For the most part, “28 Years Later” bored the hell out of me. I’ll admit that I didn’t expect a zombie movie directed by Danny Boyle to pick my pocket as franchise movies so reliably do, providing only a semblance of a plot or point. All out of the expectation that I pay again several more times to get the pleasure of a narrative well-spooled, that movies used to provide after payment for the first ticket had been remitted.
Chalk it up to my naiveté. Greed is good again and everybody wants a taste of that franchise cheddar. Why settle for a zombie sequel when you can have a sequel-slash-reboot-slash-potential pilot for a TV series?
“28 Years Later” is a sequel to “28 Days Later” and “28 Weeks Later,” both of which are self-contained movies. “28 Years Later” adds nothing to them and establishes nothing on its own terms. It’s a tease, a half-hearted first act stretched out to nearly two hours.
The new movie was written by Alex Garland, who wrote “28 Days Later” and the novel that inspired Boyle’s 2000 film of “The Beach,” and who has since gone on to become one of the most bewilderingly overrated writer-directors in contemporary cinema. Last year, reviewing Garland’s smug and generic “Civil War,” I suggested that it was a zombie movie without the zombies. Well, “28 Years Later” shows that zombies don’t help the current Garland recipe all that much.
Garland specializes in treating simple ideas preciously, flattering the audience’s intelligence for buying secondhand goods. Modern critics, who are as easily fooled and flattered as anyone else in the theater, probably more so, love when artists do that. As in “Civil War,” much of “28 Years Later” concerns people walking across war-pocked landscapes towards an underwhelming conclusion, trading flavorless dialogue that’s loaded with breadcrumbs about the film’s “world.”
Spike (Alfie Williams) is a 12-year-old boy who is from a small island that’s linked via a causeway to zombie-infected Britain. His mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), has an unknown disease and is given to being easily confused and slipping in and out of consciousness. Hearing of a mysterious, maybe mad doctor, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who is out in the middle of the woods on the mainland, Plucky Hero spirits Mrs. Plot Point off the island to get her Third Act Resolution, out from under the nose of the father, Jamie (Aaron-Taylor Johnson), whom Plucky Hero resents for Inciting Incident.
I confess to not understanding why every post-apocalyptic movie hinges on a road trip. I get the appeal that it may have for screenwriters, granting them permission to ignore a larger structure and invent new skits every few pages or so. But the zombie skirmishes of the movie’s second hour are few and far between, and are nothing that you haven’t seen delivered with more impact in “The Walking Dead.”
We await the discovery of Kelson and of that creepy bone tower that has been so prominently displayed in the trailers. We, especially those of us who are students of George A. Romero, await a confrontation with Kelson that underscores some sort of high concept about humanity in extremis.
Garland’s big idea is that, surrounded by death, we should appreciate life.
This movie’s final third is indeed that asinine. Kelson is just another fount of soft-minded mush. Who attends a zombie movie for life-affirming platitudes? Filmmakers are so desperate for a franchise to call their own that they overlook the fundamentals.
Danny Boyle is the director, not Alex Garland, but the back hour is so uncannily similar to Garland’s recent work that it’s difficult to resist leaving the bill at his table. The first act feels more in tune with Boyle’s sensibilities, following Jamie as he initiates Spike into the world of hunting zombies while foraging the mainland for goods.
The first act of “28 Years Later” is terrific, in fact, suggesting a kind of “Robin Hood” of zombie fiction. Jamie and Spike are archers ducking and weaving menaces, and there’s a rich sonic and visual collage of Britain’s history with warfare, referencing Kipling, medieval epics, you name it. None of this serves much of a point in the long term, but one admires the energy.
Initially, “28 Years Later” is a reminder that Boyle made his name 30 years ago with “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting,” grimy and inventive thrillers that suggested that he was the next boutique hipster oddball in the tradition of Tarantino. Boyle’s career has been much more inconsistent than all that, and “28 Years Later” initially finds Boyle trying to get his mojo back, a purpose that “28 Days Later” also served two decades ago.
Boyle returns to digital photography here, as in “28 Days Later,” and he and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle initially allow you to feel as if you never quite know where the camera is going to be or where the zombies are going to storm in from.
For a while, “28 Years Later” has the rapid and free-associational editing and sound mixing of a mid-’90s-era Oliver Stone joint, with nightmares and fantasies and historical tidbits and narrative information being blended into a frenzied modern cinematic poetry. Boyle appears to be linking the zombie up with our medieval past and with our present and future as people who are over-stimulated into unthinking oblivion.
And then Boyle appears to go out for coffee, allowing Garland’s script to assume control, with his usual half-baked ideas that are meant to compensate for the lethargy that sets into the enterprise. The exhilarating cinematic fever breaks far too soon in “28 Years Later,” most likely leaving you feeling as if you’ve been screwed.
Joel Potrykus’ “Vulcanizadora” is also about two people navigating countryside towards a murky and potentially dangerous destination, and it is considerably more volatile than “28 Years Later.” There’s a difference between Boyle, with all that studio money, cosplaying at grassroots filmmaking and tortured artists who are inventively stitching their fantasies together with a few cameras and nickels, driven by neuroses and need and conviction. Potrykus is a legitimate and authentically unpredictable outsider artist, while Boyle, decades removed from his lean days, is essentially a businessman.
Marty (Joshua Burge) and Derek (Potrykus) are middle-aged oddballs hiking in the Michigan woods. There’s a slow yet compelling build here, as Potrykus laces hipster absurdism with horror. Derek is defined as a perpetually adolescent numbnut who stops to blow stuff up with fireworks. In the middle of the night, he blasts Godsmack while pouring the liquid from glow sticks over his body. He is a failed man who implicitly wants to go back, to an analogue realm of old millennial/young Gen X reverence.
But Derek isn’t the cartoonish man-baby of a Kevin Smith or Judd Apatow movie. Potrykus’ performance is toothier than that. He shows the disease inherit in our yearning for endless nostalgia playbook loops. Derek isn’t cute, he’s stunted and hurt and in profound need, and Potrykus gives a performance that’s daring and seemingly skinless, and somehow above it all also funny.
Marty is even more openly haunted, taciturn to the point that we initially wonder if he might hurt Derek. That’s misdirection — sort of. Burge’s elegant gauntness and reedy voice bring to mind the great actor Brad Dourif, and he keeps challenging our initial impressions of Marty. There’s tenderness to him as well. These men are best friends and alone together and still not quite connecting.
Potrykus teases out the reason that Marty and Derek are in the woods. They’ve made a pact, and we’re primed to assume that it’s bad. There are pointed references to this being a one-way trip, as they gorge themselves on junk food. Along the way, Potrykus springs cheeky indie allusions, with long takes and an emphasis on male confusion that suggest Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry” and Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy,” among others.
“Vulcanizadora” is a sequel as well, to Potrykus’ “Buzzard” from 2014, which features the same two characters in earlier states of arrested adolescence. Taken together, they are about how quickly youthful rootlessness can harden into alienation, especially these days with our media-curated fantasy realms. The new film eventually pivots on Marty’s need to reconnect to society, to atone for his selfishness. In a joke that Kafka might like, society loses interest in punishing Marty just when he’s ready to receive it.
By Potrykus’ standards, “Vulcanizadora” is relatively easy to engage with, or at least easier than “Buzzard” or say, “Relaxer.” This one might be a good first step for those curious about a filmmaker who hides earnestness and poignancy under a cloud of obstinacy. His mercilessness is a tonic, a cleansing form of empathy.
“28 Years Later” is in theaters everywhere, while “Vulcanizadora” is rentable on VOD. “Buzzard” and “Relaxer” are also rentable, and available for free on Tubi.
