I saw 28 Years Later mainly for the AC (it was an even 100 degrees Farenheit in New York the day I went), but as it happened, I really enjoyed it. The original movie in the series, 28 Days Later, ends when a plucky group of zombie killers learns that the whole world hasn't been destroyed by the plague, like they thought, but only England, which is quarantined. In 28 Years Later, this quarantine is, improbably, still on. The main characters live in a tiny island off Scotland, in a poor but well-functioning farming community based on the values of thrift, communal goods, and killing zombies with a clean arrow-shot to the head or chest. The Brits love this thatched-cottage dystopia stuff, and this village society is pretty pleasant. One of its attractive archaisms is the male initiation rite, which in this case means going to the mainland for the first time via a picturesque causeway only accessible for a few hours when the tide is low. The hero, twelve-year-old Spike, makes this crossing, accompanied by his father. On the mainland, father and son kill a few zombies, are chased by others, and barely make it back alive. Then Spike, after a fight with his dad, takes his sick mother back over the causeway and onto the mainland to look for a doctor, where they have other terrifying adventures.
I watched 28 Years Later with a friend. My wife refused to go, as did his girlfriend. They made a good decision: the movie is incredibly violent and disgusting. The first scene involves a roomful of children being slaughtered while Teletubbies plays in the background. The 28 Days franchise got started during the zombie craze of the oughts, when there were so many of these movies that each new one had to stand out in some way. Boyle's innovation was fast zombies. Traditionally, zombies' slowness was what made them scary: they were slow but inexorable, the terror was drawn out as, seemingly against the odds, the much faster humans were run to ground, boxed in, and checkmated by brainless ghouls. But fast zombies are, for obvious reasons, even scarier. The ones in Boyle's movies charge their human prey in a fast-forward frenzy, limbs flailing, a look on their face exactly like Saturn devouring his son. It's hard to imagine any creature more unpleasant. The new movie features its own version of slow zombies, too: not the shambling mob of George Romero's movies but obese balloonlike creatures with the puffy pig-eyed faces of soccer hooligans. They crawl on the ground and eat worms, and, if you're slow enough, you. We get treated to the sight of both kinds of zombies shot dead with arrows, blown apart with machine guns, clubbed, decapitated, and burned. And naturally we also get to watch them devour humans, with all the sounds. One super-zombie has a move where he rips people's head and spines right out of their body. To make it even more sense-assaulting, the movie is shot in what used to be called MTV style: trashy and overloud, with lots of jarringly quick cuts, disorienting changes of vantage point, and intrusive music. I'm told some of it was shot on tricked-out iphones.
And yet despite all the splatter and the off-putting style, I enjoyed 28 Years Later more than just about any movie I've seen this year, and not just for the well-delivered thrills. I found myself almost transported, in an old-fashioned movie-magic way. There is something refreshing, even romantic about this film. When the super-zombie pursues the heroes over the causeway under a dreamlike spread of stars, it's quite beautiful. At one point Spike, awed by the sheer quantity of land on the mainland, gazes into the distance and sees a fire burning. His father is cagey about its source, but we learn later that it belongs to one Dr. Kelson, a mysterious person with a strange past. I wondered if Dr. Kelson might be engaged in some sort of genetic cross-breeding experiment with the zombies to make them more intelligent or something like that, but it turns out he's building a giant memorial to the dead out of human bones and skulls. It's pretty impressive, but it could just as well have been plenty of other things: this little corner of Scotland, and indeed, all of Britain, have been transformed into a wilderness where anything can happen. The young hero has no idea what mysteries it contains, and neither do we.
This is the post-apocalyptic idyll, a fantasy that was flourishing at around the time the original 28 Days Later appeared. I first encountered it in Alan Weisman's wonderful 2007 nonfiction book, The World Without Us, which imagined what would happen to the earth if, from one moment to the next, human beings were to disappear. Weisman talked to experts to try to get the details. How long would it take for skyscrapers to fall down, or bridges? What would happen to nuclear power plants? The pleasure of visiting ruins half-overgrown with grass and trees: Weisman's book invited us to imagine doing that with our entire civilization. "The trump card of the end-of-the-world movies," Susan Sontag writes in "The Imagination of Disaster," her essay on science fiction films, "is that great scene with New York or London or Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated." Many disaster movies of this era played this card well. 28 Days Later featured beautiful shots of an abandoned London. There was a nice scene of Will Smith hunting deer on the West Side of Manhattan in the otherwise boring I Am Legend. Not dystopian but somehow in the same escapist spirit was the Mannahatta Project, a natural history of the island of Manhattan in 1609, back when it was a bucolic paradise without a single overpass or Chase Bank.
Alex Garland, the screenwriter of 28 Years, has a feeling for the depopulated idyll: the pristine island of The Beach, the billionaire's isolated mansion in Ex Machina, the weird wilderness in Annihilation. 28 Years Later is another such fairytale setting. So much popular entertainment tries to stay relevant and seem serious by being dark and depressing. Directors pour on gloom like a thick sauce to cover up their insipid films. But 28 Years isn't depressing at all. It's as if it pays its duty to gloom with such outrageous zombie horror that it can be, at heart, hopeful and fun. Here where the very worst happens constantly, the land is re-enchanted, life and community have meaning, things can be beautiful (or horrible/sublime), and you can unplug and get back to basics. It's as though it takes all that splatter violence for us to be able to enjoy a simple story, which in this case involves a boy's coming of age, rebelling against his father, and losing his mother (not to zombies, for better or for worse).
What's especially pleasant about this movie is that within the quarantine area, there's no suggestion that any of this zombie horror is going to end. There's no tedious struggle to save humanity ("If we can get the serum to [X location], we just might have a chance to develop a vaccine!"), no boring morality tale, no hints that this goes all the way to the top and is somehow being done by politicians to help corporations. No, it's just that England has been turned into a kind of story preserve. Obviously there are going to be sequels, and I don't blame the producers, there's plenty more material there. It's great to see this revival of the empty earth fantasy and I hope we see more of it, more containment zones, exclusion zones, Area Xs, and other terra incognitas. That's where the magic happens.