Taylor Holmes’s 1915 rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 poem, ‘Boots’, with its repeated words pounding in one’s brain sets the tone for the film’s delirious beauty. That Kipling wrote it imagining the thoughts of an infantry soldier during the second Boer war and it has been used since for its psychological effects through the World Wars, in Russia, in videogames and now more than 100 years later in a post-apocalyptic horror movie, signifies how things change and remain the same.
28 Years Later (English)
Director: Danny Boyle
Starring: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes
Storyline: A boy travels to the ravaged mainland with his mother in search of a doctor to cure her who might cure her
Runtime: 115 minutes
The third installment in the series, which started with Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), followed by 28 Weeks Later (2007), 28 Years Later, written by Alex Garland, is the first of a new trilogy.
The movie opens with a young boy, Jimmy, whose family is overwhelmed by the rage virus, running to his father who is praying in church. His father welcomes the ravening hordes as a form of rapture while Jimmy escapes.
After 28 years, the rest of the world has conquered the virus and moved on while the United Kingdom is in quarantine. An island, Lindisfarne, connected to the mainland by a heavily guarded causeway, has a group of survivors living a kind of normal life.
Spike (Alfie Williams) is 12 years old and his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), feels the time has come for him to go to the mainland for his first kill — a rite of passage among the islanders.
Isla (Jodie Comer), Jamie’s wife and Spike’s mum, suffers from a mysterious illness with crippling headaches and memory loss. Spike is amazed at the vastness of the mainland, he learns of the different kind of infected from the bloated crawlers eating worms off the forest floors to the cunning, sentient, ripped Alphas who do a neat line in ripping off heads, spinal cord and all.
While Spike is celebrated as a hero on his return, he feels let down. When he learns of a mysterious doctor on the mainland, who might or might not be insane, he decides to take Isla to find the doctor in the hope of curing her.
Boyle is credited with revitalising the post apocalyptic zombie genre, whose influence is still felt today, what with the nasty cordyceps laying waste to civilisation on a screen near you. Similar to other apocalyptic tales, 28 Years Later features intense bloody, brutal action — Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), the powerful alpha, is the stuff of nightmares.
It also features stretches of unimaginable beauty. The ruined countryside looks magnificent, truly a bejewelled isle reinforced by the bird’s-eye view. Ralph Fiennes as the mysterious Doctor Kelson, though echoing Colonel Kurtz, sees a beauty in the horror of it. His ritualistic citadel of bones is a temple to insanity or cold reason depending on your perspective. He brings memories of that other great renaissance navel gazer/deep thinker, when he holds up a skull to say “Alas, poor Erik.”
Fiennes brings in the gravitas, while Williams embodies the raw power and frailty of youth, and Edvin Ryding as Erik, the hapless Swedish NATO soldier, provides the unintentional humour. With a sequel featuring more of cult leader, Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), and Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later, this is one psychedelic nightmare train, with Boyle and Garland at the wheel, that you will want to ride all the way to the end of the world.
28 Years Later is currently running in theatres
Published – June 20, 2025 07:32 pm IST
