28 Years Later
Zombie movies have exploded in popularity and become so ubiquitous in recent years that it’s easy to forget how thin on the ground they were until director Danny Boyle revitalized the then-moribund genre with his 2002 exercise in guerilla filmmaking, 28 Days Later. Grimy, stark, and shot on a shoestring budget, the film told the tale of a United Kingdom laid waste by the ‘Rage Virus’, a devastating plague liberated from an animal testing lab by misguided activists which reduced its victims to mindless, violent ‘zombies’. A sequel, 28 Weeks Later, followed in 2007, detailing a doomed attempt by U.S.-led NATO forces to purge the virus from Great Britain and re-establish society.
The intervening couple of decades have seen such a multiplicity of imitators, parodies, and pastiches that the entire zombie genre is in danger of becoming a tired cliché. Indeed, broad comedies like Zombieland and The Dead Don’t Die leave one wondering if it’s even possible to make a zombie movie un-ironically anymore. As if on cue, however, Boyle and his frequent collaborator, Alex Garland, have arrived with a belated but welcome reply in the form of 28 Years Later, which picks up the saga a generation on from the events of the original film.
The deserted, trash-strewn streets of London are nowhere to be seen this time around. Instead, Boyle takes us to the remote fastness of Holy Island, off the coast of Northumberland in north-eastern England. Here, heavily fortified and isolated from the infected hordes on the mainland, a small community of survivors has clung to a pastoral existence over the 28 years since the outbreak. The story centers on 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), who, as the film opens, is embarking on a rite of passage into adulthood. His father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson), is taking him on his first hunting and foraging trip to the mainland, leaving his sick and troubled mother Isla (Jodie Comer) in bed. Spike is successfully ‘blooded’ after using his archery skills to kill his first infected, but his father’s praise is cut short when they are hunted by an ‘alpha’ (an infected male mutated into a superhuman ‘pack leader’ by the rage virus) and must race back to the island. Safely back behind the community’s walls, Spike — unable to process all of the trauma in his life — finds himself repelled by the drunken, boorish celebration of his coming-of-age. While relating the events to an elderly survivor, Spike learns that there may still be a doctor alive on the mainland with the knowledge to treat his ailing mother, and the two set off on a desperate search to find her.
While 28 Years Later retains the DNA of its progenitors, it eschews their breakneck, claustrophobic tone in favor of an altogether different pace. This is as much a bucolic tale of a young boy’s reluctant and sudden journey into manhood as it is a zombie movie. The previous movies’ low-resolution, found-footage aesthetic has been replaced by lush, lingering, widescreen panoramas of the Northumberland countryside. Against this idyllic backdrop, Boyle — shooting almost entirely on an array of the latest Apple iPhones — employs jarring jump-cuts and disorienting camera angles to create visual tension between the action and the landscape. There are echoes of Ken Loach’s Kes in Spike’s journey, and the film’s final act, featuring a moving, deeply human performance by Ralph Fiennes as the elusive Doctor Kelson, feels like a life-affirming retelling of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
It’s worth noting that the first and last five minutes of 28 Years Later exist solely as a setup for a sequel, and incorporate a plot twist in such preposterously poor taste that it almost seems grafted in from a different film, but that doesn’t detract from what is otherwise an intelligently-crafted, subtle, and elegiac story. With zombies.
Thunderbolts*
2008 seems like an eternity ago. The credit crunch was in full swing, George W. Bush was still president, and the world of cinema was blissfully unaware that it was about to be devoured by the rampaging entertainment behemoth that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One can’t help wondering if the makers of 2008’s Iron Man had any sense whatsoever of what they were about to unleash — a multi-generational, multimedia juggernaut which would dominate popular entertainment for the next two decades and (possibly) beyond.
Seventeen years and thirty-six movies in, this cinematic titan is somewhat adrift. 2019’s Avengers: Endgame killed off the bulk of the franchise’s most popular characters and splintered the ‘universe’ into a ‘multiverse’, thus tossing any remnants of narrative continuity out the window in favor of an ever-more bewildering array of unconnected episodes featuring ‘B-list’ characters unfamiliar to all but the most ardent fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the original comic books. It’s here that Thunderbolts* (the asterisk is significant, although we don’t find out why until the film’s full title is revealed in the end credits) finds us, scratching our heads and muttering “...Who?”
Thunderbolts* attempts to answer the question: “How can we make an Avengers movie without the Avengers?” And, in a rather strained and accidental way, it mostly succeeds. The ensemble cast is headed by Florence Pugh, returning as Yelena Belova, the bereaved sister of the late Black Widow, now employed as an assassin by the film’s primary antagonist, sketchy government black-ops boss Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Yelena is in the midst of an identity crisis, weighed down by grief at the loss of her sister and doubting her purpose in the post-Endgame world, when she is betrayed by Valentina and finds herself in a remote laboratory in a standoff with a motley collection of other rogue operatives, all sent by Valentina to kill each other. Putting aside their differences, the crew discovers they’re not alone — a mild-mannered amnesiac in hospital scrubs who identifies only as ‘Bob’ (Lewis Pullman) appears, displaying a complete absence of super-powers. Needless to say, ‘Bob’ is not what he seems, and Yelena’s cobbled-together team of sort-of-super misfits have a fight on their hands as his true nature is revealed.
As an exercise in the familiar ‘assorted surly misanthropes bicker their way into becoming a team’ trope, Thunderbolts* does it by the numbers. There’s plenty of light relief along the way, particularly from David Harbor as Alexei Shostakov, bellowing his way through the movie with vodka-fueled gusto, and a script heavy on Joss-Whedon-style pop culture references. Where the movie comes unstuck is in its attempt to address the complex subject of mental health. This is one of those films which tries to boil the issue down to ‘It would all have been okay if only they’d gone to therapy’, but never quite manages to articulate how. Creating a ‘Clinical Depression Man’ whose super power is nihilistic despair may seem a dubious artistic decision, but it’s certainly on point in 2025. Florence Pugh’s nuanced performance as Yelena is the film’s undoubted highlight, though.
It may well be that the MCU’s glory days are behind it; and the messy, haphazard Thunderbolts* may well be what you get if you order The Avengers from Wish.com, but there’s still enough entertainment here to justify the ticket price. Just.
Recently arrived in the Tri-Cities from Scotland, Damian Beagan is a former freelancer who has written music and movie reviews for UK websites.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Boyle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Garland
https://www.nber.org/digest/mar09/explaining-credit-crunch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
