'28 Years Later' (2025): Review
Boots, boots, boots. There's no discharge in the war!
I got to see the first screening at my local Odeon; just as I went to my local Odeon in Richmond back in 2002 to see 28 Days Later to witness horror history.
I have a thing for zombie movies, especially when it comes to the many breeds of Infected you get these day from media. But Days, that was the first time you saw fast infected in a story which focused on the relationships of the main characters and the slow beauty of a world being reclaimed from humanity.
Years is very much a sequel to the original, although it’s confirmed that Weeks is just as canon. The story is also very focused on relationships, specifically those between Spike, a teen on Lindisfarne, Holy Island, who is about to undergo his rite of passage by going to the mainland.
The first scene, though, takes us back to the outbreak in which kids are watching The Teletubbies, of all things, as the world collapses around them. A a single boy survives, running to a nearby church where his father is the priest, only to survive and escape.
Then we meet Spike and his dad, Jamie. Initially I was convinced Jamie was the adult version of that boy we met in the first scene but apparently not. We’ll get to that in a bit. We also meet his mum, Isla, who is stricken with an illness that presents like dementia.
Jamie has been raised, as have all the kids, to shoot and to contribute to the community by taking on adult roles. Spike is young for his age but Jamie has decided he is ready so the pair walk the causeway, which floods at high tide, to the mainland in order for Spike to get his first kill.
The cinematography is an interesting mix of the beauty of northern England and the massive herds of deer (who are so numerous and swift, they can take down a building…). The Infected seem to fall into two camps: the dessicated and weak and the obese and chonky, attributed to steroids.
Jamie and Spike end up trapped and out of arrows; neither seem to have more than a pocket knife… while and Alpha watches them. Alphas are suggested to be the smart Infected of the area and this one is good at tracking. This leads to a low tide run back to the Islands and I honestly thought the main event was going to be the Infected trying to get through the Island’s barricades…
Boy, was I wrong.
This not a movie about the virus, or the zombies but about people with this film focusing solely on Spike and his parents, with the first act focusing on Spike’s first hunt and trip to the mainland with his father, and the second half following along as Spike takes his mother to find a mysterious doctor living on the mainland.
The final scene is about Spike himself, and his meeting with Jimmy, who we met in the opening scene, as he takes to the mainland on his own to be his own person.
(Note: Jimmy is really giving me Jimmy Saville vibes, right down from the look to the name: Sir Jimmy Crystal… I know the original was set around 2002, thus before the whole Saville thing came to light but I need to make sure this isn’t just me... This definitely intentional…)
EDIT: I was right IGN just released this article explaining why. I was wondering if it was to do with the whole Jim’ll Fix It narrative, that the cult will fix the world, but apparently it’s more to do with vestigal memories of the world before…
(PS: He’s played by the same actor who played Remmick in Sinners! We don’t get to see much of him but I’m curious to learn more about him and his cult in The Bone Temple, due out next year.)
Even though this is a 28 … Later film, it’s very much the start of something new. The Rage Virus has turned the UK into a leper colony, no one is allowed to leave and the natives are forced to rely on themselves. Using Lindisfarne is a fascinating way of acknowledging that survivors exist, and that it’s possible to live and survive with a community.
Also all the kids are taught about careers within the community, such as steamstering or hunting, or fletching arrows. We see the kids learning archery with the bow as their main weapon (which makes sense as you can shoot Infected before they get close enough to vomit blood on you…)
We don’t really get hordes of Infected running either, not like the first scene of 28 Weeks Later, which still gives me the creeps today. The film also reminds viewers that these are human beings, albeit ones infected with Rage. There are quite a few shots of colonies of them, wandering through woodlands and hunting, they even stop to bathe.
This is important as we meet a pregnant infected. And then she gives birth, forgetting her Rage for a few moments in order to birth her baby with the help of Isla. Only to then revert and get a headshot a milisecond later
Oh and the baby is fine, BTW, which makes sense not just because of the placenta offering some protection but also because of the simple question: Who does a baby hate?
The filming locations are gorgeous, from the Holy Island to the rolling hills. We even get a shot of the Angel of the North. Britain in this quarantine world looks amazing, with herds of deer running, rolling blue skies filled with fluffy white clouds and little signs that the world is being taken back by nature a la The Last of Us (which, remember, this series predates).
When we first visit with Jamie and Spike, the mainland is terrifying, with rotting houses, broken bridges and the threat of the infected, both the obese slow ones, and the faster ones led by Alphas, like Sampson.
Jamie is a loving father but also a little toxic in places, he keeps his son safe but then cheats on his mother with another woman, thus breaking Spike’s perfect image of him. Then, he essentially fades out of the film until its closing moments.
We visit the mainland again with Isla, the land becomes full of beauty, quiet moments, even a picnic.
Also worth remembering is that the outside world continues to exist and move at a fast rate, indeed this is our world, just with a viral outbreak contained around the UK mainland.
A redshirt character carries a modern smartphone, which Spike has never seen, and then tries to explain the online world where it is possible to summon someone to bring things to you; quite the juxtaposition between the mediaeval life with a few modern conveniences and the world of the late 2020s.
While the narrative is basically linear, there are moments with what I can only describe as overlay; moments when the camera reveals things we couldn’t know like an Infected stabbing a deer’s head on a branch or a moment when Isla rage-kills an Infected that threatened a sleeping Spike.
There are other moments, showing battles against the Infected on Holy Island, in which hundreds of people launch arrows in a way that can only be described as ‘inspired’ by Game of Thrones.
Other instances include the dial-up internet noise, no doubt one of Isla’s memories of before the outbreak. There is also a nice insertion of lines from ‘Boots’, the poem by Rudyard Kipling (specifically the 1915 spoken-word recording of the poem by Taylor Holmes) that was used in the trailer campaign for the film.
The film itself culminates in its big set piece: The Bone Temple, a monument made by humanist and doctor, Ian Kelson. The assumption, pre-release, was that this would be an important part of the film and it is, but not for the reason you anticipate. Was it something the Infected made, or perhaps a cult?
No, it is simply a monument meant to remind the good doctor, and Spike, that everyone must due. We see Kelson process a skull, boiling it and heating it until the skin and hair sloughs off.
He then instructs Spike to find a place for it in the tower. He’s so nice about it all, so compassionate, even when Spike knocks a skull out of place. It’s as much a part of the evolution of the monument as adding a skull is. This is not some grotesque monstrosity, rather it is ensuring every skull can have some kind of peace even after the violence of their lives.
It is Kelson who serves as the psychopomp in this post-apocalyptic world. He gives Isla the name of her illness, cancer, either begun in her brain and metastasised into her lymph nodes and breasts, or vice versa. Then he offers her death, painless, kind and quick, using darts laced with morphine. Drugged, Spike cannot stop this passage, this death, and I think he will carry it with him in the future films; you can die brutally, or painfully, but everyone must die.
That poster, that iconic image, is Spike giving his mother the best view in the tower, the most special of nooks and crannies, to spend the next years and decades of her existence with her eyes to the rising sun.
This film is Spike’s rite of passage and, at the end, he returns baby Isla to the community in hope they will raise her and decides to go off, alone, to find the place where you cannot see the sea, to see how big the mainland really is; This sets up that we’ve only see the first of three films but also sets up The Bone Temple as something which will give us more answers and probably so more questions.
This was not the horror film any of us though we’d be getting. Not what the trailers told us we’d be getting and that makes the film very diverse; the two halves, the realities of life in a world of Infected but not focusing on them, rather focusing on how this affects those left behind. Some will love it, some will hate it; I’m still trying to sum up my feelings.
It’s not as simple as loving it, or disliking the film, it’s about finding the beauty of moments in life, watching nature, enjoying a fine day, but also knowing that death is a moment away, violent or blissful, it can and will take all of us in the end.
As Dr. Kelson says: Memento mori, remember that we all must die.
28 Years Later is in cinemas now.