Director: Danny Boyle Starring: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell Running Time: 115 minutes
There are few more defining images of popular cinema in the new millennium than that of Cillian Murphy’s Jim, freshly out of a month-long coma, wandering the vacant streets of a London ravaged by disaster as the morning dawns at the outset of Danny Boyle’s genre-shattering zombie film 28 Days Later. While Jim slept, the world changed. Many upon the film’s 2002 release saw this scene and immediately drew comparisons to the aftermath of the previous year’s 9/11 attacks, the empty spaces in a bustling metropolis and walls lined with missing person posters were eerily similar to the reality in New York. In actuality, the scene had been filmed in the summer of 2001, and the film had all of this social importance projected onto it in ways that I don’t think the film quite sustains (particularly its woefully hard-headed third act, which veers into cheap shock value threats of sexual violence). The thing about the world changing though, is that it tends to stay changed.
Only 23 years later, here we are with 28 Years Later. Despite this fact being avoided in the film’s promotion, it’s the first of an intended new trilogy of films penned by returning screenwriter Alex Garland. Garland’s been having his own relative success as a director despite, if you ask this writer, the extremely poor quality of his last two directorial efforts Civil War and Men; clumsy, unsubtle allegories for our present climate of division and hostility. Upon the announcement of the film, and then two further films, it was easy to be cynical. Danny Boyle hasn’t directed a feature film since 2019’s woeful Richard Curtis-penned romcom Yesterday, which does now feel like an innocent reminder of a time when we thought it would be ridiculous to make even one Beatles biopic.The film also released following Boyle’s public breakup from the James Bond film that would eventually go on to become No Time To Die, so it’s been unfortunate to see him stuck in the television mines on Disney funded punk bio-series. It was, after all this, easy to see a return to the well from the pair, who abstained from involvement in 2007’s mixed bag sequel 28 Weeks Later, as a cynical last ditch attempt to get something, anything made for Boyle. I am delighted to say I find the final film as far as can be from that reality.
It should come as no surprise really, the film acts as a wonderful compliment to Boyle’s last great film, 2017’s T2 Trainspotting, a similarly cynical-seeming exercise in getting the band back together with Ewan McGregor and John Hodge which resulted in a gorgeous, elegiac film about aging and remembering your listless youth, framed in the sumptuous, uncanny colours of Anthony Dod Mantle’s digital cinematography. In contrast, 28 Years is a film about upbringing, and what that looks like in a world that’s narrowing rather than expanding.
We follow Spike, a 12 year old boy wonderfully played by Alfie Williams, who lives on a small, well-guarded island off the British coast, connected to the land by a small causeway that’s obscured in high tide. In an evocation that hardly feels as coincidental as the original film’s look at the fear of the other at the outset of the war on terror, this island’s perfect village of Little England-ism and constant mentions of the perils of “the mainland” are impossible not to read as commentary on the climate post-Brexit, and an exercise in seeing the isolationism present in that mindset taken to its most advanced conclusion.
The village not only fears the infected, it fears the other survivors on the mainland, it fears the people they knew before society fell, its gates are watched 24/7 to keep out anyone unfamiliar and to keep anyone without what they see as good reason to be away inside. It makes fraudulent myths of anyone who steps outside and lives to return. It feels really conscious of the original film’s place being seen as this definitional work about the first years of the new millennium and draws something that was, to me, intensely meaningful from it.
Alex Garland’s last solo directorial effort Civil War tried to tell a tangentially similar story of modern division stateside but its world and characters felt so much more poorly defined, cartoon caricatures of American division from an English writer. Here, being able to use the previous two 28 films as a basis, and perhaps with more of an ease in Garland’s pen in commenting on his home country, it can zero in on what it feels like to have only known a world of this anger and polarisation and decline. Can the millennium babies who’ve been raised in all of this muck and hatred ever hope to provide a better future for another generation? Are we doomed to retreat into idealised symbols of what came before us, the things that we half-recall from childhood innocence? These are dark, dismal questions I’ve prompted, but this ultimately is a far kinder and hopeful film than the edgy shocks of 28 Days Later.
The film builds a remarkable heart around the tender relationship between Spike and his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer, in typically superlative form here) flipping the now (in this writer’s opinion, at least) played out The Last Of Us-style Gruff Father And Daughter He Must Protect story (that show itself a major inheritor of the 28 Days Later lineage) to a son and mother, which really should not feel as revelatory of a twist for the genre as it does.
The film’s action is primarily built around two excursions to the mainland, first with Spike’s father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) before Spike goes out on his own with the ailing Isla to find a doctor to treat her, these sequences are, of course shot within an inch of their life by Boyle’s stalwart collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle. The film’s much discussed iPhone photography is a perfect modernisation of the impressionist miniDV thrills of the first film, there’s a voyeuristic quality to many of the film’s images, which always leave you on edge wondering if you’re seeing things from the perspective of a potential threat, especially in any of the film’s wide open natural spaces. Much like miniDV at the turn of the millennium, it recognises the iPhone as a sort of lingua franca for the moving image in this day and age, its ubiquity in our everyday life, recording everyday life, it lets you readily accept what you’re seeing on screen as something more real than most other films of this production level, despite the uncanniness of the colours the sensors process and the lenses used on top of the standard iPhone lens, as well as a couple of showy Matrix-style bullet time shots that accentuate the film’s kinetic stylings.
I felt delighted to be proved wrong by 28 Years Later, a triumphant return for Danny Boyle to the director’s chair and a return to form (perhaps exceeding my opinion of any of his previous work even) for Alex Garland as a screenwriter, it’s refreshing to see a sequel as justified as this, using its basis to explore real ideas about our world rather than simply re-upping corporate ownership or stewing in metatextuality, though I do wonder if this form can be maintained in Nia DaCosta’s The Bone Temple, the sequel set for release in January next year. For now, I can’t see anyone being too unsatisfied with 28 Years Later as it stands.
(5 / 5)