When good movies turn baaaaaad....

28 Years Later and why I've got the Rage

I am really fuming about something. Frothing at the mouth with all the rage of one of Danny Boyle’s zombies. The thing I am fuming about is when films start off brilliantly and then just fall off a cliff somewhere in the middle. From a critic’s perspective this makes giving stars obscenely difficult (oh, there’s a whole other piece to be written about the often nonsensical process of star-giving). What do you do, though, when something starts off a masterpiece but ends up making you want to scoop your own eyeballs out?

Contrary to what some people think, critics love to love things, and there’s a very particular and peculiar horror in spending the initial stages of a film thinking you’re going to leave it telling everyone how great it is, only to realise half-way through that you’re going to have to caveat all that embryonic euphoria with, no sorry, it really just dropped the ball 54 minutes in, and whoever greenlit that final bit, well, I want to smash their lights in. (Fuming, see?)

I am specifically raging about 28 Years Later, the new Danny Boyle and Alex Garland zombie film (out now), which is so INCREDIBLY good… until it’s really, really not.

I spent the first half of 28 Years Later in a state of utter wonder. A six-star movie, I thought dreamily, an absolute masterpiece. I was so looking forward to coming out and telling everyone about it. It starts with an outrageously terrifying child slaughter featuring the Teletubbies. (The Teletubbies are terrifying! They so belong in a horror movie!) It is such a weird and surreal rendering of the zombieverse, where a sort of medieval meets folk horror Wicker Man aesthetic is intercut with footage of Agincourt archery, as if to suggest that time really is a flat circle. (Give survivors of an apocalypse time and they will always revert to their base instincts: in this case, prioritising bacon, flying the St George’s flag while singing old hymns, swigging ale like Friar Tuck and hating on the French.)

Here’s where we’ve got to in the franchise so far. In 28 Days Later (2002), humans caught the “rage” virus from monkeys, and it immediately spready round the country like wildfire. At the end, survivors (Naomie Harris and Cillian Murphy, the latter set to reappear in this new trilogy) tried to attract the attention of (rescue?) planes flying overhead. There was a second film, 28 Weeks Later in 2007, where the virus made it to continental Europe. More on that in a bit, but you don’t need to have seen it to watch this new one, largely because this new one completely ignores all that.

So, here we are 28 YEARS later in Blighty, and on Holy Island, aka Lindisfarne, just off the coast of northern England, a retro community has established itself, full of milk maids and farmers and archers, who have fortified an island village and venture on to the mainland via a low-tide causeway only when they need to get supplies. Oh, and to enter manhood. The film begins with rugged, put-upon father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, crazy-eyed, terrific) preparing to take his 12-year-old son Spike (a brilliant Alife Williams, surely now vying with Adolescence’s Owen Cooper for young actor of the year?) to the mainland to kill his first undead in quite the ritual. So, off they trot. The undead have changed a bit since their earlier Boyle outings: now there are fat slow ones that slither along the earth sucking at worms and are good for target practise. There are giant alphas, who have evolved to wait and chase. And they are all quite ostentatiously naked, which adds to the Midsommar feel in more ways than one.

The boys encounter more trouble than they bargained for, of course, and this, the first hour or so, is absolutely tremendous. I don’t think I breathed for a full 60 minutes, as the escalating tinny terror of Rudyard Kipling’s Boer war poem Boots (read by the American actor Taylor Holmes, some good details on that here) flooded the England’s green and now very unpleasant land. Boots boots boots boots, there’s no discharge in the war… There’s a lovely tinge of madness in the way even the ordinary folk go about their business, wildly shaking their heads with glee or enthusiastically preparing for battle, as if the rage virus is something already in them, a human curse, not an external affliction. The whole thing is also, of course, very much a Brexit metaphor, but because the film embraces atmosphere ahead of plot at this point, it doesn’t feel heavy-handed, just real. Hyper-real.

And then… look away if don’t want SPOILERS. And THEN, Spike, now lauded young hero back home, returns to the mainland with his sick, frail ma (Jodie Comer) to find her a doctor. Now, look, Comer is brilliant in everything she does, and she’s brilliant here: brilliant accent, brilliantly layered madness that starts to feel as if it is in fact not insanity but a sort of truth, the only real memory of the past. But it feels here like Garland starts rushing. Rushing to have more plot, rushing to fit it all in. Because, and I am sadly not kidding, suddenly we have (and seriously, LOOK AWAY IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS):

1. A zombie giving birth to a baby. Isla, Comer’s character, is inexplicably not afraid of this zombie, and conversely holds her hands out to the zombie’s hand to steady her during labour. It is, apparently, a cross-culture meeting of minds. The baby is then born infection-free and lovingly cared for by Isla and Spike. Nobody is worried about its potential contamination. It’s just like, yep, here’s a zombie infant, we know nothing about anything and it’s totally fine. Huh?

2. Aphas. I mentioned these before. It’s not all bad. But in the scene with the baby it all gets very silly. There is one that comes charging down a train carriage with the heft of Jason Momoa (I thought it was him for a sec actually; it’s not) and the look of a man whose baby has been pilfered. Is this the zombie’s family? Are we supposed to feel sorry for the zombies? In the same way I enjoy Garland exploring the madness of human beings I’m actually on board with potentially considering the humanity of zombies. In the first film there’s a great scene where they keep a pitiful infected on a leash and it’s a subplot that does an excellent job of making the humans in charge look like monsters. But this is not that. This is just… really, really silly.

3. Ralph Fiennes and his tower of skulls. He is the doctor they have been searching for. He is gentle and erudite and possibly mad. He collects the skulls of the human dead and deceased undead alike and builds a tower out of them and talks about Shakespeare and Memento Mori. And then (SERIOUSLY LOOK AWAY IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS) he compassion kills cancer-ridden Isla, washes her skull for her son (only moments ago bereaved). And Spike, because he is no longer in a stunning film but a ridiculous one, is moved rather than repulsed by the skull of his extremely recently deceased mother, and tenderly embraces it, looking deeply into the vacant eye sockets and exhaling with loving wisdom beyond his years. Honestly… I just can’t. This film has Danny Boyle at the helm, Alex Garland writing and the original’s star Cillian Murphy (who is apparently going to return in this film’s sequel next year) exec producing. Why in holy hell did not one of them spot how ridiculous all this was getting? Someone explain it to me, please.

What’s especially annoying is that the film’s predecessor 28 Weeks Later did… EXACTLY THE SAME THING. I recently rewatched it and I spent the first thirty minutes delightfully surprised at how good it was. Beautifully shot (cinematographer is Enrique Chediak, who later worked on Boyle’s excellent 127 Hours), Robert Carlyle is there doing his intense, quaking Robert Carlyle-y thing as a husband and father who abandons his wife to the zombies right at the start of the movie. Then, when his children are returned to him in a London safe zone they discover Mum is actually alive. Turns out she is an immune carrier of the virus. What a great premise!! Can a marriage survive such a betrayal? Will the kids find out and hate Dad? Who knows, because a third of the way in, Dad contracts the virus (in an admittedly gloriously gruesome scene), kills Mum and goes off on a rampage that kickstarts a very average action movie with a pre-Hurt Locker Jeremy Runner.

WHAT were they thinking? To start so well and then screw these up is just such a waste. To be clear, I’d still recommend you go see 28 Years Later. The first half and bits of the second half are spectacular, unmissable. Everything I’ve said above doesn’t ruin the movie exactly, just detracts from the total perfection it very nearly was. Go rewatch the first one too. That’s a masterpiece. The scene where Murphy slaughters a military man and you’re just not sure if he’s infected because he’s so bloody mental? Genius.

But still, I am sad. I am devastated. I am filled with RAGE. (I should add I remain hopeful that the next film in the franchise, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, out next year, will take its serious bits less seriously and stop trying so hard to complicate the plot. Given a silly epilogue I haven’t even yet mentioned, I doubt it, but still, here’s hoping.)

What are your favourite films let down by bad endings or second halves? Have you seen the 28 days/weeks/years films? What did you think? Share your thoughts in the thread…

Ps In the name of being unequivocally POSITIVE, have you all seen Dying for Sex on Disney+? That really is a marvel.