28 Years Later

 Twenty-three years later... director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the zombie movie that pretty much made them (yeah, yeah, I know, The Beach, but who's talked about that one in the last couple of decades?) The thing is, they don't really seem all that interested in following up on 28 Days Later.

 The British isles have been quarantined and left alone in the last twenty-eight years since the rage virus broke out and turned most of the population into feral, fast-moving zombies. Survivors were left to fend for themselves.

 In this brave new world, one population's been doing pretty well for itself: a tiny, self-sufficient community at Holy Island off the coast of Scotland, cut off from the mainland by a causeway that is submerged under the ocean come high tide.

 The film follows one of the villages, Spike (Alfie Williams) - a 12-year old whose father (Aaron Taylor Johnson) is pushing to go for a coming-of-age ritual zombie hunt in the mainland. It goes about as well as you could hope, but upon returning a rift opens between young Spike and his father. Disillusioned, and learning that there may be a doctor further inland, he resolves to slip away from the community and take his ill mother (Jodie Comer), to see the physician.

 28 Years Later is an excellent movie with some fairly idiosyncratic choices which may or may not impact your enjoyment of it... I don't know you, what do you expect me to say? I liked it.

 The first of those choices is a shift in genres: this is not, on the main, really a horror movie; Boyle and Garland use the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop for a coming of age drama instead. That's not a criticism, by the way, just an observation; It's a fine coming of age drama. Just be aware that it's closer to, say, Vesper than 28 Days Later.

 The second point of contention is that the movie feels fairly experimental in its visuals and editing. 28 Days Later came out in the early 2000s, so it had plenty of frame-skipping and shaky cam, and that goes double here: The film's signature visual gimmick is that the action will frequently do a small freeze-frame as an arrow pierces some zombie body part - shots also jump jarringly between different angles, and we still get hyperactive shaky cam and frame-skipping shenanigans. To be fair, Boyle's been tinkering with highly personal ways to shoot action pretty much since he started; This is one of his misses.

 Outside of the zombie hunts, the experimental touches are a little more successful - footage from old war and medieval movies is intercut into the proceeds fairly often to give a feel for the mood at the Holy Island community, and the editing gets a little too frantic when tension ratchets up. The cinematography (by a returning Anthony Dod Mantle) is lovely, and scores a lot of really interesting visuals by juxtaposing the natural beauty of the North with zombie grotesquerie. The music, by hip-hop band Young Fathers, is bloody excellent.

 The last thing to have in mind is the project was approached as a trilogy; The film ends with a bit of a cliffhanger and a very strange tonal shift. It tells a complete story and I like what it seems to be setting up next, but that ending really is a bit jarring.

 Other than that, the film does introduce some slight tweaks to its zombie lore - mainly, it tries to show the ways in which people infected by the rage virus are actually different from zombies. My favourite new element were the alphas, powerful zombies that look like raging Ted Nugents - swinging dicks and all, and give the movie a much needed shot of energy. Also interesting (and diametrically opposed) are the infected equivalent to bottom feeders, the series' creepiest creation yet. There are a decent amount of chases and whatnot, and they're fun even if some of them seem to be viewed through the eyes of someone suffering a seizure.

 There's also some lovely footage of the North being seized back by nature, complete with huge herds of roving deer, and a couple shots of the sycamore gap tree before it was cut down. A friend who knows the area confirmed that the protagonist's itinerary seems plausible, which is neat.

 The acting is excellent, with both Comer and Williams giving two great performances. A third actor pops up later as a major character and gives a characteristically soulful performance.

 I love that they took all these chances with what the studio must consider a franchise, even if not all the risks pay out. You just know there's going to be a somewhat deserved backlash. But now I'm really interested in finding out what they do for its two planned sequels, if they ever come to be.