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28 Years Later

Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, and Ralph Fiennes run from rage zombies in 28 Years Later. (Courtesy Columbia Pictures)

George Romero invented the modern zombie film starting in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. There had been zombie-themed horror films in the 1930s and ’40s, like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, but they had been focused on the Haitian Vodou roots of the zombie myth, filtered through the era’s ubiquitous racism.

Night of the Living Dead is not about a witch doctor using magic to control a white woman. In Romero’s vision, an unknown cosmic force reanimates “the unburied dead” who kill and eat the living. The word “zombie” is never uttered in the film; Romero and co-writer John Russo called them “ghouls.” But by the time Romero filmed the sequel, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, they were zombies, and his vision had replaced the original meaning of the word. 

The 21st century has seen a huge surge in zombie media. (How many seasons did The Walking Dead and its spinoffs run? Too many!) The zombie renaissance started in 2002 with 28 Days Later. Written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, it captured the imagination with its opening sequence where Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens from a coma and wanders through an empty London. While Romero’s zombies were shambling corpses who were easy to avoid but hard to escape, Boyle and Garland’s zombies were very fast and very mean — and not, technically speaking, dead. The highly infectious rage virus destroyed the thinking parts of the brain while amping up the victim’s fear and violence. 

Shot in the early days of digital, 28 Days Later was an early example of chaos cinema. Liberated from the cost of film stock, Boyle shot his action sequences handheld with lots of coverage, then jammed the whole thing together in the editing room, creating excitement out of the combination of shaky cam and quick cuts. It was a big factor in the film’s success and, along with The Bourne Identity, inspired a decade’s worth of disorienting and often sloppy action. 

The 2007 sequel, 28 Weeks Later, was produced by an entirely different team. Now, after a decade in development hell, Garland and Boyle have returned to zombieland with 28 Years Later. At the end of the last film, the rage virus had spread to Paris. But apparently, the Europeans had more luck combatting the zombies than the British did. Now, Britannia is a total quarantine zone. Anything that gets out is shot on sight by EU patrols, and if you go in, you’re on your own.

That’s not only EU policy; it’s also how they do things at Lindisfarne, an island off the Scottish coast connected to the mainland by a causeway which is only passable at low tide. That’s where 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and mother Isla (Jodie Comer). The survivors’ commune is pretty well protected by fortifications both natural and manmade, but they have virtually zero connection to the outside world. Isla is sick with an unknown ailment which leaves her confused and weak. When Jamie decides it’s time for 12-year-old Spike to come of age by killing his first zombie with a bow and arrow, Isla is terrified she’ll never see her son again. But she quickly forgets, and Spike reassures her he’s just going to school. The townsfolk give them a big sendoff, but not before the commune’s matriarch (Stella Gonet) reminds them, “No rescues. No exceptions.” 

Once on the mainland, Spike and Jamie loot houses that have been already picked over. In the forest, Jamie finds an obese rage zombie crawling on the ground eating worms. He goads a shaking Spike into putting an arrow in its jugular — and almost misses the second zombie sneaking up behind them. As they traipse through the ruined uplands, they attract the attention of an Alpha zombie (Chi Lewis-Parry). It seems that when some people are infected by the virus, their pituitary gland goes into overdrive, and they grow much larger and smarter than normal zombies. Since the ragers are mostly naked, we see that ALL of the Alpha’s bodily appendages have grown much larger than normal.  

While hiding in an attic from the Alpha and his minions, Spike sees a fire on the horizon. Jamie believes it belongs to Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), another survivor whom the Lindisfarne folks believe has gone stark raving mad. But what Spike hears is “doctor.” The commune hasn’t had a physician in years, and he’s hopeful that a real MD could cure his mother’s mysterious disease. When they finally make it back to their island, Spike makes a plan to escape to Dr. Kelson’s with Isla in tow. But what chance does a 12-year-old and a sickly dementia patient have in a Scotland swarming with zombies? 

The most surprising thing about 28 Years Later is how retro it is. Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shot the bulk of the movie on an iPhone 15 Pro Max — a much more advanced camera than the Canon XL1 they used on 28 Days Later. The edit is a blast of full frontal chaos cinema, circa 2003. The inhabitants of the British Isles have been reduced to a medieval state, while their European neighbors across the channel enjoy iPhones and cosmetic surgery. Editor Jon Harris gets the point across by intercutting Spike’s longbow practice sessions with scenes from Laurence Olivier’s wartime masterpiece Henry V. If you liked Natural Born Killers for the editing, this film is for you. 

But if you’re not into being pummeled by a W-era digital image flood, you might come away from 28 Years Later with a headache. Let’s just say the post-screening conversation in the Malco Studio on the Square men’s room grew quite heated. 

I was on the “pro” side of the argument. Boyle and Garland are all out of fucks to give, and I found their big swings exhilarating. At age 14, Alfie Williams is already a breakout talent; he and Jodi Corner are grounding presences amidst the chaos. Then Ralph Fiennes shows up painted red from head to toe, looking like things have gotten out of hand at the Grand Budapest Hotel. The British Isles isolated from the European Union, crawling with infected people who are too stupefied to help themselves, feels eerily familiar in our post-Brexit, post-Covid world, and that’s no coincidence. As George Romero taught us, the real villains are always the humans. 

28 Years Later

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Yesterday

There is a video that occasionally pops up online, but usually gets taken down quickly. It’s an August 3, 1983, benefit concert at First Avenue for the Minnestoa Dance Theater — the night Prince debuted his new band, The Revolution, and played “Purple Rain” for the first time.

Every other time Prince plays “Purple Rain” from that moment until his tragic death in 2016, the opening chords are met with ecstatic cheers, and the audience sings along to the “woo woo-woo wooooo” of the coda. But not that night. When the anonymous First Avenue videographers who captured the moment pan across the crowd, most of them are half-ignoring Prince. Who cares about some new song that doesn’t sound anything like “1999”?

Himesh Patel in Yesterday

But for some of them, there is a growing recognition that something wonderful is happening. When Prince plays the climactic guitar solo like he’s calling the angels down from heaven, a girl in the front row clasps her hands and bows her head as if in prayer. The guy beside her turns to his friend and, slack-jawed, jabs a thumb at the band. “Are you hearing this?”

That feeling of being there at the creation, when it suddenly felt like the world was new, is what Yesterday is all about. Jack (Himesh Patel) is a singer/songwriter from a sleepy English coastal resort town who splits his time between his music and working part-time at a Tesco-like warehouse superstore. Ellie (Lily James), his friend since childhood, is his “manager” and biggest fan. She comes to all of his gigs, which range from busking on the street to being ignored at children’s birthday parties. Finally, she gets him a spot at the Latitude Festival in nearby Suffolk. He’s excited. This could be his big break! But since it turns out to be in the locals tent, he once again plays to no one.

Terminally frustrated, he decides to hang up his guitar for good and return to teaching. But when he’s riding his bike home after a row with Ellie, a mysterious worldwide blackout happens. In the darkness and chaos, Jack is hit by a bus. When he awakens in the hospital, he’s missing a couple of front teeth. But the world, he soon finds out, is missing something more significant: The Beatles. No one but Jack can remember John, Paul, George, and Ringo. When he searches for them, Google asks, “Did you mean: beetles?”

So what does a singer/songwriter do when he’s slipped into an alternate universe where no one has heard “Yesterday”? He struggles to remember the chords and lyrics, then passes the song off as his own. Jack’s own personal First Avenue moment comes when he plays “Let It Be” for his indifferent parents. But slowly, word gets out about this kid who had a head injury and then starting writing incredible songs, and Jack is on his way to fame and fortune.

There are a lot of fascinating “what ifs?” along these lines, moments when a subtle twist here or there would forever change history. What if Elvis hadn’t made a big impression on Sun Records’ Marion Keisker and she never told Sam Phillips about him? What if DJ Kool Herc’s family never migrated from Jamaica to the Bronx? What if Mark David Chapman’s wife called the cops before he murdered John Lennon? But the real question is, would any of those scenarios make a better light comedy by Trainspotting director Danny Boyle and Love, Actually writer Richard Curtis?

Yesterday has its moments. Patel, a veteran British comedy actor, is charming and charismatic. He’s no Sir Paul, but he can actually sing okay. English songster Ed Sheeran appears as himself, and he can actually act okay. The film finds some teeth when Kate McKinnon shows up as Jack’s agent and starts dripping venom on the music industry.

But there’s not enough of that. Like most music nerds, I’m a fan of the Fab Four. But I understand how folks are turned off by the hype from the Beatle Industrial Complex. The film treats it as a given that the world would be unrecognizable if no one had ever heard “I Saw Her Standing There” and that “Help” would be a hit in 2019 if you just punked it up a bit. Yesterday plays it safe and provides pleasant entertainment. But The Beatles took big chances and never took their own press too seriously. That attitude would have made for a more interesting — and funnier — film.

Yesterday
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T2 Trainspotting

The current “epidemic” of recreational opioid drug use just goes to show you that everything old is new again. The world runs in cycles. Once everyone forgets how awful/awesome something is, it comes back around. Fascists, I’m looking at you—particularly the fascists sprung on oxy.

Long before the American white working class lost hope and found pharma, the flower of Scotland’s youth did it. Dismal weather, lack of jobs, and a football-besotted culture of toxic masculinity put the Scots on the smack back in the gone-gone grunge era of the 1990s. Granted, it was the stepped-on brown stuff smuggled by haji through the Khyber Pass, not pure, white pills ganked from grandma’s Medicare-funded cancer meds, so score another for American exceptionalism, I guess. USA!

The last time the smack was flowing through our veins leading to centers in our heads, we were in the early states of an indie film revolution. In America, it was QT and RR. In England, it was Danny Boyle, a nerdy upstart who knocked one out of the park adapting literary bad boy Irvine Welsch’s cult novel Trainspotting. Perhaps inspired by his junkie characters’ fetishization of Brian Eno, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop, Boyle made the most of his modest budget by looking to 70s art cinema for visual inspiration. No dutch angle was too extreme, no composition too expressive. But it was his cutting that set him apart: fast for the pre-digital era, but not so fast as to lose visual coherence. In 1996, Trainspotting was madness, but there was clearly method.

The standout in the Trainspotting ensemble of dead ender Edinburgers was one Ewen McGregor, who subsequently hit the big time playing young Obi Wan Kenobi and singing opposite Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge. Boyle’s star continued to rise as well, culminating in eight Academy Awards for his 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire. But Trainspotting was lightning in a bottle, still studied for its hyper hip artistry, even as the players it elevated matured into mainstreamers. When Boyle got the band back together for a sequel, twenty years later, who knew if it could still work?

T2 Trainspotting is based on Welsch’s 2002 sequel Porno. The three mates from the projects, Mark (McGregor), Simon “Sick Boy” Wiliamson (Johnny Lee Miller), and Spud (Ewen Bremmer), have somehow lived into middle age, as has their frenemy Franco (Robert Carlyle). Simon and Spud are still in Edinbough. Simon is ostensibly running his family’s failing pub, while making his real living crafting blackmail schemes with his on and off Eastern European girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova). Spud’s back on the smack after a messy divorce and series of horrible misunderstandings brought on by the switch to Daylight Savings Time. Franco is, of course, in jail for robbery and assault, but he busts out just in time for the return of Mark from Amsterdam, where he fled with 16,000 pounds of the gang’s money at the end of the first film. Mark, too, had a bad divorce, and his well paying desk job is on the way out thanks to a corporate merger. So he decides to stay in Edinburgh for a while to put a business face on Simon’s idea for a high class brothel to be run by Madame Veronika. Needless to say, creative larceny, bad sex, and betrayal ensue.

There can’t be another Trainspotting, of course, but upon exiting the theater, my first words were “Where has THIS Danny Boyle been for the last decade?” His Aaron Sorkin-penned Steve Jobs biopic was formally inventive, as always, but T2 is the uncut Boyle funk—restless, visually witty, evocative, and cool. The Boyle I like is not the sentimentalist of Slumdog Millionaire, it’s the guy who says “Projection mapping looks like fun. Let’s try some of that!” The story is episodic and character driven, as was the original, but it lacks a certain sense of urgency and danger. Maybe that’s because the cast is clearly having so much fun, they can barely contain themselves. Nineties niihlism has worn thin for everybody—turns out dysphemism is less fun when there’s actual apocalypse in the air—which reduces the proceedings to a lighter, cops-and-robbers exercise.

Making Trainspotting into a psychedelic Ocean’s 11 is completely forgivable when the riffs are this sharp. The soundtrack is all aces, with Prodigy remixing “Lust For Life”, and punk classics like “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” rubbing shoulders with Fat White Family. The updated “Choose Life!” speech, which Mark delivers to Veronika in an upscale bar while trying to get in her pants, falls flat, but when Simon gets up in Mark’s face and accuses him of being “a tourist in your own youth”, the punch lands both on McGregor and the audience. Maybe Gen X has a little snarl left after all.

T2 Trainspotting