satisfying enough note, talking about themes of new generations having to eke out their own path and rise above the previous one…aaaaand thennnnn, in the last sixty seconds, it suddenly snorts a whole yacht of yeyo, leaving myself and the others who watched it going into the credits feeling...somewhat bewildered. Turns out that there’s another sequel filmed back to back on the way, which I’m not sure how to feel about that—let’s just say that there’s a line between the suitably surreal and hopped-up coke rushes.
Other than that, between the five thousand seasons of The Walking Dead and the recent Last of Us show stumbling about, we have—for the most part—a return of the director and title that did very arguably profoundly impact most of such titles of not-zombies and survivor strife for most of the last 25 years. We’ll see if Boyle can keep it up, but there’s at least enough different here to make this particular long-distance sequel at least interesting…
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