You can try to live with rage virus but it’ll just keep evolving into something weirder
As laid out, this latest in the Danny Boyle-Alex Garland zombie apocalypse series is more reboot than a trilogy closeout for “28 Days Later” (2002) and “28 Weeks Later” (2007). In fact, it’s alleged to be the start of a new trilogy, with “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” already slated for 2026. But two films, a cinematic hat-trick does not make.
We also need to clear the chronology slate, 28 years later is not 2053, but more around now – 2030, if we extrapolate from the release date of “28 Days Later.” As with the other films, the setting is Britain, which still is the only infected area in the world as far as we know – in “Weeks,” as well as here, there are implications that the “rage virus” may be elsewhere, but it’s teaser. As to why survivors still reside on the isle of Britain: The island nation is quarantined and its coast patrolled rigorously by other countries – France and Sweden, at least.
The long and short is, if you’re in the infected U.K., you’re not getting out. Not exactly an ideal place to raise a family, but that’s exactly the role of Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnston, “Nowhere Boy”) and Isla (Jodie Comer, who was a standout in “The Bikeriders”). They live on a small islet off the coast connected by a causeway that’s exposed only at low tide. They’re part of a community that, isolated and short on power and technology, has flourished by defending that milelong causeway (my guesstimate) with unflinching precision like it’s the oil refinery in “The Road Warrior” (1981).
For the most, life is pretty good. There are schools and raucous social gatherings; for food and fuel, forays to the mainland are necessary, which, as you can guess, bear inherent peril.
From “28 Days,” we learned that the rage virus was a failed experiment to test an aggression pathogen on simians. Thanks to animal-rights activists, the virus got out of the lab into the general population – a boomeranging if ever there was one, with themes from human arrogance and unintended circumstances to playing god (hello, Frankenstein) and the cold lack of humanity as society collapses.
In the new now, the infected have morphed. They eat food (in the previous films, they starved to death after a few days or weeks), have increased intelligence and a pack mentality, may be reproducing and pretty much exist au naturel – more “Quest for Fire” than “The Walking Dead.” There are also jacked berserkers known as alphas (think Jason Momoa, but a foot taller and having a bad hygiene day) that can take a whole machine gun magazine before slowing down, and creepy Rubenesque belly-crawlers who look like they slithered off the set of a “Human Centipede” movie.
On the islet, it’s a rite of passage to get your first zombie kill, so Jamie takes his 12-year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams, impressive, as so much of the film hangs on him) across the causeway, much against the wishes of Isla, who is suffering from bouts of confusion and delirium. While on the mainland, Spike notches his first kill fairly easily, but there’s a chaotic encounter with an alpha-led pack and a thundering stampede of deer. (We now know from this film, “Leave the World Behind” and “Flow” that seeing a group of deer means something very bad is about to happen). Spike also learns of the existence of a reclusive doctor (Ralph Fiennes) with strange proclivities. Spike decides the only way to save his mother is to sneak her off island and to the doctor. To say that mother and son are ill-equipped for the trek would be an understatement.
The film marks a reunion of Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “Trainspotting”) and Garland (“Ex Machina,” “Annihilation”), who collaborated as director and writer on the original “28 Days” chapter some 23 years ago. The two also worked together on ”The Beach” (2000), another dystopian tale set on an isolated island, but they don’t resurrect the same grim, angry, amped-up veneer that made “28 Days Later” so dark and hopeless in outlook. No, there’s hope and humanity, which also got bandied about in “28 Weeks Later,” the interim chapter well-crafted by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and penned by a trilogy of writers – none named Garland.
“Years,” while less bleak, is also less gory. The zombie costuming and effects and gorgeous cinematography are transporting – as is the staging – but there’s a degree of cartoonishness to “Years” the way there was in Neil Marshall’s underappreciated “Doomsday” (2008). Some of that comes from Jamie’s slack, tongue-in-cheek wisecracking in the face of a teeming zombie horde, or Fiennes’ droll, wry doc, ever slathered in orangey-red iodine to hold the virus at bay – and akin to Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now” in defiant intrepidness and isolationist ideology. Then there’s the sheer amount of full-frontal nudity you get from the naked infected crashing through the woods at a breakneck pace or pouring down a bucolic hillside. “Head and heart,” Jamie shouts at Spike as his arrow goes off aim and explodes its target’s manhood.
Cheekier yet is Spike asking a Swedish commando shipwrecked on the mainland (Edvin Ryding) what is wrong with his fiancee when the commando shares a picture of his betrothed on his quickly draining phone. The woman is Lindsey Vonn stunning, except for her abnormally plump, Kim Kardashian lips that are an unnatural shade of lilac purple. The image is near funhouse in spectacle, and when the commando asks Spike “What do you mean, ‘What’s wrong with her?’ She’s beautiful,” Spike replies sheepishly that he thought she was sick or infected. The best, however, is the gang of gym-suit-wearing droogs who employ a four-iron, driving wedges and gymnastics for their security detail.
Boyle and Garland obviously set out to do something beyond a straight-up, trope-riddled zombie horror film, which, given the genre’s endless rotten retreads, is admirable – really – but some elements, such as the cutaways to film clips of Ivanhoe knights letting fly salvos of arrows or the haunting pulse of Rudyard Kipling’s war ballad “Boots” as recited by Taylor-Johnson (so effectively deployed in the trailer), are layered in incongruously and pull the viewer out. There’s also the “state of the rest of globe” remarks that didn’t feel intrusive in other chapters, but beg questions here. One can imagine Boyle and Garland deciding on some envelope-pushing developments over a late-night scotch or two and never coming back to revisit the continuity the next day.
The film posters sub-label each installment (in order) as, “It began,” “It spread” and “It evolved.” It most definitely has evolved. In terms of style and texture, “Years” feels like a strange extension of Garland’s 2022 gender role examination, “Men.” It’s more a series of strange sojourns in the woods than running a gantlet of bloodthirsty maniacs. There’s even a maternity theme of birth and renewal and how the other gender is received and treated in a society – among the infected too. As far as the next chapter is concerned, “Years,” like “Weeks,” ends with a “28 Days Later” epilogue that lets you know where the world and the series is heading. In “Weeks,” that follow-on was a dim depiction that portended doom. Here we get an open-ended flourish of fancy.
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