Flasz On Film

Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later persists in the cultural memory for a lot of reasons. It is often credited with popularizing the concept of a “fast zombie,” though it needs to be remembered that it wasn’t the first movie to deploy this idea either. Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead beat Boyle to the punch by nearly two decades, while Nightmare City from 1980 had already featured a few more athletic antagonists too. 

Moreover, it is remembered for its digital video aesthetic and the footage of deserted London, through which young Cillian Murphy walked completely discombobulated by the state the place was in, having spent four weeks in a coma. Finally, 28 Days Later is remembered, weirdly enough, for remaining inaccessible on physical media, which is a fact many Blu-Ray collectors tend to point out while brandishing their own tattered copies that to this day remain quite rare. I may have indulged myself in this practice.  Judge me all you want.

What 28 Days Later is not remembered for are its lore and storytelling. Let’s be honest, the Alex Garland-penned script, his debut foray into writing directly for the screen, was light on world-building and heavily reliant on easily digestible visual shorthand. It was a simple survival horror whose apparent prowess was owed in large part to John Murphy’s iconic score. If you’re ever on the lookout for a movie in which the music does a lot of the heavy lifting, 28 Days Later is a good bet. In fact, the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later is an equally good bet in this regard as well. This entire franchise, as much as you could call it that, didn’t necessarily have legs to support a longer or more sprawling series, despite the fact that the ending of the sequel suggested that the rage virus had spread to mainland Europe and that we might as well have a peek at what it would look like in movies to come. The fact that we never did get that peek suggests that either nobody had the appetite to do so or that Boyle and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (who directed the sequel) didn’t leave enough openings in their movies for other filmmakers to naturally gravitate to the series and take a punt at a fast zombie movie set in the 28 Blank Later series, thus growing this world organically.  

Maybe it was a hint that some movies are not meant to become franchises… 

If you want to be really pedantic about it, the first two movies kind of painted whatever prospective series could become into a corner by dint of inferring that the zombie outbreak wasn’t technically a “zombie-zombie outbreak” because it never involved anyone rising from the dead and running at speed towards the living with express intentions to eat their flesh or shlurp their brains out. Original as it may have been, the idea of suggesting that the outbreak was akin to a rapidly-spreading and infuriatingly fast-acting variant of what could have been rabies (developed in a movie-set lab where a single scientist would strap chimpanzees to a table in a darkened room and have them watch violent movies Clockwork Orange style while injecting them with stuff with little regard for health and safety, let alone animal cruelty laws) closed the door on the possibility that these “zombies” would have enough logical stamina to warrant multiple movies set apart in time. After all, after two movies, they also locked themselves into a pattern where they would have to revisit this world at a progressively later date. Though, we never got to see 28 Months Later. And that’s probably because 28 Weeks Later clearly established, both in a bit of direct exposition and in the foundational element of the entire story, that the rage virus epidemic was so violent and fast-spreading that it effectively extinguished itself in the end. 

All it took was for Britain to be left completely cut off from the outside world and all the infected ended up dying off on their own and the only reason the virus came back was because one of the characters turned out to be an immune carrier. The cat was already out of the bag because according to the logic established by the movies themselves—it‘s not like any of it had to follow some kind of real-life logic rooted in science of mega-rabies or zombie virus diseases, because they do not exist—time was never an ally of building a lasting franchise out of that one movie with rabid people sprinting at bystanders to the tune of John Murphy’s music while Danny Boyle was out there with his camcorder. Even Max Brooks’ World War Z, written like a fake UN-commissioned report investigating a zombie outbreak, stipulated that any undead plague would always come with a time limit because the undead would simply decompose over time, having eaten all available brains. Equally, the Boyle-Garland infected zombie variants would just starve to death in a matter of weeks, as established in the movies. 

But we all know that in the movie industry, if there is a will to make money, people will dance their way out of a corner they had painted themselves into and it doesn’t matter that both that painted floor will end up ruined and needing a re-coat and they will also ensure they will leave nasty footprints on any other surface they touch after they have negotiated their way out of the room. Which sums up what I feel about the idea of revisiting the world of the 28 Blank Later exactly twenty-eight years after those fast-moving rabid zombies, which even the movie itself referred to as “the infected” as opposed to “the undead.” 

How exactly is one supposed to re-enter this seemingly “unfranchiseable” universe and turn it into a self-sustaining media universe akin to The Walking Dead, which successfully ran for multiple seasons, spawned off-shoot TV shows and video games while leaving a lasting memetic impact on the popular culture? After all, the series itself has never hinted at existence of a larger world-building platform and the storytelling enclosed within it has never been tied to the longevity of its characters, and mostly tied to broad thematic strokes and opportunities at deploying a kinetic set piece where appropriate. 

Answer: by force. Hook and crook.  

Thus, 28 Years Later takes place… twenty-eight years after the original movie, where Britain has been continually quarantined and the spread of the rage virus hinted at in 28 Weeks Later had been quashed successfully. And of course, we do remember that it only takes a few months for the infected to die of hunger after they’ve spread the disease with outlandishly exponential speeds throughout the whole nation. After all, they’re not after brains. They’re not zombie-zombies. They are just angry rabid folks. Or are they? 

Nearly three decades on, a secluded community in Lindisfarne, a tidal island connected to the British mainland by a causeway accessible only during low tide periods, thrives in this otherwise deserted post-apocalyptic landscape. In it we latch onto Spike (Alfie Williams), a twelve-year-old boy who is about to become a real man and contributor to the community, as his dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is about to take him for an expedition onto the mainland against his ill mother’s wishes (Jodie Comer). So, they venture out, bows and arrows in tow, to let us have a look at what the world of 28 Blank Later looks nearly thirty years after the initial outbreak.  

You’d be excused to think that it’d be virtually deserted because the infected would have long died off… which would have made the Lindisfarne community look just a tiny bit paranoid, unless of course the world we’re about to investigate is a true Mad-Maxian dystopia with different tribes competing for supremacy and brutal regional wars fought over the scarce resources. Well, none of that is true here. Britain has effectively bounced back as a natural habitat for throngs of wild game and lush forest reclaimed what once used to be human civilization.  

Oh, and the infected are still around too. But this time, Boyle and Garland are thinking ahead because what they are after is not a singular movie, but a franchise with enough legs to carry a whole bunch of other movies and maybe even TV shows and video games too. Therefore, we casually ignore the fact that the infected were supposed to die off years earlier and now, on top of the regular infected, who now sprint almost completely nude (because their clothes have presumably been destroyed in the intervening years), we have the slow crawling fat ones, and even slow wandering ones. In fact, Cillian Murphy makes a cameo appearance in this capacity too. And to top it all off, the regular sprinting infected organize themselves around what are called “alphas” who are essentially Viking Liver King zombies: faster, bigger and more dangerous than your average rabid nudist. It is remarked at one point that apparently the rage virus worked on them the way steroids would on a regular human being, so now they are massively roided out and when they chase you, all you can hear is the flapping sound of their massive zombie penises thrashing insidiously against their thick muscular thighs. Shivers.  

I watched this movie unfold with all these pieces of world-building sewn into the fabric of the series by punching them in furiously by a pair of desperate filmmakers and all I had were questions. Why are the fat crawling zombies fat? Wouldn’t they have lost weight? Do these infected people now organize themselves into tribes and hold meetings in angry scream once a week? Do we also have to deal with actual undead too? Look, there’s an angry zombie birth scene in this movie, which makes absolutely no sense as far as I am concerned. There’s also Ralph Fiennes as a slightly demented former doctor who has now devolved into a local hermit witch doctor covered in copious amounts of iodine… because apparently it takes out the virus. And where did he get all this iodine in the forest three decades after the outbreak?  

Look, it honestly doesn’t matter, and I can only expect that the filmmakers either had no idea that none of what they based the logic of this movie on made rudimentary sense within the parameters of the movies they wrote themselves too, or they simply didn’t care on iota. Because all they wanted to do was to set the scene for a multimedia franchise they could maybe retroactively rename as The Sprinting Not-Dead and proceed to collect hefty residuals for the foreseeable future. That’s what this movie feels like—a cash grab.  

None of the drama enclosed in this story registers to any appreciable degree, which includes the tension between Spike and his dad, his mother’s mysterious illness or anything relating to the safety of the Lindisfarne community. It’s all a festival of introductions to tangential characters (Jack O’Connell showing up towards the end as a demented tribal gangster self-styled after Jimmy Savile ought to give you pause) setting up a journey for Spike that I don’t think is going to be anywhere near as interesting as the filmmakers think it would be.  

After all, they have bastardized the logic of their own work, stretched everything way past the limits of believability so much that the idea of suspending one’s disbelief is now an athletic feat, and still rested the entire thing on the re-heated premise stating that a sprinting not-zombie is a dangerous antagonist… let alone a sprinting Liver King-type zombie with his gargantuan dick out. Thus, 28 Years Later registers as not only tedious and fundamentally repetitive, but also somehow insistently try-hard in its attempt to turn whatever this series has been thus far into a shared cultural universe. And nobody likes a try-hard.  

It only goes to show that some ideas and movies should be left alone. It ought not to matter that they potentially could be rendered fertile, because the work needed to be done to achieve that would turn the entire franchise into such an unrecoverable mess that it could (and in all seriousness, it might) diminish the stature of the preceding movies.

Some films are so bad that they are actually fun. Not this one, though. 28 Years Later is so bad that I begin to question whether anyone responsible for making it happen had the first clue as to what made them good and memorable in the first place and, most importantly, why it has been nearly impossible to raise this series from the dead throughout the intervening two decades, pun intended.

Somehow, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland—who should have known better—thought that they could levitate their way out of the corner they had painted themselves into twenty-odd years ago. 28 Years Later shows clearly that, talented as they may be, they can’t levitate. And now the carpets are ruined.