Danny Boyle horror 28 Years Later has a lot to take in. An exploration of its ending, where The Bone Temple might go, and the importance of one particular character:
NB: The following contains heavy spoilers for 28 Years Later. If you haven’t seen the film yet, why not read our spoiler-free review instead?
A more cynical pair of filmmakers would probably have been content to give audiences more of the same. But rather than slavishly recreate the aggressive, grungy pace of 28 Days Later, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland come up with something quite different for this year’s sequel to their 2002 cult horror. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine another studio-backed horror franchise that would be willing to go as tonally off-piste as this film does in its coda: Jack O’Connell and his army of blonde-wigged, green tracksuit-wearing cultist ninjas, laying waste to a crowd of infected to a pounding heavy metal soundtrack. It was a bit odd, wasn’t it?
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 28 Years Later quite clearly sets the groundwork for the next film, director Nia DaCosta’s The Bone Temple – and if audiences show up as planned, a third movie will complete the trilogy. Boyle and Garland’s latest film is therefore the first act in a much longer opus. So where is it headed?
Although headlined by big names like Aaron-Taylor Johnson, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes, 28 Years Later really belongs to Spike – the 12 year-old kid superbly played by Alfie Williams. The post-apocalyptic sequel is seen almost entirely through his eyes: the claustrophobic island community he calls home, his well-meaning but flawed father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his desperately ill mother, Isla (Jodie Comer). Although 28 Years Later is undoubtedly in the zombie horror genre, it’s also a coming-of-age story about Spike – a boy finding his own place in a strange, violent world.
Where legacy sequels tend to wallow in nostalgia for its own sake (or for the box office’s sake), 28 Years Later presents it as something dangerous. In the 19th century, nostalgia was itself considered to be a kind of sickness – something Garland repeatedly alludes to in his script.
Decades after the Rage virus unleashed in the first film, the UK is a country in quarantine. While the rest of the world carries on as usual, the British Isles have stumbled back into a pre-industrial way of life: there are no computers and smartphones, and non-infected humans survive by hunting and farming. Spike’s community has necessarily created a fortification for itself on Holy Island in the North West, with the town’s walls protected by the sea. But the townsfolk have also taken on an almost retro hue – the men go off hunting and come back with tall tales of their adventures, which are drunkenly related in a makeshift community centre with a faded picture of Queen Elizabeth on the wall.
“They’re cherry picking the past,” Garland told us of the population we see in the film. “They’re misremembering the past, and they’re also having amnesia about some aspects of the past. And I think that what the film is doing is showing a kind of messy memory of the past in some respects. So when you look at the community on Holy Island, there’s a 1950s vibe about them: 1950s and back.”
Podcast: In conversation with Alex Garland
Jamie’s treatment of his son feeds into this: he’s intent on turning Spike into a hunter like himself, and regards the killing of the infected as an important rite of passage. Strip out the zombies, and 28 Years Later would look in places like a typically British social-realist drama – the story of a boy trying to fit his shooting-and-fishing obsessed father’s image of what a man looks and behaves like.
Jamie’s character is contrasted by Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) – a reclusive figure who lives on the mainland and regarded as a potentially dangerous crank by Spike’s grandfather. Desperate to find a cure for his sick mother, Spike decides to sneak out of the town – with Isla in tow – in the hope that Dr Kelson can offer a cure.
Although Dr Kelson’s habit of polishing skulls and turning them into quasi-ecclesiastical art installations marks him out as an eccentric, he’s nevertheless a scientist and a scholar. He playfully quotes Hamlet and treats the infected with the same dignity as he does with uninfected humans.
In this respect, Dr Kelson echoes Robert Neville, the protagonist in Richard Matheson’s horror novel, I Am Legend. Like Dr Kelson, Neville is a scientist alone in a sea of plague-infected ghouls. As Neville tries to find a cure for the disease that turns people into pallid vampires, the creatures themselves are busy rearranging themselves into a new kind of society. The latter plot point is hinted at in 28 Years Later, too: we see the infected hunting in packs and led by muscular ‘alphas’, while the crawling, worm-eating zombies Jamie and Spike encounter near the start of the movie appear to be a family.
One of the infected is also heavily pregnant, later delivering what appears to be a perfectly healthy, virus-free baby that Spike and his mother take under their wing. Whether she was pregnant when she was infected or these creatures have learned to do the deed is left unsaid. The baby could play a big part in The Bone Temple (or the third film) after Spike takes it back to his village at the end of the film.
Read more: 28 Years Later interview | Screenwriter Alex Garland on its inspiration and themes
Ultimately, after Dr Kelson euthanises his terminally-ill mother, Spike rejects the oppressive, ultra-masculine path offered by his father and the people of Holy Island, and sets off on his own uncertain journey. But then comes that startling coda, with Jack O’Connell and his cultist ninja army.
O’Connell, it turns out, is Jimmy – the kid we see in the opening scene fleeing from a domestic bloodbath even more nightmarish than an episode of Teletubbies. Thirty years on, and the now fully-grown Jimmy appears to have imbibed the religious fervour of his dad – as signposted by the now upside-down crucifix said father pressed into Jimmy’s hand just before he was torn apart by an infected horde.
What does this mean for next year’s sequel, The Bone Temple? If the theme of 28 Years Later is of looking forward rather than looking back, of reason (as represented by Dr Kelson) rather than mindless machismo, then the sequel could be joined by arguments about science versus religion. The title itself hints at a religious theme, while the occasional sight of the word ‘Jimmy’ carved into a man’s chest and into the side of a building could imply that O’Connell’s character is a Charles Manson-type figure. (The Bone Temple is almost certainly a reference to Dr Kelson’s artistic mountain of skulls, though we can only speculate as to how it’ll appear in the story.)
Garland has also said that Ralph Fiennes will be back for The Bone Temple, and implied that his role will be bigger next time around. Saying that the new trilogy is “super-preoccupied” with the theme of progress and regress, he added, “In the second film, that becomes very explicit.”
“You’ve got a super regressive community in Holy Island. And then you meet this guy, Dr Kelson, played by Ralph Fiennes, who on the outside kind of looks a bit like Colonel Kurtz, or someone who’s gone a bit crazy, and he’s surrounded by corpses. And actually what you [find] is a super compassionate, progressive person who’s not differentiating between infected dead people and non-infected dead people. He’s seeing them like a kindly doctor, as sick people and healthy people, but still just people… And again, this will become clearer in the second film. He’s a good natured, compassionate atheist scientist.”
Alfie Williams is also back as Spike in The Bone Temple, and Danny Boyle has said that he’ll also play a central part in his third film, should it get made. “He follows right the way through,” Boyle recently said on Virgin Radio. “Eventually there’ll be a third film that he’ll be in as well, that’s the idea.”
The trilogy as a whole could therefore end up being about Spike’s coming of age in a violent and divided Britain. On one side, there are the infected, who are evolving in their own way; on the other, there are the disparate communities of farmers and athletic cultists. There’s Dr Kelson, who’s found his own, more cerebral way of surviving in a hostile landscape. Only time will tell what route Spike will take; for now, his character offers a ray of optimism in a dark and at times surreal saga.
If there’s hope for the human race, the film suggests, it’s in younger generations rejecting the mistakes of their ancestors, and looking forward rather than back to some mythical past.
28 Years Later is in cinemas now. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is scheduled for release on the 6th January.
