Not as you might think the time between Brooklyn Beckham answering a question he’s been asked on Mastermind but a belated third film from Danny Boyle’s ‘28’ trilogy which in itself is the start of a new trilogy (the next film is out in summer 2026). And here the rage virus that has turned the majority of the UK population into zombies has seen the UK quarantined from Europe (something of a comment on Brexit surely ) and how we got there is graphically seen in the opening scene as a group of young children watch Teletubbies, setting the era when this all began back in 2002, when the zombies or ‘the infected’ as they’re called here break into the house and blood spattered carnage ensues. It sets the often gory tone for what is to come. Amongst those children is Jimmy who we catch up on 28 Years Later and now a father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to 12 year old Spike (Alfie Williams) and wife to Isla (Jodie Comer) who is bedbound with an unspecified illness and serious mental decline that sees her hurling vitriolic C- bomb littered abuse akin to that moment when a courtier tells King Charles that Harry’s on the phone for him.
They are living on Holy island as part of community that with the disintegration of society live without electricity, the internet and Babe Station. They also are without modern weaponry and are reduced to defending themselves from the infected with bows and arrows and it’s these that Jimmy and his son use when he takes him to the mainland as a rites of passage to make his first kill of an infected. It’s a well constructed unnerving series of scenes with a real sense of danger. But Spike will soon find that dad isn’t the man he thought he was and the boy takes it upon himself to take his ailing mother back to the mainland where he knows there’s a Dr (a stripped to the waist Ralph Fiennes heavily tinged in reddish hue looking like the most catastrophic shaving accident ever) who can hopefully help his mother with whatever illness she is suffering from.
Written again by Alex Garland it’s a script with a packed two hours with ideas and great and often gruesome moments (there’s also an emotional scene later in the film that had the person sat with me in tears) as well as a couple of funny lines, the best of which involves the photo of a Swedish soldier’s girlfriend. And the story has expanded and developed the infected into three types – infected crawlers like bloated bags of offal, the standard infected humans able to run after you and most worrying of all a kind of super infected that’s both far more intelligent, far stronger ( it rips off heads with spines attached a la Predator style) and are far harder to kill.
Boyle continues to experiment with his film making having shot the film on an iphone and an experimental aesthetic in the first act that sees him crosscutting between the fight against the infected and archive footage of what looks like Henry V and his archers at the Battle of Agincourt. It all works well although the very end scene is likely to divide audiences with it’s set up for the next film. But the law of diminishing returns with franchises usually has a third film drop off dramatically in quality but this is superior to ‘28 Weeks Later’ that will appeal to both horror hounds and Boyle loyalists.
related feature : When Danny Boyle was offered Alien 4……
related feature : Getting scalped by a helicopter in ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (1978) – Jim Krut talks about the film and George Romero
Here’s Danny Boyle introducing the film at the premiere……..
Here’s the 28 Days later trailer…….
