28 Years Later film review: This strangely beautiful film is electrifying and fizzing with adrenaline
28 YEARS LATER
★★★★★
3
IT seems to be the season of the sequel, with a whopping 19 follow-ons being released this year.
So it was with some trepidation that I watched another instalment from Danny Boyle's 2002 cult classic, 28 Days Later.
My concerns quickly disappeared when this astonishing film started.
Having dipped out of directing 2007's 28 Weeks Later, Boyle is back with writer Alex Garland to make a terrifying — and strangely beautiful — film.
We meet the family of Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), his wife Isla (Jodie Comer) and their son Spike (Alfie Williams) in their threadbare house on an island off the coast of North-east England.
It's 28 years since the deadly virus escaped a weapons lab, and while much of the rest of the world has carried on, Britain is in quarantine. That means if you're on it, you are never getting off.
Zombie hunter
Pockets of communities around the country have tried to survive, including this one.
The island feels very The Wicker Man — an eerie hierarchy has been created and beliefs have a cult-like following. The men and women have traditional roles. One of those is the men go to the mainland, crossing the defended causeway, to hunt zombies.
Jamie has been training 12-year-old Spike to become a zombie hunter and the pair leave the island with their bows and arrows to take some hits on the bloodthirsty undead.
Meanwhile, Isla is bed bound, fighting another illness that's quickly making her lose her grip on reality.
It makes for a fascinating juxtaposition between the family members, and Comer, as always, is spectacular.
Jodie Comer looks striking in a metallic silver dress as she leads stars at 28 Years Later
Boyle cuts back and forth to black-and-white war footage of young boys being trained, reminding us that Britain has a long history of sending our youth off to fight. It's only the enemy that changes.
During his heart-racing expedition, Spike realises all is not as sold by his dad.
There are other things happening on the mainland — and the infected are their own civilization now.
The thumping soundtrack by Young Fathers is electrifying and fizzing with adrenaline. Very much like this film.
Closing on a cliffhanger, and with two more films to come, it's good to know they're coming back for another bite.
THE. LAST JOURNEY
PG (95mins)
★★★☆☆
3
THIS warm, funny and often deeply moving documentary charts Swedish TV presenter Filip Hammar's attempt to bring his 80-year-old father Lars back to life – figuratively, at least.
Since retiring from his job as a French teacher, Lars has become increasingly withdrawn and frail. So, Filip decides to buy a battered old Renault 4, and whisks his dad off on a nostalgic road trip to the south of France, hoping to reignite a spark.
They're joined by Filip's longtime TV partner Fredrik Wikingsson, and the pair's banter keeps the film fun, even as emotional undercurrents start to appear.
The journey is nearly derailed early on by a nasty fall, and though Lars is slow to warm up, glimpses of his old self soon begin to reappear, particularly when surrounded by the culture and language he has loved for so many years.
At times, the film veers close to manipulation. But what shines through is Filip's deep affection for his father, and a quietly powerful message about ageing, legacy and the bonds between parent and child.
It's a bit uneven, but The Last Journey has heart to spare – and plenty of charm.
★★★☆☆
3
SPACE and sentimentality are the linchpins of Disney and Pixar's latest animated adventure which encourages you to dream big.
Sci-fi obsessed Elio Solis (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a cape-wearing cosmic obsessive adopted by his Aunt Olga after his parents pass away.
When extraterrestrials make contact, Elio doesn't hesitate to respond, and before you can say 'Martian' he's beamed up to a kind of cosmic UN Committee from various galaxies, including Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldana).
They believe he's the leader back on Earth and Elio doesn't correct them.
He's soon tasked with negotiating an alien peace treaty with baddie Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), but this quickly turns into a journey of self-discovery as, along with new wiggly best friend Glordon (a cutesy Remy Edgerly), our hero realises what really matters to him.
Reminding us that there's no place like home, there's many Wizard Of Oz homages here, as we transport through solar systems and scary villains. Intergalactic, nourishing, family fun.
There's a cameo from JLS singer Aston Merrygold too.
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The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘You'd never make Slumdog today': Danny Boyle on risks, regrets and returning to the undead
The UK is a wasteland in Danny Boyle's new film. Towns lie in ruins, trains rot on the rails and the EU has severed all ties with the place. Some residents are stuck in the past and congregate under the tattered flag of St George. The others flail shirtless through the open countryside, raging about nothing, occasionally stopping to eat worms. You wouldn't want to live in the land that Boyle and the writer Alex Garland show us. Teasingly, on some level, the film suggests that we do. Boyle and Garland first prowled zombie Britain with their 2002 hit 28 Days Later. It was an electrifying piece of speculative fiction, a guerilla-style thriller about an unimaginable world. Since then we've had Brexit and Covid, and the looming threat of martial law in the US … The story's extravagant flights of fancy don't feel so far-fetched any more. 'Yes, of course real world events were a big influence this time around,' Boyle says, sipping tea in the calm of a central London hotel. 'Brexit is a transparency that passes over this film, without a doubt. But the big resonance of the original film was the way it showed how British cities could suddenly empty out overnight. And after Covid, those scenes now feel like a proving ground.' Where Cillian Murphy first walked, the rest of us would soon follow. Tense and gory, 28 Years Later is a fabulous horror epic. I would hesitate to call it a sequel, exactly: it's more a reboot or a renovation; a fresh build over an existing property. Newcomer Alfie Williams plays 12-year-old Spike, who defies his parents (Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and flees the sanctuary of Holy Island for an adventure on the infected mainland. Along the way, he tangles with berserker zombies and smirking psycho-killers, and encounters Ralph Fiennes's enigmatic, orange-skinned Dr Kelson, reputedly a former GP from Whitley Bay. All of which makes for a jolting, engrossing journey; a film that freewheels through a gone-to-seed northern England before crashing headlong into the closing credits with many of its key questions still unanswered. The hanging ending is the point, Boyle explains, because the film is actually the first part of a proposed trilogy. Sony Pictures has put up two-thirds of the budget. The second movie – The Bone Temple, directed by the American film-maker Nia DaCosta – is already in the can. Boyle has plans to shoot the final instalment, except that the future is unwritten and the industry is on a knife edge 'Sony has taken a massive risk,' the director tells me happily. 'The original film worked well in America to everyone's surprise, but there's no guarantee that this one will. It's all because of this guy, [Sony Pictures' CEO] Tom Rothman. He's a bit of a handful, a fantastic guy, runs the studio in a crazy way. He's paid for two films, but he hasn't paid for the third one yet and so his neck's on the line. If this film doesn't work, he's now got a second film that he has to release. But after that, yeah, we might not get to complete the story.' Good directors reflect the times they work in, but they're at the mercy of them, too, hot-wired to the twists and turns of history; up one year and down the next. And so it is with Boyle, who's travelled from the sunny Cool Britannia uplands of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting through the imperial age of Slumdog Millionaire and the London Olympics, right down to the shonky doldrums of today, when a cherished project might collapse under him like an exhausted horse. He's 68 now, and battling to get his films across the line. I don't know why he's so cheerful. Hasn't everything gone to hell? 'Well, I'm an optimist,' he says. 'So I don't despair about things the way I know that a lot of people do. Also I'm slightly more outside the media than you. That allows me a slightly different view on things. And increasingly, as I age, I become more wary of the obsessions of the media. That constant catastrophising and sense of perceived decline.' It's particularly noticeable in the US, he thinks. 'Much of Trump's dominance is undoubtedly down to his appeal to the media. He is so media friendly. His soundbites, everything about him, fit hand in glove with news and entertainment to the point where it's damaging. Whereas in this country, we're quite fortunate. We've dodged the far-right bullet for the moment and we elected Keir Starmer against the tide of what's been happening elsewhere.' He reaches for his tea. 'It could be a lot worse.' In 2012, Boyle devised and directed Isles of Wonder, the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. The show was a triumph: a bumper celebration of British culture that made room for James Bond and the queen, Windrush migrants and the NHS, Shakespeare and the Sex Pistols. 'But my biggest regret was that we didn't feature the BBC more. I was stopped from doing it because it was the host broadcaster. Every other objection, I told them to go fuck themselves. But that one I accepted and I regret that now, especially given the way that technology is moving. The idea that we have a broadcaster that is part of our national identity but is also trusted around the world and that can't be bought, can't be subsumed into Meta or whatever, feels really precious. So yeah, if I was doing it again I'd big up the BBC big time.' He laughs. 'Everything else I'd do exactly the same.' Isles of Wonder has safely passed into legend. These days it's up there with James Bond and the queen. I wonder, though, how history will judge Slumdog Millionaire, his Oscar-winning 2008 spectacular about a ghetto kid who hits the jackpot. Boyle shot the film in Mumbai, partly in Hindi, and with a local crew. But it was a film of its time and the world has moved on. 'Yeah, we wouldn't be able to make that now,' he says. 'And that's how it should be. It's time to reflect on all that. We have to look at the cultural baggage we carry and the mark that we've left on the world.' Is he saying that the production itself amounted to a form of colonialism? 'No, no,' he says. 'Well, only in the sense that everything is. At the time it felt radical. We made the decision that only a handful of us would go to Mumbai. We'd work with a big Indian crew and try to make a film within the culture. But you're still an outsider. It's still a flawed method. That kind of cultural appropriation might be sanctioned at certain times. But at other times it cannot be. I mean, I'm proud of the film, but you wouldn't even contemplate doing something like that today. It wouldn't even get financed. Even if I was involved, I'd be looking for a young Indian film-maker to shoot it.' A waiter sidles in with a second cup of tea. Boyle, though, is still mulling the parlous state of the world. He knows that times are tough and that people are hurting. Nonetheless, he insists that there are reasons to be cheerful. 'Have you got any kids?' he asks suddenly. Boyle has three: technically they're all adults now. 'And I think that's progress. I look at the younger generation and they're an improvement. They're an upgrade.' The director was weaned on a diet of new wave music and arthouse cinema, Ziggy Stardust and Play for Today. He began his career as a chippy outsider and winces at the notion that he's now an establishment fixture. 'It all comes back to punk, really,' he says. 'The last time Lou Reed spoke in public, he said: 'I want to blow it all up,' because he was still a punk at heart. And if you can embrace that spirit, it keeps you in a fluid, changeable state that's more important than having some fixed place where you belong. So, I do try to carry those values and keep that kind of faith.' He gulps and backtracks, suddenly embarrassed at his own presumption. 'Not that my work is truly revolutionary or radical,' he adds. 'I mean, I'm not smashing things to pieces. I value the popular audience. I believe in popular entertainment. I want to push the boat out, but take the popular audience with me.' I suggest that this might be a contradiction. 'Yeah, of course it is,' Boyle says, snorting. 'But I've found a way to resolve it – in my own mind, at least.' If 12-year-old Spike played it safe he'd have stayed on Holy Island beside the reassuring flag of St George. Instead, the kid takes a gamble and charts his own course to the mainland. He's educating himself and embracing a fraught, messy future. He's mixing with monsters and slowly coming into his strength. That's what kids tend to do, Boyle explains. That's why they give us hope. 'Maybe hope is a weird thing to ask for in a horror movie,' he says. 'But we all need something to cling to, whether that's in films or in life.' 28 Years Later is in UK cinemas now
Sky News
2 hours ago
- Sky News
Director Danny Boyle on how 28 Years Later could be seen as an allegory for Brexit
Director Danny Boyle has said his latest film 28 Years Later could be seen as an allegory for Brexit. Boyle's original zombie horror, 28 Days Later, was a groundbreaking film which revitalised the genre. Now, his follow-up 28 Years Later gives an insight into how much of humanity is still standing almost three decades after the deadly Rage virus took hold. "It's a very ambitious picture of what's happened to the British mainland 28 years after the original infection," he tells Sky News. The film shows how mainland Europe has cut Britain off, the country is isolated, with the remaining population left to fend for itself, which Boyle says could be seen as an allegory for Brexit or the pandemic. "There is an element of that… horror is a wonderful genre because you can put transparencies against it, you can put COVID against it… you can put Brexit against it as well, and you read things into it like that and it's deliciously flexible," he says. Central to this new story is a new character, a young boy called Spike, played by newcomer Alfie Williams, whose character has been raised on a remote coastal Island with Jodie Comer starring as his mum. "To get to see how Danny and his team work on set and then see the final product, it's been a dream," Comer says. Fans won't have to wait quite so long for the follow-up to this, with a triptych of films planned this time around. While the second has already been shot and is due out next January, the really scary thing for Boyle currently is securing the financing to make the last instalment. "We're hoping we do well enough to get the third film financed... we want there to be three films ultimately," he says. 'A wonderful tribute' to Sycamore Gap Boyle's film also features a digital recreation of the Sycamore Gap tree, which the director says he hopes will be "a wonderful tribute" to Northumberland's iconic tree. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot the tree is still standing in scenes for Boyle's apocalyptic horror despite being felled in September 2023. Boyle explains: "It had already been destroyed by the time we came to film, so we recreated it for the same reasons that you see the Queen in this… all the things that have happened to us in the last 28 years have not happened." As well as forming a part of people's personal lives, as the scene of wedding proposals, ashes being scattered and countless photographs, it had already held a place in pop culture, featuring in the 1991 Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. It is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in the film, but Boyle said given how much of what they shot is filmed in the beautiful Northumbria countryside, to resurrect "one of their most beautiful icons" was a "real privilege which we felt we couldn't ignore". "So we've recreated it deliberately to say that it was still growing… which is a wonderful tribute," he adds. 28 Years Later is out on 20 June.
Daily Mail
5 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Bet they wished they'd reined it in! Royal Ascot revellers spotted making their way home after a big day on their feet... in the 32.2C heat
Revellers at Royal Ascot spilled out onto the street as they were spotted heading home on the hottest day of the year so far. Drinks were flowing in the scorching heat and many racegoers were looking a little worse for wear after leaving the venue. Even King Charles was seen adjusting his tie in the tropical conditions as other racegoers cooled down with magnums of champagne and old-fashioned fans. And the going was stifling for the horses, who were doused in buckets of water as forecasters warned of a four-day heatwave set to see Britain turn hotter than Hawaii – with 34C (93F) expected in the South and East this weekend. Royal Ascot, known as the jewel in the crown of the UK racing calendar, will welcome hundreds of thousands of punters during the five-day meet. The term Ladies Day was first used in 1823 when an anonymous poet described the Thursday of the annual meeting as 'Ladies' Day … when the women, like angels, look sweetly divine.' While there is no official prize on offer for best dressed lady as there is at other race meetings, ticket holders were still eager to put their best foot forward. Stylish racegoers at today's event turned the racecourse into a sea of vibrant outfits as they donned bright prints to ensure they stood out from the crowd. One lady keeps cool with a handheld fan in the scorching sunlight Many of those arriving at the main spectators' enclosure opted for coordinating outfits with their friends too. However, the combination of the blistering sun and an indulgence of drinks proved tough for many. A large police presence was spotted throughout the Berkshire town to keep people in check. Fans were treated to an exciting day of racing as seven-year-old Trawlerman won the Gold Cup with his jockey William Buick. In a race that dates back to 1807, the horse on his 21st race sprung out of the starting stalls and never looked back. The horse which was ridden by legendary jockey Frankie Dettori eight times, began its career during the pandemic. But yesterday it had its finest hour in the two-and-a-half-mile race. Buick was congratulated by King Charles and Queen Camilla, who braved the heat in Berkshire. Taxi! Time to head home for this group of racegoers eager to get out of the sun Two ladies give their feet a rest after walking in heels at the races all day long Also amongst the punters for Ladies Day were famous faces such as former model Jerry Hall, who attended with her son Gabriel Jagger and daughter-in-law Anouk Winzenried. As temperatures soared in excess of 32C –almost 90F – racegoers clad in their finery, including full morning suits for the men, began dropping like flies. At least one person was taken to hospital and more than 40 treated for heat-related illness. The last time Britain reached 34C in June was almost six years ago on June 29, 2019, at Northolt and Heathrow. The record for the month is 35.6C (96.1F) on June 29, 1957, at Camden Square, central London. As The UK Health Security Agency issued a four-day amber heat health alert from noon yesterday until 9am on Monday, even Newcastle-upon-Tyne is forecast to hit 31C (87.8F) tomorrow. The agency warns 'significant impacts are likely' across health and social care services because of high temperatures, including a rise in deaths – particularly among those aged 65 and over. An official heatwave is logged when areas reach a certain temperature for three consecutive days, with thresholds varying from 25-28C (77-82F) in different parts. Temperatures are set to fall back to the mid-20s by the start of next week.
