\n\tIn \u201c28 Days Later,\u201d it took less than four weeks to transform London, one of the world\u2019s busiest and most advanced cities, into an inhospitable ghost town after an outbreak of the ultra-contagious Rage virus struck the human population. Just imagine what another 10,000 or so days might do.<\/p>\n
\n\tThat\u2019s where boundary-pushing director Danny Boyle<\/a> and speculative fiction super-brain Alex Garland pick up their 2002 dystopian horror saga with \u201c28 Years Later<\/a>,\u201d swinging to the opposite end of the U.K. to follow an entirely new set of characters. You don\u2019t have to be a math whiz to spot that the creative duo are five years ahead of schedule. But when Boyle and Garland landed on a compelling enough reason to check back on the now-quarantined country, it hardly seems reasonable to wait. And what better catalyst could there be than the real-world disruptions caused by self-imposed isolation (Brexit) and a once-in-a-century global pandemic (COVID-19)?<\/p>\n \n\tWhere the original film tapped into society\u2019s collective fear of infection, its decades-later follow-up (which undoes any developments implied by \u201c28 Weeks Later\u201d with an opening chyron that explains the Rage virus \u201cwas driven back from continental Europe\u201d) zeroes in on two even more primal anxieties: fear of death and fear of the other. To which you might well ask, aren\u2019t all horror movies about surviving an unknown threat of some kind? Yes, but few have assumed the psychic toll taken by such violence \u2014 or stared death directly in the bloodshot eyes \u2014 quite so effectively. Though conceived as the start of a new trilogy, \u201c28 Years Later\u201d towers on its own merits (part two, subtitled \u201cThe Bone Temple,\u201d is in the can and expected next January).<\/p>\n \n\tApart from its first and last scenes, which introduce a charismatic lad named Jimmy (played by \u201cSinners\u201d villain Jack O\u2019Connell) who learns to defend himself after seeing his local priest and parents killed, the film focuses on a small collective that has taken refuge on Holy Island, just off the coast of Northern England. The nearby Scottish mainland is literally crawling with the infected, a new strain of which are blubbery, slow-moving scavengers who eat earthworms off the forest floor. They\u2019re disgusting, but little danger to Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) or his 12-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams), whom he\u2019s taken ashore for a father-son foraging mission \u2014 the boy\u2019s maiden trek beyond the walls.<\/p>\n \n\tSpike is cocky at first, but freezes up when it comes time to shoot. He\u2019s been training with the bow and arrow, but shakes uncontrollably at the prospect of killing an onrushing attacker. Perhaps he wasn\u2019t expecting them to look so much like the good people back home (minus the clothes and attention to hygiene). In the most spectacular leg of the pair\u2019s surreal excursion, Jamie drags his son across a half-submerged causeway while a cheetah-quick, silverback-strong berserker sprints after them.<\/p>\n \n\tThe sequence looks positively hallucinatory, illuminated by night stars and aurora borealis streaks in the sky above. Nothing about the film\u2019s look \u2014 from unnerving, avant-garde inserts of medieval soldiers to infrared flashes of the oft-misunderstood infected \u2014 could be described as conventional. That\u2019s a logical next step from \u201c28 Days Later,\u201d which Boyle shot using low-grade digital cameras. It hurts the eyes to revisit that footage on today\u2019s hi-def formats, revolutionary as the film was for its time.<\/p>\n \n\tHere, the radical stylist (responsible for \u201cTrainspotting\u201d and \u201cTrance\u201d) updates his technology to cutting-edge iPhones, which maintain a similarly unsettling home-video edge without compromising the clarity or the aspect ratio \u2014 a dramatic, ultra-panoramic frame that\u2019s nearly three times as wide as it is tall. Such lightweight equipment gives DP Anthony Dod Mantle enormous flexibility, whether tracking action by hand or squeezing into tight spaces.<\/p>\n \n\tEditor Jon Harris adds another edge, unpredictably jumping axis and splicing in non-diegetic elements in strategic defiance of traditional visual logic. Things settle down somewhat after Spike returns home to process what he\u2019s just witnessed. In the wild, he spotted a far-off bonfire, where a rogue doctor, Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), is said to be burning corpses by the hundreds \u2014 someone it\u2019s hard not to imagine as the iodine-smeared Colonel Kurtz in this heart of darkness, until such time as his own secrets come to light.<\/p>\n \n\tSomething\u2019s wrong with Spike\u2019s mother (Jodie Comer), who seems disoriented and combative at times. Centuries earlier, she might have been labeled a witch. Now, there\u2019s a good chance she could be infected with something (a new strain of Rage, perhaps?). Finding his courage, Spike convinces his mom to follow him back out into the world, hoping to find a cure or simply some kind of explanation. Doing so means risking death \u2014 or worse, exposing either of them to the mutating virus, which has produced intimidating new \u201calphas,\u201d who swell up and stand tall, striking fresh fear in the audience.<\/p>\n \n\tTransmitted by blood, Rage doesn\u2019t kill people outright, but functions like a fast-acting form of rabies, sending the infected into an instant hyperaggressive frenzy. Fans of \u201c28 Days Later\u201d credit Boyle with accelerating the lumbering zombie-movie trope: Instead of getting bitten and waiting hours or days to become braindead flesh-eaters (always the most tedious part of Romero-era zombie classics), Boyle\u2019s infected switched over within seconds.<\/p>\n \n\tTechnically speaking, these frightening creatures aren\u2019t zombies, and though our heroes (Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris, both MIA in this movie) didn\u2019t hesitate to kill the so-called infected in the original, this sequel restores their humanity. There\u2019s still no antidote, mind you, but that doesn\u2019t mean these poor Rage-compromised souls don\u2019t merit a bit of respect \u2014 which Garland generously bestows in the film\u2019s contemplative bone temple scene. One doesn\u2019t expect a high-tension genre movie to suddenly turn eschatological in the home stretch, but that pivot mirrors the original, which spent its final third at a mansion in Manchester, where soldiers proved a greater threat than the infected.<\/p>\n \n\tWhere the Manchester scene showed how quickly moral collapse followed such a pandemic, demonstrating that human nature didn\u2019t need Rage to unleash its aggressive tendencies, Fiennes\u2019 scenes provide a more optimistic outlook. As Kelson puts it, the infected and uninfected are more alike than we care to admit. Surviving COVID taught us that, whereas the AIDS crisis was more complicated, since many cast judgment on how the virus was passed. The movie invites such thoughts, along with reflection on our own mortality. Typically, we look to adrenaline-fueled entertainment for catharsis. Boyle\u2019s thrilling reboot offers enlightenment as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In \u201c28 Days Later,\u201d it took less than four weeks to transform London, one of the world\u2019s busiest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[16475,48891,77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-196096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-28-years-later","9":"tag-danny-boyle","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114707917928881340","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}