28 Years Later

If 28 Days Later represents a catastrophic moment in time, one sealed forever in interlaced amber, then director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland's belated sequel, 28 Years Later, speaks for the kind of societies that have sprung up in the decades following that captured collapse. Our principles are the headrung descendants who might well end up discovering that original, degraded document then. Like the back-end of Threads, from producer-director Mick Jackson and screenwriter Barry Hines (the author of A Kestrel for a Knave), Years is concerned with the offspring who are born in the ruins of the twentieth century; the innocents whose daily reality is a brutal and ever present reminder that the generations who came before them were not just unreliable but actively destructive when pursuing their own ends. Told almost entirely from the perspective of a child, Alfie Williams' Spike, Years allows itself to unfold around crucial absences - largely those associated with the basic transmission of information - that are themselves willfully elided by people playing the role of parent. 

Although Spike finds himself nocking arrows while the mutated children of Toshio Masuda's Prophecies of Nostradamus wriggle towards him, his biggest and most vivid opponent is his own father. Jamie, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, is an insistent and eventually disappointing presence in his son's life. A young father struggling to come to terms with the wheezing death that is creeping into his wife Isla, played by Jodie Comer. Perhaps Jamie is as much a victim here? Jamie will have been a child himself when the rage infection swept the British isles and there are no doctors on the fortified island that this family call home. Reassurance is absent then and must be sought. Years stresses that there is no-one in this tight-knit enclave impartial enough to take loved ones aside and prepare them for the worst. Crucially for this film, none of the older adults have been brave enough to level with Spike, to trust this child with the knowledge that his mother will very likely not ever get any better. Years may be packed with bloated human worms and spine-ripping violence but the film's central dilemma is, essentially, based in domestic strife: a sick mother, a community steeped in mute conformity and a checked-out, unfaithful father. Boyle and Garland have taken the BBC's ancient Play for Today format then twisted it into apocalyptic knots.