‘28 Years Later’ Review: Danny Boyle’s iPhone-Shot Zombie Sequel is Audacious, Disjointed, and Bewildering [B]

There was a solid 30- to 45-minute period during the first half of 28 Years Later when I was convinced I was watching one of my favorite movies of the year. Writer/director Danny Boyle and co-writer Alex Garland’s return to their landmark zombie franchise—which sparked a resurgence within the genre that endured throughout most of the aughts and 2010s—is made with the same type of gonzo vigor that once reflected the height of pop culture’s collective craze for the subgenre back onto an unwitting audience that may have forgotten just how unorthodox 28 Days Later really was. That means going back to the roots of everything that initially defined the series before 28 Weeks Later settled stylistically into a more approachable temper under a different director (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo): wacked-out camera setups on a second-rate camera; feverish chases with those infected by the Rage Virus; reflections on the human condition in a world torn apart by terror and brutality; and a lopsided script that gradually sputters out as the story chugs along.
That last point is what will stick in your craw about 28 Years Later. This 23-years-later legacy sequel from the originating team (Weeks was 18 years ago, but these films are so episodic that this may as well function as a direct sequel to the first) has a surplus of individual moments and images that surpass Days, but retains the same lackluster sense of pace and structure that leaves you deflated walking out of the theater. Its spirit is ambitious; its final form is haphazard.
This type of movie is what I’ve come to personally know as an Alex Garland Special: a film that squanders early goodwill with a vague instability as it tries to settle into itself later on. I admit that at this point, I carry a personal bias in that I’m intrinsically wary of any movie with Garland’s name attached to the screenplay. But 28 Years Later reinforces my perception of him as a writer with provocative ideas who nonetheless lacks the sense of congruence to have them cohere by the time the credits roll.
Boyle and Garland pick up with their contagion-ravaged world per the film’s title, nearly three decades after the Rage Virus escaped an experimental laboratory and laid waste to civilization within the UK. Now quarantined and cut off from whatever civilization remains past the borders of their island, survivors have formed something resembling a thriving society—especially in the small, bustling village where young Spike (newcomer Alfie Williams) lives with his rigorous father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and invalid mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who mostly dwells in bed amid bouts of confusion and anxiety.
The settlement seems to be making it work amid an everlasting doomsday, but Boyle and Garland—sharply realizing you’ve seen this setup in many a post-apocalyptic tale—aren’t overly concerned with the composition of the town so much as they are with the logistics of its geography. It’s a brief introduction of setting before Jamie is off with Spike on the lad’s first trip to the mainland, revealing that this isolated hamlet is situated on a small island off the coast of Scotland, connected only by a long causeway that can be crossed at low tide. Once you’re inland, you’re stuck there with the monsters, and who knows what else, until the bridge reveals itself again.
It’s an accessible foundation that allows the audience to get ahead of where the plot is going: clearly, the adventures to be had are all across this natural artery, and the drama lies in the possibility that our characters may not be able to get home when they need to. This promise is fulfilled when Spike decides to cross over to the mainland on his own, after just one hazardous excursion, to bring Isla to a fabled Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who may be able to treat her disease.
This melancholy mother-son relationship is the emotional core meant to drive the film’s back half, but the bond between Spike and Isla is never as poignant as the movie wants it to be. By the time it makes big swings for a broadly sentimental climax that hinges on the heart-rending nature of a boy trying to save his dying mother, the connection still feels thin. Comer’s role is too non-participatory and passive, and the history of Isla and Spike’s relationship too indistinct, for it to ever feel like more than the movie simply telling you how affected you’re supposed to be. As with any Garland script, the film makes imprecise gestures toward grander ideas about the human condition in times of despair, but these ultimately collapse due to a lack of meaningful insight into the interiority of its characters—even with a fantastic debut performance from Williams. And with Boyle’s deeply idiosyncratic style resting directly at odds with the film’s melodrama, this feels like a movie that wants to have its beating heart and rip it out with gushing blood, too.
But that style is an argument in favor of the movie all on its own. Boyle re-enlists regular cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot 28 Days Later, for another round of purely insane visual experimentation. Whereas Days was shot with a consumer-grade Canon XL1 camcorder to achieve its now-iconic smudgy ugliness, Years is primarily shot on an iPhone 15 Max and drone cameras. The result is a trade-off between the harsh textures and occasional heavy pixelation of iPhone footage blown up for the big screen, and the pristine clarity of drones gliding over the Scottish highlands. That means 28 Years Later is a $75 million studio horror movie largely shot on the same camera you have in your pocket. The technology may have advanced, but Boyle’s punk-rock spirit is unchanged.
The wild look is most prominent in the film’s first act—the high point of the runtime, and one that overshadows much of what follows. Sequences during this stretch, in which Jamie takes Spike on his first expedition to the world outside the island, can comfortably go down as some of the most audacious visualizations we’ve seen in any mainstream movie in years, occasionally bordering on the expressionistic or abstract. Editor Jon Harris nonchalantly cuts between disparate moments that give the movie a stream-of-consciousness propulsion: the film jumps between nightmarish sequences of zombies feeding with gleaming eyes under red infrared light, archival military footage of a world always preparing for the next war, and the expedition of Jamie and Spike, whose encounters with the infected are conveyed through an always-involved, heavily abrasive digital assault.
Boyle doesn’t suppress the zombie intensity, either. The duo’s encounters with the newly introduced large, bulbous infected—as well as the Herculean, warrior-looking creatures known as Alphas—offer some of the fiercest action from any zombie property in years. The panic of Jamie and Spike being chased across a bridge by a fully sprinting infected is countered by the scene’s beauty, set against a soft backdrop of seemingly endless cosmos, resembling something otherworldly. Whether Boyle and Mantle are framing the eerie silhouettes of the infected against the skyline, capturing an arrow hitting its target in stuttering, stop-motion-like snapshots, or presenting an Alpha standing among a swirling cloud of birds on a darkened cliffside like some kind of gothic Dracula figure, the film is constantly in search of an image you’ve never quite seen before.
Most of the time, 28 Years Later is frequently begging to be rejected by general audiences, even as it courts the admiration of longtime fans, who may nonetheless find themselves put off by the film’s turn toward unearned emotion, its relatively meager expansion of this universe, and its occasionally jarring tonal shifts. (The abrupt sequel-teasing stinger feels like it’s from an entirely different strain of the zombie subgenre.) Much like the virus at the series’ center, it’s a film whose DNA is constantly mutating, resulting in an inconceivable host subject—one that is both corrosive and something of a marvel.
Grade: B
Sony Pictures will release 28 Years Later only in theaters on June 20.
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