23 years ago Danny Boyle directed Alex Garland’s ground breaking script, 28 Days Later. The film was also ground breaking in its early use of digital cameras, and Cillian Murphy’s first lead role. It also starred Naomie Harris (later Miss Moneypenny) Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston. It was shot by Anthony Dod Mantle using the new lightweight Canon XL1 digital cameras to great effect. Although often still called a Zombie movie, it was not about the ‘living dead’ but about folk infected with a Lab created virus called Rage that turned them into highly energetic, murderous and seemingly mindless people - and ones who could move very fast in pursuit. One drop of their blood would infect anyone who came into contact with it in less than a minute. Despite being a horror movie, and a very popular and influential one, its deeper theme (as with many other ‘horror movies’) was that of family. And the true monsters turned out not to be the ravening infected but the uninfected.
A couple of years later the studio made a sequel, 28 Weeks Later, which did not involve Boyle of Garland. It did not impress.
28 Days Later, however, has maintained a loyal fan club, and when Boyle and Garland got the rights back some years ago they started thinking about a sequel of their own.
So now we have 28 Years Later. In this sequel Europe is free of infection, but the British Isles have been put into an enforced International Quarantine to contain the plague, with the uninfected left to look after themselves. One such group live on Holy Island, Lindisfarne, linked to the Northumbrian mainland by a tidal causeway, and thereby protected enough to survive. The collapse of technology has virtually plunged them back 200 years. With no electricity or communications they only have bows and arrows to protect themselves with when venturing across the causeway to forage, and to ‘blood’ their teenage boys, a rite of passage completed by killing some of the infected, reverting to some common tribal practices around the world and throughout history.
This movie follows 12 year old Spike, played brilliantly by Alfie Williams (who some years ago had a small part in the BBC’s His Dark Materials). His mother Isla, played by Jodie Comer, is seriously ill. His father, Jamie, (Aaron Taylor- Johnson) takes Spike onto the mainland to ritually kill a Crawler, one of the kind of Rage victims that have regressed into being slow ground-hugging creatures living off insects, worms and grubs and posing no real threat to the Rage free. But a kill is a kill, and killing is a rite of passage for these young males. While on the mainland Jamie tells Spike about the ‘Mad Doctor’ who still lives there. As there are no Doctors on the island Spike resolves to take his mother to the Doctor, hoping he will cure her. The Doc is played by Ralph Fiennes.
The 3rd Act includes a scene that knocked me sideways. I say ‘sideways’ because grief is not something we leave behind us in the past. It travels alongside us, and that is why sometimes we can be knocked sideways into its presence. When I left the cinema I thought that, brilliant as the movie is, I would never want to see it again. A few days later, however, having got over my initial distress, I decided it really deserves a second viewing. The fact that it so moved me is surely testament to its quality. The terrific script, superb direction and profound performances held me tight, despite my not being a ‘horror movie’ fan. And yes, this is a proper bloody, gruesome horror, but like 28 Days Later, it is much more than a horror movie and again essentially about family – and so much more. I jut so happened that part of the ‘so much more’ impacted heavily on my own long held feelings of grief.
As was said in another fine film, Rabbit Hole, (2010, Nicole Kidman, Miles Teller and Aaron Eckhart, written by David Lindsay-Abaire and directed by John Cameron Mitchell),
‘Grief can be like a boulder that falls on you. After a while you manage to crawl out from beneath it. Then you learn to carry it, and you do not want to put it down. It is what you have.’
So I do hope you will watch this film, and do so in a cinema, but be warned, it might impact you too. Roger Ebert, the late revered film critic, famously said that movies can be 'empathy machines'. They can help us understand how other people might feel. But they can also put us back in touch with our own deepest feelings. There is no harm in that as long as they are not traumatic. And these films do not ‘make us feel’ something, they remind us that we do already feel that something.
The only thing that distracted me was the confused geography. Some will, I am sure, remember when in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman arrived on the Dover Beach and walked to Sherwood Forest via Hadrian’s Wall, and its now infamous Sycamore Gap. In this film young Spike walks from Lindesfarne to the same Gap, and then past the ruins of the Angel of the North. As it happens I know this territory well and I really do not think he walked that far, and he never crosses the Tyne, which would have been necessary. Danny Boyle says he showed the sycamore still standing to make the point that this is an ‘alternative’ future, but the whole film is set in an alternative timeline. England is not, and has not been, plagued by infected maniacs. It temporarily broke the spell of my suspended disbelief. When Jodie and Aaron had mastered the regional accent so well, and the Northumbrian Island was so clearly identified, I thought this was jarring and unfortunate. Of course, those without a knowledge of the area will not notice, and once again, this may seem to be a just a horror movie, but.
The sequel has already been filmed and will, Danny Boyle says, be more about evil. In the first movie the infected were not evil, they were deranged. Sadly, we still accuse those who are dangerously aggressively mentally ill as being evil, even monsters. We do so of course to separate ourselves from them. They are ‘Other’. Many people believe however that we are all capable of acts of terrible evil – and amazing goodness – in the right or wrong circumstances, without us being ill. Just by being human.
