28 Years Later

Jimmy Fixes It 
For The Infected

28 Years Later
Directed by Danny Boyle
UK/USA 2025
Columbia
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Big spoilers. Avoid reading until you’ve seen it.

28 Years Later is, of course, the sequel to both 28 Days Later and its follow up, 28 Weeks Later. The first was a very popular retake on the zombie apocalypse genre but with the zombies replaced by RAGE virus infected killer humans and it had a strong opening which was quite similar to John Wyndham’s novel (and various adaptations of) The Day Of The Triffids. I would say the first two thirds of that movie were pretty good but it all, for me, kind of runs out of steam when you get to the military presence in the last third. I loved the second film though, even if it was more of a traditional style entry into that specific sub-genre... I just don’t remember a whole lot about it, truth be told. 

This third installment, made some 23 years after the first installment and, once more by the same director working with writer Alex Garland, is not just a sequel to those movies but also the first part of a new trilogy of 28 Years Later themed films, the second of which is rumoured to star the main lead of the first movie (the then unknown Cillian Murphy) and is currently to be released in January of next year.

And it’s a pretty good, actually. It has a strong opening where a bunch of kids try to ignore that the house they live in is being overrun by zombies as they watch the Teletubbies on television, somewhere around the time of the first outbreak... and the movie, which then jumps the 28 years later to the main setting, harkens back to this cold open at the very end of the tale. 

The main lead for the remainder being a 12 year old boy called Spike, played brilliantly throughout by Alfie Williams. The film is a game of two halves followed by a left of field prologue sequence. In sequence one it’s made clear, with some mostly credible retconning, that the UK is the only place where the infected remained. The UK is therefore a quarantine zone to the rest of the world, the shores patrolled by boats from other countries to make sure nobody tries to escape the British Isles. Spike lives in a small village compound separated from the mainland by a causeway which is only accessible when the tide is low... and yeah, that’s an obvious plot device for bad timing when running from hordes of RAGE infected zombies, for sure. 

Spike is taken to the mainland by his father, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, to get his first ‘zombie kills’ as a kind of rites of passage. And this is where the one thing which is wrong with this movie comes into play... people stupidly putting themselves in completely stupid situations and making stupid decisions for the sake of a taut and intense series of frightening scenes. And, yeah, the film is quite intense and bleak, more so in the first half hour than in any other part of the movie, I would say... as Spike and his father barely make it back to their village in one piece. 

The second main section involves more stupidity as Spike escapes from the village with his mum, played brilliantly by the great Jodie Comer, in order to seek out a Hearts Of Darkness Kurtz like character who was once a doctor and, of whom, evidence is found that he still lives (due to Spike and his dad observing a fire in the distance when they were hiding from the infected). Jodie Comer’s character Isla keeps having strange, delusionary episodes and, sometimes mistakes Spike for her father. However, when they do find the doctor, played by the great Ralph Fiennes, he diagnoses brain cancer and informs them she hasn’t got long to live. You can probably guess what happens next. 

And it’s a quite gruelling film for the first half an hour, for sure... and there are some beautiful shots in it. The cinematography looks like a gazillion dollars which is why I am suitably shocked and impressed to find the whole movie was shot on an iPhone... because it does look like an epic, it has to be said. Not to mention some great artistic choices such as the 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 poem Boots used to chilling effect (as it also is in the trailer) and the use of the Lawrence Olivier version of Henry V to further push certain metaphors. 

The second journey out to find the doctor is still quite action packed but I would say it’s more about the visual poetry of the story rather than the fright factor... although there are certainly some unsettling scenes to be had from this second expedition outside the relative safety of the compound. 

And then we get to the end sequence which... I really feel I need to talk about. Spoilers... you don’t want to know. 

So Spike makes a decision, after delivering a newborn baby back to his home. A newborn but uninfected baby which is birthed by a zombie... from when Spike’s mum helps said zombie out, in terms of the delivery. And the decision he comes to is to stay outside and take his chances in the world of the infected. However, it’s not long before he finds himself cornered by a load of RAGE infected, fast zombies. And then, in the film's third or fourth example of unlikely deux ex machina, he’s saved by a group of blonde haired... well. 

Okay... 

So this ending reminded me of the kind of satirical edge that 2000AD comic used to get into trouble for in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In a bizarre twist, this group of people, who I thought at, first were supposed to be blonde, Swedish death-metal fans and who beat up and kill the zombies with what seems to be almost superhuman strength and agility... are something which I think some members of the British audience may find a little triggering. They’re all dressed in roughly the same way, with track suits, lots of jewellery and white/blonde hair which may or may not be wigs. But it was only when the leader (who I think is supposed to be the grown up version of the main Teletubbies watching kid in the film’s prologue) puts his ring laden hand out to Spike and says, “I’m Jimmy, let’s be pals.” that I realised I was observing a cult of people who based themselves on Jimmy Saville. 

Now, it has to be said, that since the first movie was set contemporary to its release, these later installments are taking place in an alternative timeline of the UK. So, what makes the Jimmy Saville thing an even more curious choice is the fact that, in this timeline, his various crimes had not yet seen the light of day in public. So it is a very unusual choice, especially since it seems to imply that the next part, directed by Nia DaCosta (who did a great job on The Marvels, reviewed here, as far as I’m concerned), will be picking up the story directly after this one. 

And that’s me done with 28 Years Later, I think. A pretty good movie and an unexpected sequel after all this time (I was still waiting for a 28 Months Later, myself). Worth catching at the cinema, if you want to be impressed with what an iPhone can somehow capture, I would say. 

Yesterday

Star Gent’s Better Lone Key,
Part Dub, Fanned

Yesterday
UK/Russia/China
2019 Directed Danny Boyle
UK cinema release print

I should have seen this movie a lot sooner than I did, catching it now just on the last week or so of its cinema run. I’ve been listening to songs by The Beatles for most of my life now (well, around three quarters of it) and since their music plays such a huge part in this movie, I really should have got there sooner. Truth be told, I was kinda put off by the idea that this film was a romantic comedy... nothing against them, just not too many modern ones (post 1950s) done right. You get the odd couple per decade or two that are something special and, luckily for me this time around, this one is pretty good. Also, I had a slight accident recently so the day I had scheduled to go and see this was a day when, frankly, I wouldn’t have recovered enough to be able to walk to the cinema anyway.

But I got there in the end and this film was worth the wait. I find Danny Boyle a bit hit and miss as a director so I don’t go and see everything he does but this does have an almost unique premise so it was always going to make my ‘to see’ list at some point.

If you don’t already know the plot, Yesterday tells the story of main protagonist Jack, played by Himesh Patel, who is a struggling song writer/performer who, in spite of his brilliantly optimistic manager Ellie, played so well here by Lily James who kind of steals every scene she’s in, can’t make it big performing his own songs enough to get any interest and give up his job at a local supermarket and nor can he see the thing dangling right in front of his face... that he and Ellie are obviously attracted to each other but that he’s very late to the party in this regard. Then, one night when he has decided to call it quits and is riding home on his bike, the world experiences a phenomenon which causes all of the electricity everywhere to black out for about a minute. Because of this, a double decker bus hits Jack on his bike and he is knocked unconscious, waking in hospital with two big front teeth gone and lots of injuries which eventually heal. Now, the interpretation of what’s just happened here is left to the audience... did something happen to the world or did something just happen to him? Is there a religious intervention happening or did physics just slam the door. Did he even survive the bus? That’s all left up to you but, not long after he’s integrated back into his everyday life, he discovers that things have changed.

And the most prominent change to drive the plot is, nobody has heard of The Beatles or any of their songs. So, after some thinking, Jack starts ‘writing’ the hits of The Beatles and it’s not too long before he is on the road to what promises to be phenomenal world success. However, The Beatles aren’t the only things missing from the world as Jack remembers it and, it turns out, things which were once missing from our world are also now back in place... in a kind of changed way (no, don’t want to elaborate on that because it’s a bit of a spoiler).

And the film is brilliant, with some nice performances in addition to the two leads supplied by such wonderful character actors as Joel Fry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kate McKinnon  and some guy I saw in a Bridget Jones’ movie called Ed Sheeran who... well, frankly, I had no idea who he was when I saw that one and I still don’t really know but I’m guessing he’s some kind of modern pop star or some such. I’ve seen his face around somewhere.

Boyle keeps things nicely paced and there are some great comic moments which work in spite of the straight-laced delivery of Patel in the lead... or more than likely, work because of it. There are also some really nice little shout outs to The Beatles and I gave a chuckle when, for instance, one of the ‘post it’ notes with the titles to the songs that Jack is trying to remember, in a blink and you’ll miss it quick shot, is Revolution 9. Anybody who knows The White Album would tell you that this is an impossible track to cover. Not to mention the moment when Jack decides to launch his new album with a rooftop concert. There’s also a nice use of Beatles needle-drop, when the worldwide phenomenon that, effectively and depending on your interpretation, resets the world is just taking place... here the director uses the end build up from the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band track A Day In The Life to heighten the tension. I just wish Boyle had stuck with it because he really could have done with that sustained piano chord once Jack is hit by the bus.

There’s also a kind of sub plot in the movie when you worry just what is going to happen to Jack’s plan when two sinister looking people start following him around the world with the lurking realisation that... Jack might not be the only one who remembers The Beatles. The pay off to this build up is absolutely brilliant, it has to be said... the film was moving so fast that I actually didn’t see things coming. Which is always a good thing because movies are mostly so predictable these days.

My one minor criticism, if I had to have one, is Jack’s ‘final solution’ to the problem of the guilt he is suffering for finding fame from the back of the songs of The Beatles. It makes no sense whatsoever because nobody in the version of the world he has suddenly found himself in is getting hurt by his deception. On the contrary, people’s lives are richer for having these songs in their life. So, yeah... there’s no real logic to the end of the movie here but, hey, at least it made a heck of a lot more sense than Avengers - Endgame (reviewed here) so there’s that.

The other possible problem, for me, is that the songs that the film makers chose to use from The Beatles’ huge play list are, with the exception of All You Need Is Love, tracks I normally skip. All the truly great Beatles tracks (again, with the exception of the brilliant All You Need Is Love) such as Strawberry Fields Forever (mentioned but not used), Eleanor Rigby (almost used but alas, unremembered in terms of the lyrics by Jack), I Am The Walrus, Tomorrow Never Knows, I’m Only Sleeping, Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite, Magical Mystery Tour etc, from the 1966 - 1967 period where the group were at their absolute best, seem strangely absent.

Still, even so, Yesterday is a really great little movie and, frankly, Himesh Patel plays the role in such an interesting, throw away manor, while Lily James is... just wow... that I really didn’t worry too much that many of my favourites weren’t included. Lily James needs to be in more stuff, methinks. It’s a good little movie about a surreal premise where, as it should in real life (and hopefully always does), love wins the day and makes things right again. I’d grab this one again on Blu Ray, for sure.

Trance

Smooth EnTrance

Trance
UK 2013
Directed by Danny Boyle
Playing at cinemas now.

I’m not the biggest Danny Boyle fan, it’s true, but having said that, I almost always appreciate his films on some level and I very much liked his 28 Days Later. That being said, my main reason for going to see this movie was not the director, nor the majority of the excellent cast he has assembled to make this mesmerising thriller. I went to see this gig because of the always brilliant Rosario Dawson, who I first became aware of in the underrated and really quite phenomenal Josie And The Pussycats (seriously, if you want to see a really entertaining and subversive piece of propoganda about the current state of the music industry and the teenage audience it pretends to support, go see Josie And The Pussycats... such a great movie).

Trance is an ensemble piece when it comes to the acting but Rosario Dawson is, once again, the main attraction of this film, for this jaded audience member anyway, and it would certainly be true to say that she has a very “smooth entrance” in this movie... I just can’t tell you why without giving away one of the nicer surprises of the visual splendour of the film.

And visual splendour cut sharply like a diamond with some great editing is exactly what you get from Boyle here and it’s certainly one of the more addictive of the movies he’s made. Unfortunately, the main shaker and mover behind the plot is probably going to be obvious to the intended target audience even from just watching the trailer but, once you get over the fact that this film isn’t really going to surprise you all that much in terms of the deliberate and, sometimes quite elabourate, visual red herrings Boyle plugs you into in order to redirect your attention away from the truth of the plot, then you can start to watch the sometimes quite visceral image/sound poetry purely on its own terms. And frankly, the sooner in to the movie you do that, the more likely you are to have a better time with it.

Boyle uses a variety of techniques from longer, swooping visuals to hand held camera, fast edits, mixed stock treatments and differing rhythms... that he manages to make all that work without losing the interest of the viewer is a good indication of his particular talents in being able to put together a coherent entertainment for the screen. The transitory nature of the little story scenarios he builds up, before pulling them down before you, maybe gets a little tiring and just plain expected even from the outset, but this doesn’t stop there being some really nice little moments including a scene which, although you suspect it’s just a fantasy sequence already, reveals itself through such a nicely surreal and gory effect that you won’t feel cheated by the various redirection tricks going on around you as you watch.

Like a good Italian giallo (which it in no way resembles or tries to be) the deliberate blurring of the audiences focus to be able to bother following a specific line of enquiry makes for a movie where, in the end, you just won’t care who has done what... and like I said, if you saw the trailer then you probably guessed just who is on control here right from the word go anyway. Unfortunately, it’s one of the problems of the subject matter that it almost always tips itself off by its very nature but the director’s “sleight of hand” in some sequences is quite artistically and refreshingly achieved and most viewers who have an eye for visual opulence will not be too worried by the perhaps less than revealing nature of the solution to the mystery (and talking of revealing nature, there’s so much more I could say about the glamorous Ms. Dawson’s contribution to the film, especially in reference to my post title... but it’s probably best I don’t).

Trance is not a really great movie... but it’s certainly a good one and definitely one of the better distractions at the cinema right now if you want to go and see a movie which doesn’t rely totally on blowing things up (although there is some gun play and some quite raw scenes of violence on show here, to be fair). If this is your thing then Trance is probably one of the better options you’ve got at the cinema right now. Definitely something you should sample if you call yourself a fan of the medium and you want to support something British.  Who knows, it might inspire you to try to  give yourself a bit of a smooth entrance every now and again yourself.

5.29 Days Later...

127 Hours 2011 UK/USA

Directed by Danny Boyle

Playing at UK cinemas now.

Spoiler Warning: Um... Hang on a minute... isn’t that a bit like having a spoiler warning on Titanic? You already know the bloody ship’s going to sink on that one (so I never bothered watching it) and I suspect you probably already know the true life story behind this movie too... unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year or so... or, you know, trapped under it.

There’s a bit in the new movie by Danny Boyle, the famously successful British director of such respected movies as the zombie-tribute flick 28 Days Later, where he uses piercing sound to stand in as a direct link for the intensity of pain being felt as our intrepid real life hero Aron Ralston (played here unbearably but charmingly upbeat by actor James Franco) cuts through a big red tendon in his arm, which he’s already had to break the bone on so he can amputate said limb, with a lot more pain and anguish than in any of those old movies where make-do-and-mend bomb defusers had to make a choice as to whether they should cut the red wire or not.

This goes right back to silent movies when such metaphors were often thrown in for sound but expressed in visual metaphors to push their point home and while Franco was going through paroxyms of painful expressions (and doing it pretty well actually... he’s becoming a fine actor which is a big surprise for me) I couldn’t help but think of both the genius of German Expressionism/ Hollywood Noir director Fritz Lang and those two simmering surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel. Because they represent two obvious examples of directors using visual metaphor to push a point and the two specific examples I remembered while watching the action on screen were these two...

In Metropolis, Lang uses shafts of light coming from big metal sirens to suggest the wailing of factory worker shift changes in a most effective manner (if memory is serving me right). Similarly in Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, the buzzer of a front door being sounded is vibrantly shown by the juxtaposition of a pair of hands shaking up a cocktail as a stand in for... well noise. These points are used to demonstrate how the director of, so called, silent movies would use one tool in his visual armour to conjure up the idea of something that was just plain unavailable to him within budgetary and historically technical restrictions.

The other thing this made me think of was Darren Aranofsky, who did exactly the same thing that Boyle has done here in his brilliant debut feature Pi. In one of the more abstract scenes in that little masterpiece of a movie, the main protagonist finds a brain wrapped in paper on a subway station. Everytime he pokes at the brain with a pencil a shrill sound like a drill (presumably anticipating the end of the movie... but I shan’t give that away if you’ve not seen this particular slice of celluloid wonderful) pierces the soundtrack and he cringes in pain which is relieved only when he stops poking said internal organ.

This is exactly what Boyle has done with the sound to pain metaphor in 127 Hours... just as a silent director had no real sound to work with, Boyle and Aranofsky similarly use metaphor to express pain, which is unavailable to them as a real phenomenon of the movies they are making (so far... anyone want to predict when we will having the “painies” coming along in the same way we had the “talkies”). Regular readers of my column may well remember my disappointment, just a few weeks ago, with Aranofsky’s new movie Black Swan which I found dull, un-edgy and frankly unable to make me feel anything on an emotional level. But I got a little hit of the early genius brand of Aranofsky in Boyle’s latest which, despite the odds, manages to take a simple tale of a man getting stuck between a rock and a hard place... um... a bigger rock... and cutting his arm off with an inadequate instrument, seem a lot less duller than it sounds through the use of dynamic and possibly overwrought but certainly spectacular editing techniques and visual ideas which serve to give what you would expect to be a lesson in long, drawn out cinematography a large, adrenalin fuelled shot in the arm... if, indeed, you have at least one arm left to receive said adrenalin shot.

The real guy who did this extraordinary thing is never really treated with anything other than respect by the film-makers and you certainly get the impression that Ralston is definitely the kind of guy that you would want to hang around with in your local pub. This is true even during the sequence where Ralston is remonstrating with himself and taking the piss out of himself (in one of his more sober moments free from the sequences of hard-Boyled delirium that help to give this movie a break-neck pace)... yes, you know he’s been really stupid to get himself in such a jam where nobody else has any idea of where he is and with no sense of rescue... but that does nothing to diminish the courageous and more likable qualities of the character as he appears on screen and one can hope that the off-screen Ralston is as inspiring as his on-screen counterpart which is given a huge (huge!) lift by Franco’s performance.

So there you go... the pacing is jarring and fragmentary... cutting between long establishing-style shots looking at the natural beauty of the rocky terrain and fast-paced, fast-edited bouts of delirium fuelled dreams of events past and future from Ralstons life. I wouldn’t watch this one again (no DVD sale for me) but it is a really fine movie, highlighting that Boyle, unlike some other directors, is still very much at the top of his game and a cinematic artist worthy of your time and attention. Definitely one to watch... if only once.