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. 

28 Weeks Later

Although hardly the central thrust of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, in teddy bear cab driver Frank, Brendan Gleeson was given room to essay an atypical sort of father figure, at least in terms of the genre he found himself inhabiting. Unusually, Frank was on the level. A good man who only ever wanted the best for the people he had taken under his charge. Despite Naomie Harris' Selena and Cillian Murphy's Jim being adults themselves it's Frank who assumes a higher level of responsibility for the group, be that driving the taxi in which they escape London or deferring the contents of Selena's medicine bag so he can stand guard all night, soothing restless sleepers. Despite his size and the strength inherent to that, Frank behaved with gentleness in basically every moment but the one where he foolheartedly barked at a pecking crow, sealing his doom. 

Physically and emotionally, Robert Carlyle's Don, a discarded viewpoint character in director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later, is the opposite. Slighter and happy to lord his all-access pass to the American shock-and-awe occupation of this partially reclaimed London, the brief time we spend with the conscious aspect of this man imparts a sense of someone flawed who is desperate to transmit importance. By the time he's contracted the long-dormant rage virus through a stolen kiss, Don might as well be a continuation of Francis Begbie, the wiry pub-fighter that Carlyle played in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Although the kind of agency required to lead a film is lost when this disappointing father is transformed, Carlyle's magnetism demands that we linger on his actions, ascribing intent or recall to his agitated fog. 

Previous passes at these adrenaline soaked plague carriers prioritised shaky close-ups of their gnashing teeth or the torrents of blood that issue from every orifice. Carlyle though, and in fairness he's given more time onscreen to make a more lasting impression, takes his cues from the depressed chimpanzees seen in 28 Days Later's prologue. Don lingers, apparently plotting, and perhaps even directing his more mindless underlings. When it arrives his violence is overwhelmingly and absolutely destructive; be that balled fists clattering down on his wife's ruined face or sinking his crooked teeth into his youngest child's throat. The self-centredness (or good sense, depending on your perspective) that saw him flee when his wife found herself cornered in a seething cottage becomes the motivating factor for this character, one which curdles into a rolling familicide in which Don attacks, not to bring his loved ones closer into his contagious bosom, but to annihilate the less interesting characters who are gobbling up all of his screentime. 

28 Days Later

Shot using standard definition digital video cameras, director Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later plays like a degraded, interlaced despatch from a fork in the post-millennium road that was never actually taken. What was once a forward-thinking solution to the problem of low budget, but still highly disruptive (in a civic sense), filmmaking is, viewed twenty three years later, now a blurred, amber document that struggles to hold onto visual information with the stringency we are now used to. Lines are obliterated by competing data; colours resolve into bleeding clouds of undulating compression; and light lingers on the landscape of human faces like radioactive dapple. It's beautiful precisely because it's so outmoded and atypical, an analogue visual design that is suggestive of something captured then transmitted rather than drilled on a backlot. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle adopts perspectives that stress surveillance - that of the film's creeping, slathering infected or the viewpoint of indifferent, now unmanned CCTV cameras. In this way the film's audience is kept at a constant remove from proceedings, we are agitated observers then rather than the shoulder-bumping participants that the hand-held production would seem to anticipate. Happily, even the mannered, novelistic dialogue that screenwriter Alex Garland assigns to his stressed-out characters (still in evidence in last year's Civil War) adds to the unearthed effect. That wordiness, not to mention the street-level budgeting and several less than incredible acting performances, anchors our expectations for 28 Days Later in the realm of television. This weakness actually assists the production though. It allows Boyle's film to consistently understate the level of twisting terror in a piece that often seems like a BBC serial spiralling further and further out of control.