‘28 Years Later’ Review – A Family Drama Trapped In Quarantine
Days and weeks skipped months and turned into years, but the team behind 28 Days Later is back to try to recapture that magic and hopefully squeeze a few more bucks out of a series more dormant than any zombie virus. How does it go? Strap in to find out because it’s going to be a bumpy ride that also gets messy at sudden moments.
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Our story begins with a prologue where a bunch of kids are watching The Teletubbies. All is well until people in the house start vomiting up the red stuff, and soon the grounds are overrun by the infected rage-filled “zombies.” The only survivor is a blond kid, but that doesn’t become important until much later.
So, that incident passes, having no effect on the plot whatsoever, and things pick up “28 Years Later” like the title says. On a fortified island off the mainland of England, lives a colony of families eking out a rustic existence after the apocalypse. One of the patriarchs is Jamie (quasi Kraven Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who is ready to head out on a mission for supplies.
This requires trekking through the English countryside, crawling with the infected at every turn, which is exactly the kind of place you would want to drag vulnerable and unprepared family members through. Jamie thinks so and wants to bring his son, Spike (Alfie Williams), to show him the outside world and help him become more of a man. Jamie is so excited by the idea, he can’t be talked out of it, even though everyone, including his wife (Jodie Comer), thinks he is an idiot.
The wife’s name is Isla, and when she doesn’t have lucid moments wrestling with her husband’s impulsive ideas, she is bedridden with an illness. It makes her delirious, delusional, and it’s only getting worse. This impels the young lad Spike to brave the unknown one more time after a successful trip with his dad, and find a doctor who can help his mum. The only hope is a reclusive alleged wacko (played by Ralph Fiennes) who covers himself in iodine and stacks skulls in mounds ritualistically.
These characters and their main-drag plot are what give 28 Years Later its heart and make it a decent experience. The rest of it is a bit too much, as the explorations of the infected along the way only add things I’d rather unsee. The first ones father and son encounter are obese scavengers eating everything out of the dirt. They are also all naked and waterlogged-looking for some reason.
It only gets more gratuitous when we are introduced to a pregnant infected woman who gives birth in a derelict train car to a normal healthy child because the plot needs this to happen. The kid doesn’t raise the stakes any, but he’s there.
The father of the uninfected spawn is an “alpha” named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) who’s more ferocious and more dangerous than the regular infected, and he proves it by ripping heads clean off. If you want more gore out of this franchise, you might enjoy that, but it isn’t worth suffering through Samson’s full frontal sprints complete with prosthetic manhood hanging out in the wind. Anyone who cringed at Orlok in Nosferatu will have flashbacks.
Even dumber than that, when Ralph Fiennes shows up, he blabs that he has been observing Samson for three years after paralyzing him with a morphine-dipped blow dart. In other words, Fiennes had three years to easily kill the head-ripping monster, saving a few lives, but didn’t because of ‘science’, I guess. Seriously, what the f–k?! How stupid and short-sighted can you be?
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland introduce a lot of new ideas that don’t all land perfectly. They aren’t original either. George Romero toyed with an alpha zombie in Land of the Dead, and Zack Snyder took that idea, with the addition of undead societies and harems, further in Army of the Dead. In both cases, it was more interesting and meant more to the story.
Samson is around to give characters something to run from, and be a deus ex machina when it’s called for; that’s about it. His design isn’t a total abhorrent loss, but I’d prefer to see a hulking killing machine like him dressed up and wearing a hockey mask or swinging a chainsaw. As is, he’d fit better in a remake of Tower of Evil (also known as Horror on Snape Island and Beyond the Fog), if any filmmaker were to be so bold.
Ultimately, though, I think bringing Boyle back was the right move, between his visual style and aptitude for both compelling characters and crafting a dreamlike narrative experience. I just wish his strengths translated to the zombie virus portion of the story the way they did to the soap opera. The Walking Dead was good at that balancing act (well, for a few seasons anyway).
28 Years Later
PROS
- Not the most soulless cash grab Sony unleashed on us this year or last
- Aaron Taylor-Johnson and the main cast
- Funny Cameo by Jack O'Connell setting up the next film
- Danny Boyle's visual and editing style
CONS
- Has almost nothing to do with the rest of the series
- No Cillian Murphy
- Hardcore zombie nudity
- Who Ralph Fiennes's character is, isn't actually important
