28 Years After will be the film of this summer. At times scary, funny and gloriously weird, it is a story about nature and our fears of it. As such, it is worth asking what the wildness is in its story which threatens to overwhelm us?
The film is the third in a five-picture series. In the first movie, 28 Days Later (2002), Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a Britain taken over by monsters – “the infected”.
What audiences loved about the movie was the vision of a depopulated London: without cars or movement. Even money was abandoned in the streets. In the film’s second half, Jim’s practical view of the apocalypse – that it creates small moments of intimacy among the horror – clashes with the ideas of Major West (Christopher Eccleston).
Guessing
West offers Jim sanctuary and a mission of renewal: “Our real job is to rebuild. Start again. Down here is the wood-fired boiler that provides us with hot water. Our first step”.
In West’s reasoning, man has the capacity to rule the world because of his deeper obedience to something natural – the urge to reproduce.
The Major’s soldiers capture Jim’s two women companions (Naomie Harris and Megan Burns), dress them in red gowns, and propose to assault them. Their philosophy turns out to be a moral threat to Jim and his friends, worse even than the monsters with their merely physical harm.
The second film, 28 Weeks Later (2007), was a failure. It kept the monsters and the introspection – disaster returns because of one man’s cowardice – but the desire to spread the first British film to an American audience produced a by-numbers plot in which every turn was predictable.
In 28 Years After, by contrast, you are always guessing what will come next. The audience is left wondering whether we are watching Kes, or The Wicker Man or a British Apocalypse Now.
Surviving
It’s like being caught up in the middle of a shared Jenga game, the structure wobbles repeatedly and nearly falls. But it just about holds together – until the last two minutes anyway.
The part of 28 Years After which most viewers will share with their friends is the way the film experiments with its monsters. Unlike in the prequels, they must and can eat.
They have split into lower and higher forms, from slow-moving hulks which snail across the ground, to Alphas capable of organising their fellow monsters and surviving terrible damage.
More significant is what the film does with place. The most basic form of eco-horror is a warning: don’t play with snakes, don’t swim with sharks.
A very long time ago, we learned to extend our notes of caution to people and to human-made environments. We taught ourselves to feel fear of a combination, the natural blended with the human-made.