28 Years Later
I saw someone make a Brexit comparison here. The setup is that there’s a small (sort of) island that’s separated from the mainland by a raised path but only in low tide. Otherwise they’re completely isolated, agrarian (though I don’t see how they’d have, for example, a tech sector), hunters and, I dunno, maybe gatherers. The mainland is full of different kinds of zombies (someone even says the Z-word), fat ones, fast ones, “alphas”, pregnant ones. I don’t think this quite works as a Brexit metaphor unless you actually consider Europe to be full of rage virus infected flesh eaters. That’s Farage and co, I suppose. I mean, there are good things out there, that’s kind of a major plot point, but it can’t be stressed how much there really are murderous zombies. Maybe it just means the French.
Anyway, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who I did not recognise (beard) is married to an ailing Jodie Comer, who I also did not recognise (because I’m dumb) and they have a kid, Spike, who is about to go to the mainland for his first hunting trip. Initially, I thought he was going to actually hunt for food, there are tons of (CG) deer, but he’s actually there to learn how to shoot zombs with a bow and arrow. I suppose this is a useful skill. They, obviously, get attacked by a bunch of them, miss the low tide and have to spend the night in a shack that later collapses. I’m not a huge fan of the Zach Synder style freeze frame killshots, but the rest of this segment is pretty awesome, tense, violent, really gets the stakes across. The infected seem to eat to sustain themselves, those big fat ones must eat a lot of bugs. There are “alpha” zombies out there, which is waved away a little bit by saying the rage virus just made some dudes really big, don’t worry about it, and when low tide arrives again, they get chased back to the gate.
We get a little side story here about a doctor who had gone mad and was still living not far from them. Spike passes over “gone mad” and fixates on “doctor”. More on that later, but the supposed evidence that he’s gone mad was that he lined up all the dead bodies and was doing something to/with them. My first assumption, which seems reasonable, and ended up being correct, was that he was basically giving them all a decent funeral. That tower of skulls that’s in the marketing material is actually very wholesome in context.
Inside, they party. Spike gets given beer despite a) being 12 and b) not really wanting it, while his dad goes off with a (I presume) milkmaid. Spike witnesses this and is sad. He grabs his mother and they flee the town in search of the doctor. They have the expected scrapes - including one where Comer activates and smashes a zombie to death, in a flashback to something that took place, in universe, about an hour previously, and is never mentioned again - and meet Erik, a Swedish UN soldier whose patrol boat sank. His main purpose is to have his skull and spine torn out during the inevitable alpha attack, with its giant dick swinging in the wind the whole time. They witness an infected give birth to a perfectly healthy baby, and so obviously take it with them. This movie has got strong set-piece game, including this bit which takes place on a dilapidated train.
We eventually make it to Dr. Ralph Fiennes, jumping in with a blow dart to tranquilise the alpha who is about to crush everyone. Didn’t know he was in it, so that was nice. He calls the alpha zombie Samson, which is all very civilised, but I don’t quite get why he doesn’t kill it, since it is very dangerous and comes within seconds of tearing his skull out later. Are we to believe he has never killed an infected? He diagnoses Comer has having incurable cancer and within about half an hour has reduced her to a skull on his mountain. It’s actually done in a very touching way, but boy is it quick. I guess they wouldn’t have another chance for a good death. I’ve read this whole section as an alternative kind of masculinity, healing and remembering, rather than what we got at the beginning with the killing and drinking, fun though that seems.
Spike drops the baby off home and wanders back to the mainland to become a man. He meets - not a joke - a gang of Jimmy Saviles and then I learned that there are two sequels in production so that’s that for now. I kind of curse myself for so often going to the cinema for franchise sequels and remakes and not seeing, like, Megalopolis, but I got my money’s worth here.