johnke.me28 Years Later
Not so much a zombie film as much as a coming-of-age film dressed in folk horror clothing, and it’s no less effective for it. Newcomer Alfie Williams does a really impressive job as Spike, a 12 year old who born into an infected world, and the action takes up as his father brings him on his first hunting trip to the mainland. He’s given a complicated emotional arc and he portrays it heroically, with a wonderful, nuanced performance.
I’m a sucker for this kind of speculative setup. What does the world look like for the next generation after the initial film? Questions that made the recent Apes films so interesting. But once we get outside of this, the story of 28 Years Later doesn’t really take us to any surprising places and a lot of it can feel screenwriter-formulaic (oh you’re going to hit us with the duality of birth and death? Cool cool cool. Samson and Delilah? Oh wow). But one thing I love about Danny Boyle is how he is capable of elevating the blandest trash. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the final act: a wonderful, ecstatic celebration of life and death and mortality that hit me so hard.
But the coda. Yeesh. I didn’t realise this was already planned to be a trilogy, so the final minutes felt like a giant fuck you to Sony, daring them to use this tonally awful, morally misjudged bullshit as the starting point for the next film. But apparently the sequel has already been filmed? Like I said, yeesh.