Director – Danny Boyle, Screenplay – Alex Garland, Producers – Bernard Bellew, Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, Andrew MacDonald & Peter Rice, Photography – Anthony Dod Mantle, Music – Young Fathers, Visual Effects Supervisor – Adam Gascoyne, Visual Effects – Union Visual Effects, Special Effects Supervisor – Sam Conway, Makeup Effects Creative Supervisor – John Nolan, Makeup Effects – John Nolan Studio, Production Design – Carson McColl & Gareth Pugh. Production Company – DNA Films/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
Alfie Williams (Spike), Jodie Comer (Isla), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Jamie), Ralph Fiennes (Dr Kelson), Edvin Ryding (Erik), Christopher Fulford (Sam), Stella Gonet (Jenny), Jack O’Connell (Sir Jimmy Crystal), Rocco Haynes (Young Jimmy), Sandy Batchelor (Jimmy’s Father), Haley Flaherty (Jimmy’s Aunty)
Plot
It is the 28 years after the Rage Virus has been released and the UK has been quarantined from the rest of the world. Twelve-year-old Spike has grown up in a community in Scotland that lives on an island separated from the mainland by a causeway that is accessible only when the tide is out. Spike’s mother Isla is ill and wandering in mind. Spike’s father Jamie decides that Spike is old enough to take on a scavenging expedition to the mainland. However, they are forced to flee the infected and spend the night in the wild. Spike becomes curious after seeing a fire in the distance. Upon his return, his grandfather tells him it is Dr Kelson, who is regarded as strange. Deciding his father is a liar, Spike creates a diversion and takes his mother across to the mainland to get help from Dr Kelson.
28 Days Later (2002), made by director Danny Boyle and with a script by Alex Garland, was the film that started off the modern zombie film revival. It was followed by hundreds of low-budget copies, which then became parodies and gonzo mash-ups – see Zombie Films. Boyle and Garland oversaw a sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), which I will argue was a much superior work to the first film.
28 Years Later … comes to us only a few years short of what its title promises us (twenty-three years since the first film came out). Apparently, the length of time between sequels was due to the copyright being held by different parties. Danny Boyle, who dropped out from the second film, is back in the director’s chair, while Alex Garland again writes the script. The gap between original and follow-up is sufficient for Alex Garland to have gone from the guy who wrote The Beach (2000) to a major director in his own right with films like Ex Machina (2015), Annihilation (2018), Men (2022) and Civil War (2024). (See below for credits from both Danny Boyle and Alex Garland).
Danny Boyle was on an unbeatable stretch that lasted from his second film Trainspotting (1996) through The Beach, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire (2008), 127 Hours (2010) and Steve Jobs (2015). The latter half of the 2010s as he entered his sixties has seen somewhat of a slowdown. This period has seen T2 Trainspotting (2017) and the alternate history film Yesterday (2019), which felt very much Danny Boyle Lite, as well as the Sex Pistols mini-series Pistol (2022). While enjoyable, these were not greeted with the rapturous success that Boyle was receiving around the time of Slumdog Millionaire.
Spike (Alfie Williams) (r) and his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) (l) flee Rage-infected zombies
I actually liked 28 Years Later … more so than 28 Days Later. I felt the original was okay but a rehash of other films in the genre. Returning to the material here, it feels as though Danny Boyle and Alex Garland have made a much more original work and satisfying work. Now the film is far more an After the Holocaust work than the two previous films were with the twenty-eight years difference having led to total collapse and abandonment of society. Here the Rage infected are not so much an ever-present as an occasional threat. The perspective the story takes is that of the tried and true standard of the young boy venturing out into the wider world for the first time. Boyle (and his visual effects team) serve up some splendid vistas of a countryside gone back to the wild, abandoned rail tracks and rusted carriages, half-collapsed buildings.
Certainly, Boyle gives us plenty of zombie action, which is almost certainly why most people have come. Here Boyle and Garland shake the mix up a little. They borrow several ideas introduced in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021) of the zombies being led by an alpha and of zombies giving birth. One of the more interesting additions is what the film calls the slow-lows, obese zombies that slither along the ground. Boyle even gets in his own version of Bullet Time with a series of slow-motion shots as the zombies are hit by shot and hacked.
28 Years Later … is a little on the slow side where you compare it to the average zombie film, even zombie apocalypse film, or other post-apocalyptic works. The focus here goes more in the direction of the characters and young Alfie Williams’ relationship with both his father and mother. The surprise in the last quarter is a genteel and wisely performance from Ralph Fiennes – well, no particular surprise that it is Fiennes as he features in the publicity, more that he is build up as some deranged disturbed individual and then proves completely the opposite.
(l to r) Spike (Alfie Williams), his mother (Jodie Comer) with zombie baby and Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) amid the bone temple
I was puzzling over how the prologue featuring young Jimmy fitted into the film, although this becomes apparent at the end of the film. This does leave you with some confusions as the film has a story that works perfectly well without the Jimmy character. This however does appear to be laying groundwork for the further sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026).
Danny Boyle’s other genre films include:- A Life Less Ordinary (1997), a mix of abduction comedy and a fantasy film; the hard science sf film Sunshine (2007); the theatrically live broadcast stage adaptation of Frankenstein (2011); and the alternate history Yesterday (2019).
Alex Garland first emerged as a novelist in the 1990s, having a best-seller with The Beach (1996), which he adapted to the screen for Danny Boyle film with The Beach (2000). The two next collaborated on 28 Days Later and Sunshine. Garland turned out scripts for other works like Never Let Me Go (2010) and Dredd (2012). He made his directorial debut with the outstanding artificial intelligence film Ex Machina (2015). This was followed by the adaptation of Annihilation (2018), the extraordinary tv mini-series Devs (2020), the folk horror/gender politics film Men (2022) and the near future Civil War (2024).
