12. 28 Years Later, dir. Danny Boyle
The original 28 Days Later looks like shit. It is still a good movie, but those early digital films have aged into gnarly pieces of work. In Danny Boyle's defense, shooting digitally gave his movie this rough, underground feeling, like a 16mm grindhouse movie. 28 Years Later sees Boyle experimenting to a less dramatic effect. The whole thing is shot on iPhone 15, which is certainly not typical for mainstream movie-making, however it is still an advanced tool in its own right. You won't confuse 28 Years Later's cinematography for any other movie. There is an interesting effect where Boyle and his DP, Anthony Dod Mantle, sorta figured out their tech as the movie went along. The grimy 2025 digital sheen evolves during the course of the movie to being less confrontational to audience expectations. By the end, 28 Years Later looks rather conventional.
We end on a movie that is brighter, less claustrophobic, with a clearer focus. Boyle uses a technique of 'collage', quite a bit early on, where the adventures are inter-cut with stock footage of medieval longbows and castles. Again, this him acting like a dirty punk director, as if his movie is crudely glued-together and pieces of it might just fall out. As our protagonist get a clearer sense of himself and his mission in the world, we lose those elements. The contrast helps illustrate an important point: 28 Years Later is two different movies, one being the zombie sequel you expected, the other being a movie nobody saw coming.
In first half we have a British folk horror zombie movie, a clever direction for this franchise to go. Spike (Alfie Williams) is part of a survivor community in an island off the mainland, his people having out-lasted the zombie plague thanks to lucky geography. He's just a kid, so has no memory of any pre-apocalyptic world. The first act is Spike taking on his first hunt with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), giving him his first look at what is outside the isolation of his village. Just as humans have adapted, becoming semi-feudal warriors, so have the zombies. They're now The Last of Us-inspired classes of monster, with slow, easy to avoid scavengers or big brutish alphas (with some extremely questionable racial politics going on there). That's all thrilling, capped off with a great chase sequence set in the backdrop of an impossibly star-studded night sky.
Then the second half is something else. Spike goes on a second journey with his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer). I won't spoil in great detail what happens here, because this is where my own life interrupts the review. Yeah, things are getting sad again.
The zombies as a monster is all about death, but only in the abstract sense, not in any specific or personal way. You're titillated by the idea of a survivalist aftermath more than you miss the world that was. (How many times have you had the conversation "what retail store will you live in after the zombies come?") That's when 28 Years Later shocks us by reminding us that yes, all these ghouls you're sniping for points were people. They were not simply an indistinguishable mass of mindless inhumanity: they had pasts, and lives, and somebody needs to treat the dead with respect. We get that through, of all things, palliative care, with heroes accepting inevitability. That the best thing we can do for our loves ones sometimes is not more treatment, but making them comfortable, letting go, and saying goodbye.
I saw 28 Years Later the day before my grandmother died. (She would have liked this movie, btw.) My sister and I went out to the movies for a distraction while Grandma was in the hospital and in a very bad condition. We were already preparing for her to have a greatly reduced level of life if she survived this latest illness. We just wanted a distraction and to see people run from spooky zombies. Instead 28 Years Later ended up being a reflection on our very circumstances. My sister hates this movie, it was a bad call for her. I loved it. This is not "the movie I needed that day", no movie would ever fix anything, but it was at least some comfort from the world of cinema to tell me that I was understood. That what I was feeling was universal. These tough decisions are coming for all of us You don't often go to a movie to feel 'seen' by it, but that was my experience here. After I saw this, Grandma got out of surgery, muttered a bit to the nurses, and she seemed at peace for the first time in a week. She passed away the next day, her strength having finally given out. Even if she only had one more good night on this Earth, that time matters. She got a good night's rest, and for all I know, dreamed good dreams.
So I don't know if that's "fair" for this movie to have all that baggage. However, we don't do fairness here; I never pretended otherwise. The review is the review.
Obviously I'll see The Bone Temple, the sequel, which is out the very day I'm posting this. The first 28 Years Later movie ends on such a wild, hysterical tone shift of a cliffhanger that I gotta see what happens next. However, there is no universe where the next movie is makes nearly as brave of choices, or gets close to mattering nearly as much. Will it even have as bold of choices in cinematography?
