Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the news that Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and Cillian Murphy are to reunite on a long awaited threequel to the classic new wave zombie horror 28 Days Later, is that none of the above really need a career hike. When film-makers and movie stars return to the source for a belated follow-up, there is often a distinct whiff of greatest hits tour about it. Let’s get the old band back together for one last dip into the coffers before retirement. Who doesn’t need a second beach house in Malibu to hang out in when the glory days are over?
But while Boyle isn’t quite hitting the high notes he did with the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire or cult classic Trainspotting, he remains one of Britain’s most celebrated film-makers. Garland has morphed into a doyen of genre cinema, creator of Ex-Machina and Annihilation. Murphy, who is producing and may take a role, is hot off the success of the multiple Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer, and really doesn’t need to be slumming it in zombie films. The sense is that the trio must have something seriously interesting to say if they are coming back to this one now, decades on from the lightning-strike success of the inspirational original.
28 Years Later, as it is currently known, will be the first of two new films continuing the story first introduced in 2002 in which Murphy’s bicycle courier Jim awoke from a coma to discover most of the population of Britain had been infected by the terrifying, zombie-creating Rage virus. So what is the big idea that makes a new chapter so essential?
The problem with zombie sagas that straddle decades is that zombies – certainly the biologically infected fast-zombies of the 28 Days series – just don’t last that long. We already saw at the end of 28 Days Later that the infected were prone to dying off once there were no healthy humans left to eat. The logical outcome of a virus that spreads as quickly as Rage is that it would destroy most of humanity before humanity had much of a chance to fight back or, with a bit of luck, become confined to isolated geographic locations. And yet we already saw during the denouement of 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, that the virus has spread to mainland Europe.
The new film will have to resist the temptation to widen the vista of the story, giving us glimpses of how humanity is getting on in other parts of the world, because the original’s greatest plus point was that we had absolutely no idea what was happening in Idaho or Melbourne, and didn’t really need to. This narrow scope allowed the film-makers to zero in on the essential humanity of the tiny band of characters we met along the way, almost as if we were witnessing a kitchen sink drama in which the denizens of the kitchen were forced out into the wider world by hunger, fear of dying alone and impending civilisational collapse.
The original film’s grimy, down-to-earth splendour stemmed from Garland’s ability to show how different people, given exactly the same collapsing society to try to survive, choose to react to their new existence in completely different ways. Jim, Naomie Harris’ Selina, Brendan Gleeson’s taxi-driving Frank and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns) are exactly the sort of people you would want to be caught in a zombie apocalypse with. Christopher Eccleston’s Major Henry West and his knuckleheaded band of rapacious military grunts are exactly the sort of bunch you wouldn’t.
It’s this steely yet open-hearted realism that made 28 Days Later such a classic, and which Boyle and co will need to fight hard to retain in the new episode. What we don’t want is to see Jim (or anyone in his crew) elevated to legend status, a battle-hardened vet with thousands of zombie kills to his name, wearing some sort of bandana and wielding an AK-47. The original film triumphed by avoiding all the usual Hollywood action movie cliches, even if the thought of Selina mowing down zombies with miraculously still-functioning heavy weaponry has a certain zing to it.
So give us – please – a 28 Years Later that holds true to its predecessor’s claustrophobic, linear storytelling and outright rejection of fantasy elements. Show us another tight vision of the zombie apocalypse, not inter-governmental agents battling across continents to keep them in their place. This sequel needs to ensure we’re kept in the dark for as long as possible – if that’s even possible, three movies in – for it’s in the shadows that fear curdles so deliciously.
