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Time Magazine
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
28 Years Later Is an Ambitious, Gorgeously Somber, Never-Boring Zombie-Fest
In John Wyndham's 1951 science-fiction novel Day of the Triffids, which screenwriter Alex Garland has cited as an inspiration for the now-classic 2002 zombie-horror reverie 28 Days Later, a mysterious green meteor shower has blinded most of the world's inhabitants—an army of giant, carnivorous creeping plants may have something to do with it, though they're almost a red herring. A group of sighted survivors take to the English countryside to rebuild society, with all the freedom and danger such an enterprise implies. If you were free to remake your world just as you wanted it, with no influence or input from any other country or group of outsiders, would it be a utopia or a disaster? Wyndham's novel is layered with strata of coziness and unease, twin moods that Garland and director Danny Boyle also evoked in 28 Days Later, in which a virus has turned much of the population into rage-fueled zombies. Boyle and Garland's new sequel to that first film, 28 Years Later, is both more Wyndhamlike and more overtly topical: For one thing, we ourselves are now survivors of a pandemic. And this new movie, emerging onto a geopolitical landscape that's vastly different from 2002's, riffs directly on all the dreams those who voted for Brexit hoped might come to pass—and all the ways Brexit created more problems than it solved. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's cut to the chase: 28 Years Later is mostly about zombies, which is, after all, the thing most of us are lining up for. Boyle has said that he doesn't like to use the word zombies to describe the angry, hungry beings of this movie and the earlier one; it only serves to dehumanize them, and we need to remember that they were once thinking, feeling humans. He prefers the term infected. That's all well and good, but infecteds don't sell tickets. And isn't a zombie by any other name just as sweet? 28 Years Later —even though Cillian Murphy, the heart and soul of the first picture, doesn't appear in it—delivers everything it promises, chiefly lots of mindlessly determined zombie-infecteds bearing down, and chomping down, on terrified non-infecteds. And it's undoubtedly the true sequel to the duo's earlier film, a poetic apocalyptic downer if ever there were one: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's reasonably effective standalone follow-up 28 Weeks Later, from 2007, now feels like just a brief digression in the franchise. But if 28 Years Later contains a little bit of everything that made the first film great, it also, somehow, adds up to less. It's gorgeous to look at—cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle has returned to work some of his verdant magic. The editing is snappy and clever—the plot is interrupted here and there with what looks like ominous World War II-era newsreel footage, as well as clips from Laurence Olivier's 1944 Henry V. This is an ambitious picture, filled with grand ideas. Parts of it are wondrously beautiful; some sections are so mawkishly morbid they might make you groan. But at least you won't be bored. 28 Years Later opens with a terrifying snippet of child-endangerment: a group of trembling tykes huddle together in a house somewhere in the Scottish highlands, watching a scratchy Teletubbies VHS. The inevitable thing happens: the rage-virus-infected zombies invade the house, doing their thing and vomiting blood all over the place, but one child escapes and runs to a nearby church. You'll have to wait till the movie's end to find out what happens to him, but in between, Boyle and Garland have devised plenty of horrors to distract, disgust, and delight you. The story's hero-in-training is a 12-year-old boy, Spike, played by a marvelously expressive young actor named Alfie Williams. He and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and mother Isla (Jodie Comer) live on an island that, in a Great Britain that has been essentially destroyed by the virus, has managed to remain infection-free, thanks to the vigilance of these sturdy settlers. (A title card near the beginning of the movie tells us that Europe and the rest of the world have managed to fend off the virus, making this scourge a—Brexit metaphor alert!—Britain-centric problem.) These hardy souls have built a beautiful, self-sustaining, hippielike community: Sheep graze placidly in the fields. Sturdy men work with their hands, forging arrows with which to kill zombie interlopers. The women and girls flounce around charmingly as they go about fulfilling various womanly household tasks. Aye, but it's exactly how the world should be, innit? This bucolic island is separated from the mainland only by a narrow causeway, guarded, on the island side, by a mighty, zombie-proof fortress. One of the jobs of the island menfolk is to cross to the mainland and kill zombies with the arrows they've forged with their very hands. Spike is a bit young for this, though father Jamie thinks he's ready, and he too is eager to prove his manhood. But his mother would prefer to keep her son close: she's bedridden and clearly not well. She drifts in and out of lucidity. Something is desperately wrong, and Jamie is losing patience with her; Spike, however, remains devoted The less you know about Spike and Jamie's zombie-hunting expedition and the revelations it triggers, the better. I will tell you only that there are fat, slow-moving zombies that look like overgrown babies and slurp worms from the ground, and fast-moving, harder-to-catch zombies with free-floating fury in their eyes. Boyle makes it clear that in some ways, the infected are much more sympathetic than the cloistered islanders: they're driven only by impulse and need, not by some blinkered desire to return to life to the way it used to be—but then, you've been forewarned about all that. Ralph Fiennes turns up late in the movie, just when you might be wondering if you're getting a little bored, as a tenderly wacky character who almost single-handedly shifts the movie's tone. His performance is terrific. Another actor who shall not be named shows up a little later, with bad teeth and a fantastic tracksuit. That, too, is something to look forward to. Boyle and Garland are superb at building and releasing tension: just when you think you can't bear any more bloody entrails or sinewy detached spinal cords, they lighten the mood. There are places where 28 Years Later is gorgeously somber, echoing the desolate lyricism of the first movie. And Mantle shoots the countryside, a place of both solace and menace, of both restorative greenery and end-of-life sunset skies, as if he were making a pagan offering to Jack Cardiff, the god of cinematic British beauty who shot most of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. There's much that's terrifying and wonderful about 28 Years Later, but the ending is jarring and dumb, in a kick-ass heavy-metal way, and it breaks the mood. It's as if Boyle had gotten cold feet about ending the movie on too solemn a note. But this ending, no matter how you feel about it, is really just a beginning. Boyle and Garland have two follow-up movies in the works. The next, already filmed, is directed by Nia DaCosta, of Candyman and The Marvels; Boyle will return for the third. We'll be living in the world of 28 Years Later for a few more years to come. Come for the zombies; stay for the metaphors—no spoiler alert necessary for those.
Irish Independent
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Rick O'Shea: Addiction and the apocalypse never sounded so appealing
Tim MacGabhann describes being strung out at his first Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Mexico; while Gethan Dick's debut is a modern take on Day of the Triffids, but without the plants; and Pádraig Ó Tuama's anthology is a collection of incredible poetry Today at 21:30 How would you like 'the pollen-textured light over the bookshelves in a corner apartment, a window deep with time, specifically, time deep and quiet and unbroken enough to read every book on that shelf, leave them heaped and discarded on the bank of your own absorption in time as deep as a lake'? Sounds fantastic, right? It would be if it weren't Tim MacGabhann describing how he felt at the start of his first Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Mexico City. He had just walked halfway across the city, strung out on heroin having been arrested during a protest against the government and then dumped on the street hours later by police.
Business Mayor
24-05-2025
- Business
- Business Mayor
The small stuff I'm sweating on before the next Big One
Unlock the Editor's Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The main reason I found Day of the Triffids terrifying as a boy was the realisation that I would have for sure been one of the first people to gawp skyward at the green meteor shower. The lights are so pretty! Oh, I can't see. Exactly the same feeling overwhelmed me upon reading Ten Days That Shook the World at university. Goodness those Bolsheviks are making a racket outside, I would have mumbled. It'll be fine. Just some kids having fun. Because usually everything is fine. Until it isn't. Either way, I am usually the last person to believe anything will ever go wrong. No anxiety during Covid. Putin and his red buttons don't keep me awake. My life in La La-land does not extend to business and finance, however — where few are more paranoid than me. That latest strategy plan? Will never work. Thematic investing? Best avoided. Cryptocurrencies? Out to get us. And this explains my old-age poverty. I never bought a house when all my friends did two decades ago (overvalued relative to rental yields and median incomes you dimwits). Likewise Tesla and Nvidia were always too expensive. I've fought hard against my innate bearishness — as per my 100 per cent allocation to risk assets today. But it means I'm even more focused on spotting the next crisis. With finance you know there will be one. A big risk is being too early. Hence my lack of panic during the Orange Crash. As I wrote last week, I never thought tariffs would be the pin to pop the decade-long rise in equity markets. Not serious enough. Plus the timing didn't feel right. During my career at least, mega blow-ups have occurred every 10 years or so — towards the end of each decade. Japan at the close of the 1980s. Then Asia and the bust followed by the financial crisis. Covid in 2020. Only fools invest by calendar. But for me markets don't seem frothy enough in 2025 to presage a meltdown of Chornobyl proportions. And that is despite the exuberance of US equity prices and technology valuations in particular. I could be wrong of course. For now though I reckon we have a few more years left before something massive starts rumbling the concrete. What could it be? No idea, but it would not surprise me if it involved private equity. For starters, the whole industry operates in a gigantic bubble anyway — and we know what happens to those. During the sell-off in April the value of my portfolio fell from £535,000 to $475,000 in a fortnight before leaping around like a salmon on a pogo stick. Meanwhile private equity valuations barely changed as they don't have to reflect public markets immediately — if at all. But that isn't what worries me. By its own admission, private equity has been overpaying for assets for years as money poured in. This explains why so much cash remains uninvested and also why exits are proving so difficult. One look at the numbers and sophisticated investors balk. Where to turn? Hello retail! And so here is a long-held fear of mine: that private equity eventually finds a way to offload to mums and dads at inflated prices. This is already starting to happen. And Donald Trump is keen on allowing 401(k) retirement plans to invest in PE. 'How did we get so rich?' a child asks mum in a meme also doing the rounds. 'Your father democratised access to private equity for retail investors to find exit liquidity for trillions of dollars-worth of unsellable assets, sweetheart. Eat your Cheerios.' Greed will overcome any fears before the whole thing goes ka-boom! That's a while away though, as I said. What makes me nervous now? Three things. Which way the dollar is heading and ditto for inflation and rates globally. The greenback matters to me because my Asia fund is denominated in dollars then quoted in pounds. Also Japanese and UK equities tend to do better when yen and sterling respectively are weaker. A soggy US currency is bad for my entire portfolio in other words — even if I benefit from not owning any dollar-denominated assets directly. And right now it seems like every foreign exchange pundit on Wall Street is negative. Why so? There's ever more carping about the level of US indebtedness. Analysts — such as my old colleagues at Deutsche Bank — also point out that the dollar has been more than 20 per cent overvalued for the past three years on a purchasing power basis. That's never happened in the post-gold standard era. What frightens some currency traders even more is the drop in overseas demand for long-dated Treasuries and that the usual stabilisers don't seem to be effective. For example, the resultant higher bond yields have not helped the dollar. Nor has it rallied much since Trump reversed-ferreted on tariffs and rate-cut expectations for this year did likewise. All of which suggests to some that investors simply want shot of Trump and his beautiful, beautiful currency. Scary if so. Indeed, we also learned this week from Morningstar that inflows into world ex-US equity funds in the past quarter included the highest monthly total on record. My problem with all the dollar-mongering is that currency forecasters are even better than stock pickers or oil analysts when it comes to being wrong. Especially when they agree. So I'm happy with my exposure for now. I will cover why inflation and higher long-bond yields — especially in the UK and Japan — give me the heebie-jeebies in a fortnight after the half-term school holidays here in the UK. Yes overseas readers, we have only just returned from a long Easter break too. And to think everyone wants to be long the pound! The author is a former portfolio manager. Email: ; X: @stuartkirk__
Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Triffids on the rampage? Keep calm and have another brandy
The first thing you notice is the drinking. John Wyndham's 1951 novel,The Day of the Triffids, isn't just a classic example of a speculative dystopia, it is a testament to the restorative, energising and life-enhancing qualities of booze. You recall the basics of the story: twentysomething Bill Masen wakes in hospital on the morning he is due to be discharged and finds that everyone else — doctors, nurses, fellow patients — has gone blind after watching the previous night's comet-induced lightshow. Seemingly the solitary sighted person amid the confusion, Bill knows exactly what he needs. A drink. A big one. Masen's first act in this terrifying new world is to find a pub and to steady his nerves with the help of several
