It’s hard to overstate just how small the zombie genre was 23 years ago when Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” rejuvenated and supercharged the walking dead. George A. Romero’s films were largely sacrosanct, at least to horror fans, and there were always excellent imitators and playful homage. But the idea of a blockbuster mainstream TV series about the zombie apocalypse would have been laughable; the idea that zombies weren’t slow, shambling meat sacks was unthinkable. “28 Days Later,” with its low-fidelity “you are there” digital camerawork and deadlier, sprinting, infected monsters didn’t just give zombies a boost, they put zombies high on a pedestal, where they’ve been dwelling ever since.
It would be folly to expect “28 Years Later” — still just the third film in the franchise — to have that same impact today. The zombie genre is too big and popular and varied to blow our minds completely. So Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland, who built his own directorial career on similarly heady riffs on familiar sci-fi premises (“Ex Machina,” “Annihilation,” “Civil War”), aren’t revolutionizing anything. They’re just back to tell a story within the world they created. And they’re telling one hell of a story.
The year is 2030 and Britain has been completely quarantined for decades. The rest of the world fought off the infection, but the British Isles have regressed to the Dark Ages. Small communities of farmers protect their lands with bows and arrows, doing without modern amenities like electricity or, since all the doctors are dead, any meaningful knowledge of medicine whatsoever.
It’s in one of these communities where we meet Spike (Alfie Williams). He’s 12 years old and about to leave his island village to hunt zombies on the mainland with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), as his rite of passage. He sees what has become of the infected in all this time. Some waddle, all but helpless, on the ground, through the muck, dining on worms and any other meat they chance upon. Others roam naked and screaming through the woods, led by a new mutation: Alphas, whose bodies react to the Rage virus like it’s a magical steroid. They’re abnormally tall, too strong to be killed by conventional means, and — as we see time and time again — exceptionally well-endowed, just in case that was important to you.
It’s on this journey that Spike learns there may be one doctor left in England, so he conspires to transport his sick mother Isla (Jodie Comer) across harsh, zombie-ridden territory all by himself in the hopes of saving her life. That journey is fraught with peril and teaches Spike and Isla an important lesson about the meaning of life. And death. Both, really.
On the surface, that sounds like just a plot, some excuse to wander the woods on an escort mission and kill the undead (or the “28 [Blanks] Later” equivalent) like a triple-A video game. Technically that’s true, but that’s not how Danny Boyle films it. His earthy, Robin Hood aesthetic — courtesy of original “28 Days Later” cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle — gives the film a legendary vibe, like a folk tale future generations in this world will tell their kids. The film’s brazen, expressionistic, stream of consciousness editing — courtesy of Jon Harris (“127 Hours”) — attaches greater significance to every scene, intercutting marches through zombie terrain with World War I archival footage, and desperate arrow shots with giant projectile volleys from Laurence Olivier’s nationalistic World War II-era take on “Henry V.”
“28 Years Later” is, like many of Boyle’s best films, unmoored from generic cinematic conventions, and it goes wherever it wants to go, especially stylistically. But for the most part, the story is a classical coming-of-age tale in which Spike encounters the great big world, loses faith in his father figure and takes charge of his own destiny. He learns there’s more to the zombie apocalypse than he ever expected, and that the science they’ve lost also took their philosophy and spirituality with it. For a film with zombie heads punctured by pointy sticks and gas stations exploding (and inexplicably leaving our heroes unharmed), “28 Years Later” is remarkably mature and pensive.
It is also the first film in a new trilogy, so although this chapter comes to a fitting end, it doesn’t end there. Danny Boyle’s fearless propensity for drastic narrative shifts can’t be contained for long, and he lets that dog go out and play before the credits roll. I’m not sure where those new films are going, but I’m pretty sure watching it unfold is going to be a weird experience, for better or maybe worse.
For now, though, “28 Years Later” stands on its own — or at least, as its own temporary capper on this multi-decade series — and it stands tall. The filmmakers haven’t redefined the zombie genre, but they’ve refocused their own culturally significant riff into a lush, fascinating epic that has way more to say about being human than it does about (re-)killing the dead.
“28 Years Later” races into theaters on June 20.
