23 years after a first live film that gave its name to the franchise28 later, Danny Boyle brings back the most hurried of the horror cinema in our dark rooms, not to forget to breathe into his work a biting critique (the pun is assumed) of our contemporary societies, dressed in an ever as nervous and effective staging.
28 years and (almost) all their teeth
Although it was so far difficult to talk about saga – the franchise with only two relatively independent entries one from the other –28 Years Plus Latetries to correct the shooting, and presents itself as the first film of a new trilogy taking place in the same universe as its predecessors28 Days Later, Danny Boyle (2002) and28 weeks laterby Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (2007). Nearly three decades have passed since the infected (specifically, they have not technically died, only sick) invaded the streets of London and Paris, despite desperate attempts by the American army to contain them.
An introduction board tells us that the epidemic has finally been eradicated from Europe, except in the United Kingdom, which now lives in quarantine, isolated from the rest of the world (any resemblance to Brexit being, of course, only the fruit of chance). A village still resistant to the zombified invader survives on a small island, north of England, connected to the continent by a thin dike that the tide covers several hours each day. Jamie, a big, impetuous fellow (camped by the excellent Aaron Taylor-Johnson), decides to take her young son Spike (Alfie Williams, the young revelation of the film) to the continent, in order to learn to hunt for the infected and to recover food.
By learning of the existence of a mysterious doctor (Ralph Fiennes, inhabited), who would have succumbed to madness and would now give birth to strange rites on the lifeless bodies of the infected, Spike decides to leave the village without his father's knowledge to try to heal his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer, a moving indecent), with a degenerative disease that no one can diagnose.
The Male is everywhere
If the first part of the film obeys rather wisely (but effectively) the tropes of the zombie film, and seems, paradoxically, to have delighted the greatest number of spectators, it is with the second, much calmer and contemplative, that Danny Boyle, surrounded by the screenwriter and the director of photography of the28 Days Later– Alex Garland and Anthony Dod Mantle respectively – deploys all the extent of his talent, even losing on the way those who had only come to grimace pleasure before moult mutilation, evisceration and other blood sheaves. After the criticism of overconsumption in the first opus, that of American interventionism in the second, he attacks this time the individualistic retreat and the toxic masculinity, however, giving a hopeful look at the possibility of a new world, where empathy, devotion and love reign.
From the beginning of the film, the inspired use of the poemBootsby Rudyard Kipling, in the background of archive images of soldiers marching towards their loss, sets the tone. As an echo to another poem by the writer,If– which ends with the famous verse: You will be a man my son – the visual representation (the father who forces his son to leave his village spared by the infected, an almost edenic vision in this post-apocalyptic world, to cast him into a pasture to an ultra-violent universe) and sound (the frightening recitation of the poem recorded in 1915 by Taylor Holmes, on which a dissonant and saturated musical composition is superimposed) of the "paternal tyrannia" as thesayist Olivier Rey called it, is obvious and destabilizing. If the first few minutes could make us look forward to a moving adventure between a father and his son, Boyle soon revealed his true intention, taking advantage of the first scenes of cinematographic horror (introduction to the various infected and how to put them to death) to distil a real malaise, to which the public, in the vast majority, can easily identify: the inflexibility of a man who knows no other means than violence to make his son a man in turn.
Boyle will eventually even personify his speech through a new type of infected, Alphas, men with protruding musculature and manly appendage of disproportionate size, on which the virus would act like steroids. Nearly invulnerable beings and unrivalled violence (their way of killing is an exaggeratedly gorous theatricality), they represent the number one enemy of the film, the one that young Spike will flee from the beginning to the end.
Boreal horror
Although it has generated much debate (mostly sterile and vain) on social networks, and often for bad reasons,28 Years laterdoes not seem to receive the positive attention he deserves. A scene, in particular, is never discussed, while it probably represents a central moment in the film, both in script and in film. While a first Alpha pursues Jamie and Spike on the dyke towards the village, the scenery, until then very naturalistic, colorful, green, suddenly darkens, and is adorned with dreamlike light. Boreal aurora begin to dance in the sky, and the music, which one would have expected strident and full of tension, is suddenly of striking beauty.
The music lovers immediately recognized thePrelude to the Gold of the Rhineby Richard Wagner, reworked here in a neo-classical version, embellished with a progression of more modern chords, as a revisit of the past that would be brought to light. The choice of using this prelude to dress this scene is obviously not a coincidence, as the symbolism it contains is powerful. Referring to the writings of Kipling mentioned above, this song evokes the birth of the universe, until its corruption by evil. And this is precisely what this scene represents: a child still virgin of all aggressiveness and wickedness, pursued not only by a terrifying monster, true personification of manhood exacerbated at the extreme... but also by his own father, who runs on his heels.
Moreover, it is following this traumatic experience, and once faced with the reality of the nature of his father, that Spike will take the decision to leave him and his Eden on the facade, in order to brave the dangers of the continent and attempt to heal his mother, his last source of tenderness, also eaten by illness.
A movie isn't about his screenplay.
In this way it will easily be understood that reducing28 Years laterto so-called screenplay improbables does not rhyme to anything, so much the interest of the film lies in the subtext cleverly put in place by Boyle and his peers through an inventive and symbolic staging. Here we will keep the narrative springs of the second part of the work in order not to spoil the discovery of it, but let us make it clear that it is there that all the flavor of28 Years later, which is definitely not a common zombie movie (like other great works of the genre, by the way).
And if the end of the film will surprise more than one, a little search of Jimmy Saville's name on the internet should allow the most disconcerted spectators to understand where Boyle and Garland want to bring this new trilogy, whose second opus, already shot under the direction of director Nia DaCosta, is scheduled for next January.
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