Memento Mori

It’s been over two decades since we last glimpsed anything from the 28 Days Later franchise. The first film, written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, introduced the world to rage-infected humans (not zombies, even though everyone then started referring to them as zombies after, and it ended up making “fast zombies” a thing in zombie media). It came out in 2003 and it absolutely dominated horror conversation for the year. On a budget of $8 Mil the movie made $82.8 Mil, made Cillian Murphy a star, and all but guaranteed some kind of continuation would come out. And it did… it’s just that almost no one liked it.

Released four years later, 28 Weeks Later picks up with the not-zombie apocalypse in England, appropriately, twenty-eight weeks after the initial outbreak. It didn’t feature any of the original characters, and wasn’t written by Garland or directed by Boyle. It took the rage-poc and raised the stakes, the violence, the gore, and gave it all slicker production values. While moderately successful at the time (both critically and with audiences), making $65 Mil against its $15 Mil budget, it wasn’t a hit that could grow the franchise. In the years since 28 Weeks Later all but disappeared from the conversation, with most fans simply going back to the original and ignoring what came after.

And that more or less seems to be the goal with 28 Years Later, the first in a planned trilogy of stories set, of course, twenty-eight years after the initial outbreak. While it doesn’t exactly ignore the second film, this third 28 Days Later movie does pretty well dismiss everything that happened in that film, setting us back to the status quo established in the first film: England has been overrun by rage infected humans and now, nearly three decades later, we get to check in and see how people would survive this long surrounded by the apocalypse.

The answer is, effectively, that they removed themselves from the equation entirely. We’re introduced to Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son, Spike (Alfie Williams), who live on Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of the British Isles which is naturally protected by a land bridge that floods with the tide. Jamie works as a hunter, going out to the mainland to patrol, kill the infected, and gather supplies whenever he can find anything. On this fateful day he takes Spike with him as the kid (who just turned twelve) is now old enough to go out on a hunting mission and kill the infected.

They make their way to the coast and patrol inwards, finding some slow, fat infected that are easily picked off. But as they make their way back to their home they run into an Alpha, a super-strong infected, who commands a small horde of other infected as well. They chase after the guys, leading them to hide in a shack out of reach of the infected. While there, Spike spots a fire in the distance, but Jamie won’t answer questions about what the fire means. When they finally do get home, after getting chased all the way back to the island by the alpha, Spike asks their family friend about the fire and learns that it’s maintained by a crazy guy who, once, was a doctor. This gives Spike hope as his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), has been sick for a long while and no one seems to be able to help her. Spike manages to get her off the island and to the mainland, and now they have to survive long enough to get to the doctor in case he can save her. They just have to deal with all the infected between them and salvation.

After the bigger and beefier 28 Weeks Later it would have been easy to expect another big movie, especially considering we had been waiting for a sequel for nearly two decades. But, despite its massively increased budget (this film was made for $60 Mil, in comparison to the original’s $8) this feels like a smaller, more intimate movie along the lines of the original film. We get a few scenes of infected action, a bit of horror here or there, but this is a small, intimate story about a boy growing up and learning that, eventually, he has to let his mother go.

Honestly it’s a bold story to tell, especially as a return visit back to the 28 Days Later universe. Everyone was probably expecting something far more in line with the standard zombie apocalypse fare, which is also kind of what the first two films played towards. While the first film was small, it very much explored all facets of the rage-poc that it set up. This film seems to almost reject that idea. The rage infected humans are still here, and there’s nods towards the virus changing and evolving, but the infected are secondary to the story, not the prime motivator of it.

In a way you could take the rage infected humans here and swap them out for just about anything, even something not fantastical at all, and you’d have more or less the same story. While I don’t think you could tell either of the first two films in this series and, say, swap out the infected for bears or wolves, you absolutely could do that here. Jamie and Spike going to the mainland to fight off wild animals while they scrounge for supplies works the same. Spike and Isla battling across the highlands to find a doctor after all of civilization has crashed doesn’t need infected humans at all to work. “It’s a massive bear! Run!” is just as infected as “it’s an alpha! Run!”

That doesn’t make this a bad movie, mind you. I actually really enjoyed this film for what it is. It’s just interesting to look at this movie and realize it’s more of a family drama that just so happens to take place in the ruins of a world taken over by the rage virus.You would expect more emphasis on the horror aspect of the story when, at its greatest moments, this is a film about love, loss, and yearning for what’s to come. That feels as far removed from 28 Days Later as just about any movie could be.

Now, it’s possible that we’ll get a better exploration of the not-zombies in the next two films (28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is already out, and I’ll get to it soon, while an untitled third film is in production). What hints we get now, with the evolution of the infected here, is intriguing. We get fat, slow infected scrounging through the dirt to survive on bugs. We have the faster runners, led by massive, strong, powerful alphas. And then we also learn that the infected humans are still able to procreate as we see an infected woman stumbling around pregnant. That has all kinds of implications that the movie only hints at, and it’s pretty fucked up. I like these moments… but the film has other things to concern itself with.

And that’s fine. This film can be whatever Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (who return to the franchise after twenty-two years) want it to be. But as the next exciting part of a franchise that redefined zom-poc cinema, this feels like an odd turn for the franchise. Everyone is expecting high action for this big return of the series and, instead, we get something smaller, more dramatic, and far more intimate. It’s a film you’d expect to get after a franchise has been running for years with regular installments, not the first episode back after a nearly two decade gap.

Which may be why the sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, floundered at the Box Office. I bombed, in part due to its own inflated budget, and you have to wonder if that’s in part because people expected one kind of film and, instead, got something else instead. This first 28 Years Later did make $151.3 Mil on its $60 Mil budget, making it a moderate success, but you have to wonder if it would have been bigger, and lead to a more successful Box Office, if the film had given audiences the infected action they were expecting.

28 Years Later is an odd movie, one that hints at something more but then seems disinterested in exploring the very ideas and themes it’s toying with. Is this film about the infected and how kids are forced to grow up too fast in this new society, or is it more about a family struggling with a sickness they can’t handle. The two ideas feel counter to each other and they make for a strange film for the genre. I liked it, but it’s not what I expected at all. And I have to think that drove away more fans than it drew in.