Film of the Week #17: 28 Years Later

Danny Boyle's kinetic franchise entry work well enough when it's moving, and dies as soon as it stops.

I’m not sure if I’m the right person to see 28 Years Later or evaluate it. Movies tend to enter a sort of twilight zone around the summer, when seasonal forces dictate that most studios looking to make a buck will have to do so in the 2-3 months of long days and summer vacation. A maximalist tendency presents itself in the blockbusters, franchises and tentpoles that come out to lure dollars out of the otherwise cinema-agnostic: we must appeal to people who watch maybe 2-3 movies a year, or die. In theory, an auteurist shouldn’t be fazed by these realities. The artistry of good directors can and has been cloaked in the garb of crowd-pleasers and event spectacles from the very beginning. Still, it’s a bit hard to luxuriate in the escapism of films that seem to insist that you see the next one in the series, even at the expense of the coherence of the one you’re currently sitting through. Whatever virtues 28 Years Later shows from time to time, a sleazy vibe of salesmanship and quarterly report exceptionalism plague the movie, particularly from the middle to the end, with the movie coming to increasingly feel like a 2-hour advertisement for its sequel. The sad thing about advertisements is that they’re probably going to work – the movie was never designed to satisfy those looking for a complete cinematic work so much as it was targeted to those only looking for a momentary diversion, and preferably one that could helpfully point you to the next diversion soon to come.

Perhaps I’m taking things too seriously. (Actually, I’m certain I am…) For a good part of the movie – up until the midsection hero’s journey, I wager – I was willing to enjoy the film on its own terms as an above-average action-horror flick. The film commits to its schtick with admirable gusto. The opening Teletubby-as-uncanny-valley scene helps orient us to Danny Boyle’s hyperactive style – he wastes no time getting the zombies onto the scene, manipulating our sense of time through parallel editing and heart-beat-fast cuts to create a frantic, unpredictable chaos. The little narrative that is established here is established in a couple of title cards, a brusque rejection of any “show-don’t-tell” philosophy. It’s cheap, but it works: the film is far more effective when Boyle is able to keep us on our toes, eyeballs glued to suspicious negative space in the frame, keeping subconscious track of the shrinking distances between the zombies and the victims-to-be. The story is the excuse: the meat of the film is in the gore, the flesh, the visualization of the dead and decaying world.

Fittingly for a film that mostly rejects storytelling, the prologue turns out to be a non-sequitur for most of the duration of the film. Despite this section of the film introducing us to Jimmy (Rocco Haynes), a child who escapes the first wave of the virus,, the story actually focuses on a different child, Spike (Alfie Williams), 28 years on, living in a rural island village in quarantined Scotland with his rugged hunter dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his mysteriously sick mom Isla (Jodie Comer). Jamie brings Spike along to head to the “mainland” in a sort of rite of passage, aiming to hunt some zombies against the protestations of Isla. (I call them zombies, but in the film they’re just called “the Infected.” But they’re zombies.) The family and village situation is related in broad strokes with blink-length cuts, but I rather liked the compressed editing style with its focus on quick, missable gestures, such as the bit of business with the slice of bacon that gets passed from Jamie to Spike to Isla. Not to summon the ghost of vulgar auteurism, but I can quite well imagine the essays comparing the film to Bresson in its foregrounding of gesture and the resultant mechanicalization of its actors.

So long as any ambitions toward expressing emotion or sentimentality remain absent, the film is able to get by quite well on its non-stop barrage of linked actions, smoothly taking us past any consideration of detailed exposition and leading us directly into the money-shots of grotesque, frightening abominations being forcefully dispatched by our heroes with their primitive bow-and-arrow toolsets. The journey onto the mainland is rather pure in its survival thriller mission, and it was engaging in the way that a video game cutscene is, showcasing the technical efforts of the filmmaking team in all its splendor, with plenty of tension and suspense to keep the heart pounding. I’ll make special note of a peculiar but clever parallel editing gambit in the scene where Jamie and Spike return to the island fleeing from an “Alpha,” or a superhuman zombie, with Boyle electing to intercut moments from the welcome home celebration scene with the final suspenseful moments of the chase as Jamie and Spike pound on the village gates, pleading to get in. Since the heroes’ survival here is a foregone conclusion (we all know the film ain’t over), Boyle isn’t concerned with undercutting the tension of the chase, choosing instead to bridge the thrill of it to the afterparty and thus maintain momentum.

Having wrapped up the genre qualification sequence, the film then moves to play the heartstrings, with Spike’s discovery of his father’s affair with another woman in the village becoming part of his impetus to take his mother on a quest to find an eccentric doctor rumored to have gone insane while living on the mainland. This is where the film loses me, probably because we’re suddenly asked to care about the characters as people rather than as avatars of prowess in violence. There’s simply not enough juice in the characterizations to get me invested in the boy’s desire to cure his mother. Notwithstanding the psychological implausibility of a boy who could hardly hit a zombie suddenly having the confidence to go it alone all while escorting an invalid, the mother-son bond just felt totally shallow and reliant upon pre-existing tropes, exposing the complete absence of emotional stakes within the film. The appearance of Swedish Navy officer Eric (Edvin Ryding) as a kind of comic relief is somewhat interesting, but also ultimately turns out to be inconsequential. And finally, our long-awaited meeting with Dr. Kelvin (Ralph Fiennes hamming it up) is a total anticlimax, to the point where it could be considered arty if it didn’t also feel so incompetently earnest, even pretentious. I don’t want to describe it other than as the world’s worst euthanasia PSA.

As if only to add insult to injury after making us endure such an onslaught of sophomoric sentimentality, the final moments of the film are a trailer for the next film. The kid from the prologue shows up all grown-up with his gang of tracksuit gangsters, some rock n’ roll sounds up, quippy moments are shoved in, etc. You’re telling me I have to fork over another 10, 20 bucks to get to the bottom of this threadbare narrative? Anyway, I’ve finished my popcorn, so it’s time to leave.