Most movies are lucky to predict one thing. Danny Boyle’s 2002 dystopian thriller ‘’28 Days Later’’ managed to be on the cutting edge of two trends, albeit rather disparate ones: global pandemic and fleet-footed zombies.
Add in Cillian Murphy, who had his breakout role in that film, and ‘’28 Days Later’’ was unusually prognostic. While many of us were following the beginnings of the Afghanistan War and ‘’American Idol,’’ Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland were probing the the fragile fabric of society, and the potentially very quick way, indeed, horror might come our way.
Boyle always maintained that his undead — a far speedier variety of the slow-stepping monsters of George A. Romero’s ‘’The Night of Living Dad’’ — weren’t zombies, at all, but were simply the infected. In that film, and its 2007 sequel ‘’28 Weeks Later’’ (which Juan Carlos Fresnadillo helmed), the filmmakers have followed the fallout of the so-called rage virus, which emptied London in the first film and brought soon-dashed hopes of the virus’ eradication in the second movie.
Like the virus, the ‘’28 Days Later’’ franchise has proven tough to beat back. In the new ‘’28 Years Later,’’ Boyle and Garland return to their apocalyptic pandemic with the benefit of now having lived through one. But recent history plays a surprisingly minor role in this far-from-typical, willfully shambolic, intensely scattershot part three.
The usual trend of franchises is to progressively add gloss and scale. But where other franchises might have gone global, ‘’28 Years Later’’ has remained in the U.K., now a quarantine region where the infected roam free and survivors — or at least the ones we follow — cluster on an island off the northeast of Britain, connected to mainland by only a stone causeway that dips below the water at high tide.
Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who innovatively employed digital video in ‘’28 Days Later,’’ have also turned to iPhones to shoot the majority of the film. Boyle, the ‘’Slumdog Millionaire,’’ ‘’Trainspotting’’ filmmaker, is an especially frenetic director to begin with, but ‘’28 Years Later’’ is frequently gratingly disjointed.
It’s a visual approach that, taken with the story’s tonal extremes, makes ‘’28 Years Later’’ an often bumpy ride. But even when Boyle’s film struggles to put the pieces together, there’s an admirable resistance to being anything like a cardboard cutout summer movie.
The recent event that hovers over ‘’28 Years Later’’ is less the COVID-19 pandemic than Brexit. With the virus quarantined on Britain, the country has been severed from the European continent. On the secluded Holy Island, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams, a newcomer with some sweetness and pluck) lives with his hunter father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and bedridden mother, Isla (Jodie Comer).