28 Years Later Review: A Legacy Sequel Frenetic in Energy and Ideas

You can say that Danny Boyle was once the filmmaking avatar of Cool Britannia: a director who, at age 40, still managed to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of 20-year-olds, as seen in Trainspotting. In the span of time between then and 2017’s T2 Trainspotting, Boyle had won a Best Director Academy Award for a rather square crowd-pleaser and helmed the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics––he no longer had any claims to not being a sell-out. Though as IP demands have deepened and the British Empire has cratered even further since the tumultuous time of T2’s release, demands for another legacy sequel have beckoned. Will the director sell out even further? 

Armed with a bevy of iPhones, 28 Years Later is definitely an “I’ve still got the moves” gesture from Boyle. It’s a case where his frenetic energy, paired with returning writer Alex Garland’s structurally odd screenplay, creates a film that one never feels a step ahead of––a deep compliment for something about to be unleashed on multiplexes. Even if that doesn’t necessarily result in a great film, per se. 

Perhaps the first thing that’s refreshing is, for a legacy sequel, having zero clear connective tissue to the series itself. We do begin nearly three decades after the outbreak of the rage virus in Britain, being thrown into the middle of what seems a throwback village society-of-sorts that has managed to thrive on the quarantined Scottish Isles. Though––surprise surprise––the marketing materials of 28 Years Later have hidden the fact that the actual lead of the film is a pre-teen boy, Spike (Alfie Williams), child of the masculine hunter Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and bed-ridden Isla (Jodie Comer), who seems to be suffering from a degenerative brain disease. Spike is being groomed by his father as the next man of the house while Jamie seemingly ignores his wife’s increasingly poor state in a doctorless society. Jamie may have the millennial dad effect of trying to be a nice guy, but a darker side seems apparent in both him and what his pub-crawling boys-club society represents. 

More pointed commentary initially seems the case via editing: the all-white society boasts its isolationist qualities while the film aggressively intercuts British Nationalist imagery, be it scenes from Laurence Olivier’s propaganda epic Henry V or archival World War II footage, which one would think of as setting up a Brexit metaphor. Yet a lot of Boyle and his team’s formal ideas seem stop-start, repeating over and over zombie arrow kills that are depicted as slow-motion panoramic shots until the film loses interest in that and starts relying on multiple scenes of spines being ripped out of bodies by the infected.

This goes hand-in-hand with Garland’s screenplay, which keeps changing direction so many times you’re never sure what it’s quite building up to. As Spike hits the road with his mother to track down care of the exiled doctor Kelson (an outstanding Ralph Fiennes), the film starts risking even more. Side characters are quickly dispensed of, and the tone wildly fluctuates between uproariousness and gooey sentimentality. Death, after all, can be treated as both a joke and a tragedy within the span of five minutes. 

Perhaps such lack of concern with overarching morality, or even thematic through line, means 28 Years Later, despite the accumulated pedigree of Boyle and Garland in recent decades, isn’t hyper-concerned with respectability. The film perhaps isn’t totally satisfying––it’s still leaving a lot for an already-shot sequel with the wonderful subtitle The Bone Temple––but you’ve got to admire the gambit of going out on a truly, gobsmackingly comical ending that’ll probably result in a F CinemaScore and nobody showing up for the continuation.

28 Years Later opens in theaters on Friday, June 20.

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