[Patreon Preview] 28 Years Later Review

Hello, and welcome to a bonus episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a two-decade-in-the-making, waiting, three quil, sequel continuation of a beloved early aughts, cult, zombie, no, not a zombie, kind of a zombie film by Danny Boyle.

As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by Lizzie Bassett.

Lizzie, how are you doing tonight?

I'm great.

And I'm very glad that we decided to collectively go see 28 Years Later.

Of course, we are doing this because we just covered 28 Days Later.

Chris, did an excellent job.

So make sure you've listened to that episode if you haven't already.

And we thought, you know what?

Why don't we get our butts in some seats and go see the, you know, as you pointed out, sequel slash maybe

bit of a leapfrog over 28 weeks later.

Before we get into anything, there will be spoilers pretty much from this point forward.

So, Chris, what did you think?

I loved that everyone died.

No, I'm just kidding.

I,

so, okay, so I had very, I actually had not low expectations, but tempered expectations going into it because who knows, I haven't really liked a zombie movie in quite some time outside of like the first 10 minutes of Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead, which is a fantastic opening 10 minutes and then a very long movie after that.

And I sat in the theater by myself on a Friday next to a complete stranger, and I was not expecting to cry an hour and a half into this movie.

And I absolutely was crying an hour and a half into this movie.

I loved it.

I thought it was an unusual film in the sense that

I thought it was very flawed in a lot of ways.

There were a lot of things where I thought either that didn't work, or

that's odd, or that feels like it's ripping something off I've already seen.

And yet the whole of the movie, I absolutely loved.

And I thought it was fantastic.

I also absolutely loved it.

I agree.

There are some elements of this that if you take them piecemeal, they don't make any sense and are absolutely bonkers.

There's some strange stylistic choices, but as a whole, I thought it was wonderful.

I also was sobbing at about an hour and a half into this.

I thought that the performances were really, really excellent.

I'm not always a huge fan of Aaron Taylor Johnson.

Sometimes I think he's wonderful.

Sometimes I think he's misused.

Hot take.

I think he was a little miscast in Nasferatu.

That didn't quite work for me.

I thought he was excellent in this.

Really that sort of like macho wild element to him.

Danny Boyle just targeted that missile so well in this.

And

I was really, really impressed.

Rafe Fiennes, of course, always deeply, deeply wonderful.

And I don't know if you caught the Hamlet joke, but it did really make me wish that we'd gotten a Rafe Fiennes Hamlet instead of Kenneth Branagh and Mel Gibson.

Shots fired at a soon-to-be-covered What Went Wrong director Mel Gibson.

Well, let's get some details in, Lizzie, before we discuss the plot of the film and some fun callbacks to the first film and kind of other zombie movies that it touches on.

So 28 Years Later is a, quote, post-apocalyptic coming-of-age horror film.

Again, note, zombie not included in that description.

Directed by Zoroastrian.

Well, they're not undead, in fairness.

They are not.

Directed by Danny Boyle, written by Alex Garland, produced by Andrew McDonald, who produced 28 Days Later.

Danny Boyle, Peter Rice, who was the, I believe, the 20th century Fox executive, excuse me, Fox searchlight executive, who purchased a 50% stake in 28 Days Later back at Cannes in 2001.

And then also Bernie Bellew and Alex Garland on the producing team.

Cinematography, again, by Anthony Dodd-Mantle, who we discussed in our coverage of 28 Days Later and has been Boyle's cinematographer, I believe, since then.

Music, not by John Murphy, but by the trip hop trio out of the UK, Young Fathers.

So those, yeah, fantastic music.

Those are

kind of score, even though they kind of play like needle drops at the same time, the songs in the movie.

I am particularly love the weirdly soulful, almost upbeat music at the beginning as we're watching children get slaughtered in front of the teletubbies and that was

upsetting.

But yeah, very stark contrast that worked really well i think you forgot one executive producer

did you mention killian murphy killian murphy yeah he is listed as an executive producer he does not show up in this film i have read that he will be featured in its sequel yes the bone temple yeah

starring as you mentioned aaron taylor johnson jodi comer ray fines Alfie Williams and his feature debut

as Spike, the main character of the film, with a fun cameo by Jack O'Connell,

who I'm assuming will be a bigger part of the sequel.

Yeah, we'll talk about that ending.

Personally, all for it.

Me too.

Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing.

At the time of this recording, it's estimated the film pulled in $30 million

in its opening weekend, matched by $30 million.

Excuse me, that's $30 million domestic, $30 million international.

So $60 total against a reported $60 million budget, depending on what word of mouth is like, which interestingly is actually not that great for this film.

And we can talk a little bit about the disparity between audience scores and critical scores.

It should break even.

The critical response has been overwhelmingly positive.

The audience response has been mixed to positive.

So not nearly as bad as some horror films of the last few years.

Long Legs had a pretty poor, I believe, audience score, but not nearly as strong as something like Final Destination Bloodlines, which just had an amazing pair of legs at the box office.

So here is the IMDb log line.

A group of survivors of the rage virus live on a small island.

When one of the group leaves the island on a mission into the mainland, he discovers secrets, wonders, and horrors that have mutated not only the infected, but other survivors.

I just want to point out, it would be so easy for the other countries to just come and pick them up off that island.

It's really extremely rude that they just leave them there.

Right.

So after a

very brutal opening that I would actually like to save discussing that I have a different subset of topics that I want to see if you agree with me on Lizzie.

Sure.

We meet our main cast.

We meet Spike, our coming-of-age protagonist, a 12-year-old boy living on this island, Lindisfarne, which is connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway.

This is a real tidal causeway.

This is a real island.

They did shoot on an island.

There were, I'm sure, production difficulties in getting equipment on and off the island.

And eventually, when we cover this film in full, we'll be able to discuss all of those juicy details and all the crazy things they had to do to make it work.

Basically, we are meeting this hero, Spike, as he is being taken, arguably earlier.

you know, in great heroes' journey stories.

His dad says the boy is ready, the community says maybe he's not yet, and he's going on his, you know, call it year walk, his rite of passage, where he's going to leave the community, enter the liminal space, and return changed and be reintegrated into the society.

And Lizzie, I'm not sure about you, but one of the things that I loved immediately about this movie is it actually took the time to think about what could a community like this look like

if two decades had passed and they had been left on their own and they had to form a form of society and they had their own rituals and stories and rites, etc.

And it was interesting and colorful and not just a dreary, I will trade you nine bullets for your canteen of water, sir, at my dusty saloon.

So I'm just curious how you felt about like, you know, the production design, everything about the lore that they kind of established the movie with.

I loved it.

And I have a confession to make, which is that these days with the advent of AI and everything else that's going on, every time I see one of these movies or TV shows that shows a post-apocalyptic community that is existing with more

analog technology, I'm always like, I kind of want to go there.

Do you really want to go here though?

No, I don't, but it looks kind of fun.

It's like old people on bicycles and no doctors and everyone's

need doctors.

Getting pissed.

Telling fake stories.

It looked like fun.

They had their own little banner.

They have their own rules.

They do.

Rites and rituals.

You only had a choice of like six different jobs.

Great.

You could be a forager.

You could be a hunter.

You could be like a seamster.

Did you notice that it didn't say seamstress?

It was very inclusive.

It was.

Yeah, I don't know.

It does.

Whenever I watch these, I'm like, it looks like camp.

It looks fun.

But I thought it was great.

And I also thought that they went to great lengths to sort of answer any questions you might have about this community in a way that was very efficient.

And then I think where the movie sets up,

it sets itself up in a very familiar fashion.

We understand, okay, this boy, he's going through his threshold, right?

Right.

He's going to, the separation, liminality, and then incorporation.

And that's typically what an entire movie is, right?

And normally your hero leaves the normal world, the

living world.

They enter the dream world or the world of the death.

That's the threshold crossing of the first act.

They don't return until the end of act three.

Right.

He comes right back.

He comes right back.

I was very surprised.

I did not know that that was going to happen.

And for anyone who's not familiar, which I hope you have seen the movie if you're listening to this, but he leaves with his father.

And I hadn't read anything about the movie yet.

We saw it at opening weekend.

And I thought, okay, this is going to be the whole movie.

It's going to be him and Aaron Taylor Johnson in the woods.

And it's not.

That's a very exciting, I think, first act, essentially.

It's a very long first act, but yes, like a 40 40 to 45 minute first act basically yeah of them out there he gets his first kill you know they have an experience where he they almost die but they make it back successfully to the settlement and then what happens is that he after a series of incidents decides that he's going to take his mother by himself back to the mainland to try and get a hold of the doctor that he saw when he was there with his dad.

I was not expecting that at all.

I just have to give a huge shout out to Jodi Comer.

I think that that's a part that could so easily have just been, frankly, really annoying.

And she's not at all.

She is so just flawless in this.

She's fantastic.

Her character is suffering.

At the beginning of the film, an undisclosed, unknown to our character's medical condition, in which she seems to be suffering a whole bevy of symptoms, right?

Everything from fever, lack of appetite, psychotic fits,

you know, loss of memory.

She doesn't understand who she's speaking to, or she doesn't remember what day it is.

And so you don't really know what she's going through.

That question is answered by the end of the film.

I think, Lizzie, what the movie does so effectively is that at first you think, oh, this is going to be a fetch quest, or it's going to be about this boy becoming a man, toughening up and becoming a man.

But what you really realize is what Garland and Boyle are actually interested in is exploring the relationship that this young man has with death and growing up in a world where he is surrounded by death.

And so I'd like to briefly bring us back to the opening of the film because I have a theory or I believe this is what Garland is doing with the writing.

So the movie opens with a group of children inside of a room in the Scottish Highlands watching teletubbies

as

adults argue outside the door.

The infected quickly break in, and in really you think the kids are going to get saved.

At least I thought the kids are going to get saved.

There's no way they're going to kill these kids.

The infected break in,

it's discreet.

They don't show a ton, but the kids are all killed with the exception of one who makes it down to the church where his father, you learn, is a priest.

And his father is praying inside of the church.

And we meet the first of three fathers that we'll meet in the film or father figures.

And this first father, the flaw that he represents is, as I read it, like as is fundamentalism, right?

He's a fundamentalist christian in that he is unable to interpret his understanding of the world or reinterpret his understanding of the world with these reconcile them with these new events and so he's just contextualized it as the rapture and so he thinks this is god calling us he welcomes the infected into the church you know he gives his son his cross the boy escapes we don't learn his fate until the very end of the movie which we'll get to in a fun way and so the first father right

is too welcoming of death because he believes this is just an extension of life.

This is the rapture.

And then we meet the second father, Aaron Taylor Johnson, like you said, this weary warrior

who's, you know, got bloodlust and maybe some anger issues, as we later learn.

And in this community that they've made, death is not welcome at all, right?

Everybody's buried out by the entrance as a warning.

If you leave and don't come back, you're not allowed to go and have somebody come and try to rescue you.

Death is very much held at bay, right?

And I think that the use of bows and arrows, as we can discuss, is like a distancing effect.

And even the way Aaron Taylor Johnson treats the zombies is, or non-zombies, the infected, excuse me, is like as dehumanizing as possible.

Yeah.

And so, Lizzie, maybe you can talk a little bit about like the different types of infected they start to meet as they go out on their journey and the way in which that

freshens things up a bit.

Yeah, definitely.

I'm excited to hear your take on the third father, who is, of course, the most benevolent, I think.

But we'll get there in a minute.

But yeah, yeah so we do get introduced to some different kinds we get introduced to what can only be described as like giant rotting cabbage patch kids that just kind of crawl almost like larva in a way yes they're really repulsive and also sort of sad and they like crawl along the ground and they're mostly just eating worms they move very very slowly they're very bloated and they have a family that's kind of that first reveal Yeah, and man, as soon as I saw the child infected, I was like, we're going to get it.

There's going to be a baby.

There's going to be a baby in this.

And I don't feel great about that given Danny Boyle's history with babies,

namely train spotting,

especially because if they've been there for 28 years and there is a child who is there, then they must have multiplied, which of course we learn later in the movie, they are reproducing.

And then we discover that there is something called an alpha.

which they're gigantic.

They're very fast.

They're super strong.

And they have unbelievably large penises that you will see so, so many times swinging in front of your face.

Yes.

There's so many dongs in this movie.

Lizzie, if you remember

when we were discussing 28 Days Later, I said one of their ideas was that the movie The Zombies Would Be Horny and they would have massive erections.

And you said, I'm glad they cut the penises.

And then you got every one that was cut.

Oh,

they got all in this one.

Yeah.

Yep.

That is a prosthetic.

I hope so.

I can't remember the actor's name, he's six foot eight, and oh my god, you cannot be fully nude in front of a 13-year-old actor, obviously.

So, that's a makeup, that's all makeup.

That's a prosthetic.

The pregnant zombie you see later, that is an animatronic pregnancy rig, obviously, okay, on her and fake breasts and everything as well, because they're not going to have these people nude in front of this young poor boy.

Is it less upsetting to see it like this?

It looks very real, it's not, I mean, whatever, sure, from 100 yards out, yeah,

I think it's a little more appropriate.

But yes.

So, so obviously, you know, Garland,

he suggests they can communicate.

He suggests they have families, right?

And, and I think for our hero Alfie, it starts to feel like, oh, maybe

the stories that I've been told of the outside world, they don't comport with what I'm seeing, which is obviously a big part of the hero's journey is discovering kind of the lies my teachers hold me as he as he goes out into this space.

And so eventually they get chased back.

The biggest donged alpha is chasing them down the causeway

towards the island.

It's very exciting.

The Aurora Borealis is out in full regalia.

And then we weirdly are back in the community and we're safe and everything seems fine.

And then the real betrayal happens.

And you mentioned, Lizzie, the use of Aaron Taylor Johnson.

I think what's so good here is he's a cad.

He's cheating on his wife.

And

you have this kind of betrayal of the father.

And you know, again, this is somebody who's distracting himself from the death of the world with beer and with women.

Right.

I want to say not entirely,

he's not unsympathetic.

Like, no, no, that's what makes him a good character.

Yeah.

He's got, he's, has a wife he cannot help who is in a state of semi-psychosis in the upstairs bedroom of his home.

And

he only knows how, he's like a hammer.

Everything's a nail, right?

For this, for this character.

And

so again, kind of in the if you guys would like to hear the remainder of this conversation on 28 years later, you can head to our Patreon, www.patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast.

You can join our $5 tier where this episode is available.

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If we don't see you there, we will see you on Monday for the sound of music.