Brainspotting: Danny Boyle's great return to the zombie apocalypse
Sarah reviewed for the Sunday Star Times until 2019. After a career change to secondary school teaching, she now she works in alternative education with our most disadvantaged rangatahi.
28 Years Later, directed by Danny Boyle, is in cinemas now.
You'd think we'd be a bit over zombies by now, with the proliferation of movies and TV series like The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, and the unkillable Living Dead film franchise. Even Minecraft had 'em.
But those who remember the thrill of watching Cillian Murphy's dazed survivor wander along a deserted London in 2002's groundbreaking 28 Days Later will be excited that director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have returned to helm a brilliant, blistering follow-up. (The non-Boyle 28 Weeks Later from 2007 is largely ignored by aficionados.) It's the beginning of a planned trilogy, with part two having been shot back to back with this first one, a film that could be read as a Brexit kind of post-apocalypse.
In the three decades since humans were infected by the 'Rage' virus, Europe has regained control and is carrying on as normal. But Britain is still quarantined, its population eviscerated by the scourge of undead who roam the countryside naked and screeching.
A small community of survivors live on the island of Lindisfarne, off the north-east coast, where they have adopted a medieval lifestyle of living off the land, drinking homebrew and taking archery lessons.
A plaque in the dining hall pronounces: 'Fail we may but go we must.' So, on his 12th birthday, Spike (impressive newcomer Alfie Williams) heads with father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on a coming-of-age quest to get his 'first kills' on the mainland. But the excursion eventually leads Spike into dangerous territory to save the life of his sick mother (Jodie Comer).
28 Years Later is masterful film-making from an industry veteran. Boyle pushes the technological envelope by shooting the movie using a raft of iPhones attached to a rig and through the ingenuity of his regular cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle. The entire cast is superb, with an extraordinary performance from the tirelessly versatile Ralph Fiennes as a doctor who has survived on the mainland.
The result is sensational: a hectic but controlled mélange of tones, styles and camera shots which create tension, emotion and thrill, underscored with a soundtrack that combines 90s-sounding drum 'n' bass as well as a terrifying reading of Rudyard Kipling's anti-war poem Boots.
The film's extraordinary final moments are simultaneously revelatory, distasteful and intriguing. Thank goodness we don't have to wait another 23 years to resolve the cliffhanger: part two of the 28 Years trilogy, The Bone Temple, comes out in January.
Rating out of five: ★★★★★
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So: the dead have returned to the world of the living as ghostly "BTs" (beached things); they brought with them a crystalline substance that has empowered new technologies but ruined others (like aeroplanes); you can see them with a bit of tech that requires you to carry around an unborn baby in a little pod; and if the BTs ever manage to consume a living being (which they seem keen to), something akin to a nuclear explosion goes off. As a result, there was a bit of an apocalypse, which ended up with the world's remaining population reduced to huddling in isolated bunkers and cities, cut off from one other and relying on porters, like Reedus' character Sam, to make lonely supply deliveries between them across a perilous landscape. In the first game Sam made his way one load at a time across the US, connecting these settlements to the "chiral network" (a sort of tech-magic internet) handily averting the extinction of humanity while he was at it. At the outset of the second, he's something of a fugitive (having run off to illegally raise his little pod-pal, Lou), but is soon brought back into the fold to continue the mission of spreading the chiral network, this time into Mexico - and then, thanks to some more Death Stranding -world magic - across the whole of Australia. So yes, in a way you could simulate the experience of playing this game by joining the exodus across The Ditch and getting a job with Australia Post - but you'd miss out on a lot. Much of the game is spent just navigating Sam by night and day across the graphically gorgeous wilderness of Australia (filled with what seem to be authentic Aussie voice actors, which is nice), which serves up hazards such as local earthquakes, storms, flash floods, bush fires, and just plain overbalancing on a scree slope due to your towering backpack, faceplanting, and sliding 30m downhill - likely one of the more wince-inducing experiences in gaming. 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