Movie Review: Danny Boyle returns with a vicious vision in “28 Years Later”

While many of us were following the beginnings of the Afghanistan War and “American Idol,” Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland were probing the fragile fabric of society, and the potentially very quick way, indeed, horror might come our way.

Danny Boyle’s 2002 dystopian thriller “28 Days Later” managed to be on the cutting edge of two trends- global pandemic and fleet-footed zombies. While many of us were following the beginnings of the Afghanistan War and “American Idol,” Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland were probing the fragile fabric of society, and the potentially very quick way, indeed, horror might come our way.

Boyle always maintained that his undead weren’t zombies at all, but were simply the infected. In that film, and its 2007 sequel ‘28 Weeks Later’, the filmmakers have followed the fallout of the so-called rage virus, which emptied London in the first film and brought soon-dashed hopes of the virus’s eradication in the second movie.

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In the new ‘28 Years Later,’ Boyle and Garland return to their apocalyptic pandemic with the benefit of now having lived through one. “28 Years Later” has remained in the U.K., now a quarantine region where the infected roam free and survivors cluster on an island off the northeast of Britain, connected to the mainland by only a stone causeway that dips below the water at high tide.

On the secluded Holy Island, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his hunter father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and bedridden mother, Isla (Jodie Comer). The scene, with makeshift watchtowers and bows and arrows for weapons, is almost medieval. On Spike’s first trip off the island, his father helps him kill his first infected. Back inside the village walls, Jamie celebrates their near scrapes and exaggerates his son’s coolness under pressure. Other developments cause Spike to question the macho world he’s being raised in.

After hearing of a far-off, supposedly deranged doctor whose constant fires mystify the townspeople, Spike resolves to take his mother to him in hopes of healing her unknown illness. Ralph Fiennes plays the doctor, orange-colored when they encounter him; Edvin Ryding plays a Swedish NATO soldier whose patrol boat crashed offshore. Meanwhile, Comer is almost comically delusional, frequently calling her son “Daddy.”

And the infected? While some remain Olympic-worthy sprinters, other slothful ones, nicknamed “Slow-Lows”, crawl around on the ground, rummaging for worms. This is an unusually soulful coming-of-age movie considering the number of spinal cords that get ripped right out of bodies.