More Greek Tragedy than Horror
My quick review and personal opinions on 28 Years Later. Spoiler alert.
I was 12 years old when Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later was released in cinemas. Then I was 17 when the sequel, 28 Weeks Later, came out. Now, I am 35 when 28 Years Later hit the screens.
Earlier this year, right before the third installment of the film was released, I made my husband watch the first two movies with me once I caught wind that they were making 28 Days Later available to rent digitally. For a long time, people were hunting down physical copies of the first movie since you couldn’t find it on any streaming platform.
If you’ve never seen the first film, this is the movie that popularized the “fast zombies” trope. The Rage Virus was unwittingly released to the rest of the world by animal rights activists who were set to rescue infected lab chimps. Chaos ensues. It barely takes a few seconds to turn a person into the undead, either through the traditional bite or a drop of infected blood in the orifices.
We get introduced to Cillian Murphy’s Jim, who wakes up from a coma after an accident and discovers that the world he knows is now full of undead cannibals and desperate humans trying to survive. While the core of the film is survival amidst the horrific reality, there are more tender human moments as Jim gets to know his fellow survivors—Selena, Hannah, and Frank—while in search of a broadcasted haven. Part of the film lingers in these relationships that make you truly care about these characters. But of course, those moments don’t last, and Jim learns that there are far more terrible things out there than zombies.
28 Weeks Later was more so a conventional zombie film. Danny Boyle chose to focus on his movie Sunshine and hired Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto, Damsel) to direct the sequel. It featured an all-new (star-studded) cast and a storyline that followed a sister-brother duo returning to the UK and reuniting with their father after the government established a safe zone. The second film expanded the worldbuilding by showing us how the world dealt with the virus, and the discovery of how some people could be immune to it.
The safe zone obviously did not remain safe. The sequel did not have the more tender moments of the first film, nor did it have the nuance that there are other monsters out there than just the undead. Here, the zombies are truly the bad guys, and the military needs to nuke the place no matter what to contain the infection. 28 Weeks Later had the edge-of-your-seat action and the desperation of the survivors to get out of the city fast before they get blasted off.
I do have to say that the first two films truly belonged in the horror movie genre, but I can’t say the same for the third one, 28 Years Later.
Not that that’s a bad thing, but this movie sort of genre-hopped. In this world, we pick up almost three decades later where the rest of the world has moved on, while ensuring that nothing dead or alive gets out of the UK. The survivors inside the country are either reduced back into their old way of English peasantry living, or form Alex DeLarge-like gangs in colorful tracksuits and matted blonde wigs à la Jimmy Saville to survive.
The zombies have been classified into two types: the slow ones (large, sluggish creatures that crawl on all fours, feasting on worms) or the fast ones (almost caveman-like, intelligent, with a social hierarchy of sorts, including a recognizable alpha and its mate).
We follow Spike, a twelve-year-old on the cusp of being a man in a society where rites of passage like killing your first zombie with a bow and arrow were celebrated more than your need to stay in school. He resides in a small island town that conventionally has a causeway protected by the rising of the tides to keep the undead on the mainland away from their town.
While he looks up to his father, who wants to teach him how to survive at the cost of shedding his innocence early, his attachment is more to his mother, who is doting, protective, and recognizes that Spike is still a child when she is not under her bouts of confusion and severe headaches.
A trip to the mainland for his rite of passage wakes Spike up to the reality that the world is bigger than their tiny little island, more dangerous, and unravels the conventional lies his father has been telling him. When he becomes disillusioned with his father and learns that there is a doctor from the old days residing on the mainland, he sets out on an Odyssean journey to help his mother get better.
Danny Boyle is back directing the third film, but his filming style felt new and a departure from the first film. Yes, there have been about 23 years between this film and the first one, so of course, his style would understandably change.
Some scenes were superimposed with old, black-and-white clips of medieval and World War 1 films to juxtapose the past with the present, a storytelling device that I believed worked well but also confused other moviegoers. Some of the camera work felt like graphic novel panels, especially during the shots where the arrows protrude through the zombie heads. Some sequences felt dreamlike, with one of the best scenes being the chase over the land bridge. Even when something horrific was running after the protagonists, you can’t help but want to stay still, wondering at the starry night and the almost bioluminescent waters.
When Spike and his mother’s journey begins in the second act, it feels like a Grecian epic tragedy where they encounter the wise man, the fool, and the monster, how they provide Spike more context of the past, present (outside world) and potential future, before Spike truly understands that his journey with his mother was all for naught by the third act.
By the end, he has finally come to terms with the reality of the world he’s living in, and because of this, he cannot go back to the safety of his little island town. He can only move forward, away from the coast and deeper into the underworld. Spike’s journey continues. The movie ends in a cliffhanger, which sets us up for another film in this universe, confirmed by news of Cillian Murphy’s reprisal of his previous role for the next installment.
I felt thrills in 28 Years Later, but was less scared. It could be that I’m already desensitized to horror (which is not true–I’m a scaredy cat who loves horror), or that being scared wasn’t the point of the film. I did want to watch to be scared, but mostly, I came to watch because I was invested in the world within the film franchise. I wanted to know what became of this alternate universe 28 years after the second outbreak.
Maybe that was the point. The horror in the world of 28 Years Later became a part of the survivors’ way of life, so that it wasn’t truly horror anymore. It was just that–life.
I can compare this movie less with its predecessors but more to films like Life of Pi and The Green Knight.
Either way, it was a good film and a decent addition to the franchise. Danny Boyle wanted to expand this world, and he successfully did so. Except this time, he used paint instead of ink.