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    What to Know About ‘28 Years Later’

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    We catch you up on the “28” franchise, including the new movie, with commentary from the films’ screenwriter Alex Garland.This article contains minor spoilers for “28 Years Later.”Excitement has been building for Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later,” in theaters June 20. Sure, the trailer, which uses a 1915 reading of a Rudyard Kipling poem to striking effect, is uncommonly exciting. And it’s been a while since we’ve seen actually scary zombies on a big screen. But for many viewers, the anticipation is further compounded by the history behind “28 Years Later.”The release is a new chapter in a franchise that began in 2003 with Boyle’s “28 Days Later,” now widely credited as creating a zombie revival, so to speak. Shot on a relatively tight budget, that film imagined a Britain taken over by ferocious, flesh-eating hordes. Some of the building blocks are familiar by now: Survivors band into small, often mismatched groups; scavenging expeditions loot empty stores; everybody runs from relentless pursuers of the fast-moving variety at one point or another. But “28 Days Later” still feels radical, thanks to Boyle’s inspired direction. The movie interspersed quickly edited close-ups of violence into much longer moody, melancholy scenes whose haunting power has not faded, and was often driven by the superb soundtrack. Tellingly, the composer John Murphy’s spooky instrumental “In the House — In a Heartbeat” has been reused (including in a Louis Vuitton ad) and recycled (including by Murphy himself in “Kick-Ass”) many times since.From left, Williams, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes in “28 Years Later.”Miya Mizuno/Columbia Pictures and Sony PicturesNow Boyle has reunited with the “28 Days Later” screenwriter, Alex Garland, for what Garland has described as a trilogy. (The two men were executive producers on a first sequel, “28 Weeks Later,” that was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and released in 2007.)In a video interview, Garland said that while “28 Years Later” is a stand-alone film, a second has also been made, directed by Nia DaCosta. He explained that these two installments are narratively connected and were shot back to back. (DaCosta’s “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” is expected in January.) As for the third feature, Garland said, “the story is written. The script is not written.”Now that we are back in the “28” world, here’s what to know about the premise, the new film’s universe and what you might expect.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘28 Years Later’ Review: Danny Boyle Revives His Monsters

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      The director returns to the postapocalyptic Britain he conjured in his 2002 movie “28 Days Later,” this time with a father and son running from flesh-eaters. Mom joins in, too.After more than two decades of dipping in and out of genres that have taken him from the Milky Way to Mumbai, Danny Boyle has returned to the juicily gruesome world of consuming violence, human and otherwise, with “28 Years Later.” Once again, flesh-eating creatures are wandering, crawling and, most worryingly, running amok, ravaging every conceivable living being. Humanity remains on the run with some souls safely barricaded in isolation. It’s a sensible precaution that — along with all the gnawed bodies, shredded nerves and broken relationships — makes this futuristic freakout seem as plausible as it is familiar.Pitched between sputtering hope and despairing resignation, the movie is a classic boys-into-men coming-of-age story updated for the postapocalypse and future installments. On a lushly green British island, a ragtag collection of adults and children are doing their best to keep the tattered remains of civilization intact. Inside a protected hamlet, they live and congregate much as their peasant forbears might have centuries earlier. They share precious resources; nuzzle sexily in the dark. There are threats and some provocative mysteries, like the figure who appears in a ghoulish mask that’s suggestive of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”This is the third addition to a cycle that opened with “28 Days Later” (2002), a violent parable also directed by Boyle in which humanity is stricken into near-oblivion. (The 2007 follow-up, “28 Weeks Later,” was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.) The 2002 movie opens in Britain with animal-rights activists set on freeing some lab chimps. Even after an on-site scientist helpfully explains that the animals are infected with rage, the activists keep blundering toward doom. As they restrain the scientist, he shouts, “You’ve no idea—” just before a chimp chows down on a would-be liberator in a flurry of blood-red imagery.Like the new movie, “28 Days Later” was written by Alex Garland and draws on different influences, most obviously zombie movies. (Boyle directed the screen adaptation of Garland’s novel “The Beach”; they also collaborated on “Sunshine,” a very different dystopian fantasy.) In interviews, Boyle readily discussed the inspirations for “28 Days Later,” realistic and otherwise, citing the Ebola virus as well as “The Omega Man” (1971), a thriller set in the wake of germ warfare. Even so, he pushed back against genre-pigeonholing “28 Days Later.” “See, it’s not a film about monsters — it’s a film about us,” he told Time Out. That our monsters are always us is as obvious as the all-too-human face of Frankenstein’s creature.Whether zombies or not, the infected in “28 Days Later” kill indiscriminately, much like the undead that George A. Romero first sicced on us in 1968 with “Night of the Living Dead.” One striking, nerve-thwacking difference between these generations of insatiable ghouls is their pacing. Along with Zack Snyder in his zippy 2004 remake of Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” Boyle popularized the now-familiar fast zombie. Romero’s tend to stagger and lurch with their arms raised like scarily ravenous toddlers, moving slowly enough for some of their swifter would-be victims to escape, though not always. Quickening the pace of the creatures added genre novelty, and it expressed the real world’s ever accelerating rhythms.The pace complemented Boyle’s filmmaking, which tends toward speed. That’s very much in evidence in “28 Years Later,” which opens with some pro forma background about the state of the world (it’s still bad) and a freaky episode in a house that echoes the opener in the previous movie. The scene here begins with a group of obviously terrified children shut up in a room watching “Teletubbies” on a TV. It’s an unsettling scene that grows all the more disturbing as noises from outside the room grow progressively louder. As the thumps and panicked voices rise, increasing and then converging, the editing rapidly goes into overdrive and grows choppy, finally becoming a grim churn of tots, Teletubbies and flesh-eaters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ’28 Years Later’: A Zombie Apocalypse Infected by Brexit, the Manosphere and Trump

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      “28 Years Later” leaps forward through time — into a world that has changed in worrisome parallel to ours.It begins with a deadly lab leak. Inside an English research facility in Cambridge, a bank of TV monitors is blasting clips of documentary violence — riots, hangings — into the eyes of a chimpanzee, a test subject in what we’d now recognize as “gain of function” virus research. Today, the rest plays out like Instagram highlights: Animal rights activists burst into this “Clockwork Orange” tableau and free an infected chimp. The chimp promptly mauls its human liberator. Then comes the familiar transformation — spasm, contortion, brisk snap into embodied demon — that starts murderous insanity spreading through the lab’s remaining humans, and then to those outside.This was the start of Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later,” the movie that helped reboot the zombie apocalypse, turning a moribund horror subgenre into one of the dominant forces in entertainment. Boyle’s innovations — tonal seriousness, punk-rock filmmaking, speedy zombies bearing infectious disease — are still visible in everything from “World War Z” to “The Last of Us.” But it’s that opening scene, in which triggering media turns a primate virus into a fatal blood-borne psychosis, that sets up a prescient metaphor for what has happened in the decades between the movie’s release in 2002 and the arrival, this month, of “28 Years Later,” a new sequel from Boyle and the original screenwriter, Alex Garland. Across those years, a digital intoxication not unlike the film’s “Rage virus” really has made society feel angrier, crazier and more unstable.The original film had a grungy kinetic intensity; Boyle used digital video and the fast, cheap Canon XL1 to energize his shots, finding a jittery, claustrophobic, hyperreal visual language. Using what Garland has called a “Tootsie” cut — after the moment in that movie when Dustin Hoffman is suddenly revealed dressed as a woman — the story jumps straight from the initial outbreak of the virus to the moment, 28 days later, when a young bike messenger, Jim, awakes from a coma in an abandoned hospital and wanders out into an indelible vision of London after a people-vanishing cataclysm. (The walls and kiosks, covered with missing-person fliers, are one of several images that were transformed by real-life events after the film began shooting on Sept. 11, 2001.) He is rescued from his first contact with the infected by two masked survivors, one of whom explains that the apocalypse first appeared as a news item — “and then it wasn’t on the TV anymore,” she says, “it was coming through your windows.” Jim’s small crew must resist both the infected and a company of British soldiers who offer protection at the cost of sexual slavery. Finally escaped to a remote Lake District idyll, they see a military jet flyover as proof that civilization still endures — that the late-’90s neoliberal order may soon be restored.Clearly, things didn’t quite play out that way. A 2007 sequel, “28 Weeks Later” (neither original creator was involved) was rooted in post-9/11 security and warfare, imagining survivors huddled in a militarized safe zone controlled by American-led NATO troops, testing what a fearful society will tolerate to defend itself from an external threat. Then time passed and the paradigm shifted; ordinary people’s anger and fear was redirected from distant menaces to various enemies within. Real-life media and political institutions seemed to succumb to their own Rage, a process amplified by everything from new apps and platforms to a nonfictional pandemic. Now, “28 Years Later” shows us how the weaponized virus alters even the uninfected, reshaping society in terrifying ways.‘Some of the stuff in this film is about people misremembering the world we had.’The new film imagines a kind of extreme Brexit, extended a generation into the future. It, too, opens in the new-millennium world of pixels and screens, with a close-up of a TV playing the old British toddler show “The Teletubbies,” whose original series ended in 2001. But from there it moves to the residents of the tidal Holy Island, where, 28 years later, residents maintain a rugged nationalism apart from both the existing England and the smartphone-using world they’ve never seen. “We’ve gone backwards,” is how Boyle explained it to me. “Because inevitably you would retrench back to analog.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alex Garland Pairs With a Veteran to Engage in Realistic ‘Warfare’

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      The filmmaker directed his latest picture with Ray Mendoza, a U.S. Navy veteran of the Iraq War. They wanted to depict, with a sense of urgency, war as it is really experienced.The climactic sequence in last year’s “Civil War,” a movie about an imagined military conflict in the United States, was unusual — and not only because it depicted insurgents storming the White House, breaching the Oval Office and assassinating the president.It was also action shown in a way that films do not often depict. The gun-toting fighters communicate constantly about needing to reload. They awkwardly trade off shooting down hallways. Their rhythm is observably different than what moviegoers are used to.The movie’s writer and director, Alex Garland, whose previous work includes “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” had given the scene’s reins to Ray Mendoza, a U.S. Navy veteran of the Iraq War turned Hollywood military consultant. Mendoza had used combat veterans as extras.“When you saw veterans, in effect, directed by a veteran, something came out of it, which was something that I hadn’t really seen in cinema,” Garland said in a recent interview.It gave Garland an idea. What if, he proposed to Mendoza late into the postproduction of “Civil War,” the two men made a film together, this one entirely depicting combat without typical cinematic trappings like compressed time, character study or traditional plot structure? What if the movie were just 90 minutes of war?Charles Melton, center, is one of the marquee actors in the film.Murray Close/A24We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Warfare’ Review: A Combat Movie That Refuses to Entertain

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      In Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s film about an American platoon in Iraq, there is no admirably staged bloodshed or witty repartee. That’s the point.The highest praise I can offer “Warfare,” a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning. That’s to the point of this factually informed fiction, which tracks a platoon of U.S. Navy SEALs during a calamitous mission in Iraq. There, under cover of an otherwise still night, the troops take over a seemingly ordinary home, place the inhabitants under guard and stake out the area. Then the men watch and wait while sitting, standing and sometimes agitatedly peering out windows in the name of a cause that no one ever explains outright.Among those not explaining any of this — the mission, its averred rationale and its carnage — are the writers-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. Garland’s last movie was “Civil War” (2024), an eerie, uncomfortably realistic slice of speculative fiction set in a war-torn United States that Mendoza, a former member of the SEALs, worked on as the military adviser. That experience led to a friendship and now to “Warfare,” which is based on a real operation in 2006 that Mendoza took part in; at the time, the Americans were attempting to take control of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. The war was three years old by then, an estimated 600,000 Iraqis were dead and American fatalities would soon reach 3,000.Much of “Warfare” takes place in real time inside a blocky, two-story building where the inhabitants, including several children, are sleeping when the Americans enter. Crowded into a bedroom where they’re watched over by a rotation of guards, the Iraqis aren’t named (not that I remember, at least) and are scarcely individualized. The military men are more distinct, largely because they’re either played by somewhat familiar faces — including Will Poulter, as Captain Erik, the head of the initial operation — or have distinguishing features, like the mustache on Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis), the head sniper. (The movie is dedicated to the real Elliott Miller, who somehow survived the operation.)Garland is very good at building suspense, and he’s especially adept at turning quiet spaces into unrelenting zones of dread. “Warfare” opens with a burst of raucous silliness as uniformed men crowded around a monitor in a small room watch a risibly tacky music video for the dance tune “Call on Me.” Set in what’s meant to be an aerobics studio circa the 1980s, the video features a throng of big-haired, tight-thighed hotties (and one pitiful dude), stretching and pumping as if warming up for an orgiastic marathon. It’s a spectacle that the guys watch with collective pleasure and much whooping, and which underscores that you’ve entered a specific world of men that, minutes later, goes spookily quiet in an unnamed town.The SEAL unit takes over the Iraqi house quickly, breaking through a bricked-off upper floor, where most of them position themselves. In one room, Elliott, eyes squinting and face slicked with sweat, lies on his belly on a makeshift platform watching the street through a large, jagged peephole punched in the wall. As the minutes tick off, the men continue waiting as they listen to radio commands and watch surveillance footage. Every so often, Elliott scribbles a note as does a second sniper, Frank (Taylor John Smith). Frank briefly takes over when Elliott needs a break to replace his chewing tobacco and to relieve himself, which he does by urinating in an empty water bottle, something that I doubt that John Wayne did.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best Films of 2024, So Far

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      Our critics pick nine films that they think are worth your time on this long holiday weekend.Looking for a good movie to pass the time this Memorial Day weekend? The New York Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, have you covered. Here are their top picks for the year so far. All are in theaters or available on demand.‘Hit Man’In theaters; June 7 on Netflix.The story: Glen Powell is a philosophy professor who moonlights for the police in New Orleans when he finds himself undercover posing as a hit man in this Richard Linklater movie. An encounter with Madison (Adria Arjona), a housewife looking to hire him, raises the stakes, comedically and romantically.Alissa Wilkinson’s take: “If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now.” Read the review.‘Civil War’In theaters.Kirsten Dunst plays a war photographer in Alex Garland’s “Civil War.” A24, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Are Movies so Bad at Making Civil War Look Scary?

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      The filmmaker has made it clear that “Civil War” is a warning. Instead, the ugliness of war comes across as comforting thrills. Early in “Civil War,” the writer-director Alex Garland’s dystopian blockbuster, a plucky young journalist named Jessie recalls an event called the Antifa Massacre. You can picture the eeriness that Garland must have assumed that phrase would conjure: familiar words, filtered through his apocalyptic vision, projecting today’s ideological rancor into the future. His film is an invitation to imagine what might emerge from America’s political divisions if we don’t back away from the fractious disaffection that has characterized most of the 21st century. But it is also vague about what the Antifa Massacre, or any of the war, actually is. Who was massacred? Who did the massacring? What were the stakes? All we know is that America has descended into a chaotic conflict: California and Texas have united to battle an authoritarian Loyalist government, while other states have gathered into various alliances. Beyond that, “Civil War” obscures the war’s political and social contours. One senses that, for Garland, the ideological dimensions are beside the point, a distraction from what he hopes is a searing vision of a future nobody wants. To that end, maybe, he has cast “Civil War” as an antiwar movie in the tradition of Elem Klimov’s “Come and See,” a 1985 fever dream about Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet Byelorussia. The power of “Come and See” lies in its images, which depict war’s depravity with the unsparing clarity of prophecy. One 10-minute scene forces us to watch a carnival of violence as German soldiers, who have gathered civilians into a church, set it aflame. Garland intends a similar revelation. In interviews, he and his cast have made it clear that they see “Civil War” as a warning. You can practically hear him whisper through every frame: This could happen here.François Truffaut once said that every film about war ends up being pro-war: Whatever a director points his camera at, even violence, becomes appealing, or at least intriguing. To make an effective antiwar film, a director must find a way to unsettle this relationship between image and titillation. I think often about the 1966 Italian thriller “The Battle of Algiers,” which depicts Algerian resistance to French colonial rule. It is, generally, a triumphalist take on the power of liberatory violence, and it has proved popular among armed insurgents. There’s a mournful, cautionary undercurrent, though, that sometimes overwhelms its heroic story. In one scene, two women smuggle bombs out of a ghetto and into French cafes. One leaves hers beneath a bar, and we wait while the camera cuts from one French face to another: a flirting couple, a sullen baby, a laughing barkeep, a waiter who looks directly at us. In that long wait before the bomb goes off, we are tricked into a moral accounting of political violence’s toll on human life. The movie reminds us that our attraction to violence also threatens to destroy the society we depend on, plunging us into a Hobbesian state of nature.This balancing act depends on depicting the social costs of war on the lives of civilians — something contemporary films about war on American soil have struggled to accomplish. “Civil War” follows Kirsten Dunst as Lee, a war photographer traveling from New York to Washington with her gonzo bro colleague Joel, hoping to photograph the president while Joel interviews him. They’re joined by Jessie and Sammy, Lee’s mentor. What unfolds is essentially a road-trip movie that shuttles this quartet from one apocalyptic set piece to another. They are journalists, but they do no reporting on the tragedies they encounter on the way to their big scoop. They don’t meet many people, and when they do, they are rigorously incurious. They arrive at a refugee camp, yet make no attempt to interview any refugees. Why are two soldiers shooting at another amid a Christmas display? Joel makes only a cursory effort to find out. These are war journalists with a strange lack of interest in covering the war’s victims or America’s shredded social fabric. Garland’s vision is almost entirely restricted to destroyed buildings and corpses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How They Pulled Off the Ending to ‘Civil War’

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      The action thriller from Alex Garland concludes with an explosive sequence in the nation’s capital. A behind-the-scenes look at how it was done.This article contains spoilers for the film “Civil War.”When Alex Garland was writing the script for “Civil War,” he started with the ideas in the last moments. “In some ways the film was kind of reverse engineered from the ending,” he said during an interview in New York.The path to that ending finds the rebel Western Forces reaching Washington, D.C., laying siege to the White House and cornering the president (Nick Offerman), all while the journalists at the center of the film capture it through their own lenses. It’s a relentless, loud 20 minutes of screen time, during which the Lincoln Memorial is blown up. Garland said he wanted the audience to feel “aversion to it and to feel dismayed.”It also was an intricate production challenge, which involved digitally recreating Washington, shooting on sets throughout the Atlanta area, and executing detailed choreography that Garland likened to “football plays.” (Garland is British, but he noted that “football” could refer to soccer or American football. “It’s like little circles and triangles and arrows,” he added.)From the start of “Civil War,” two journalists at the center of the story — Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a photographer, and Joel (Wagner Moura), a correspondent — want to get to the White House for an audience with the president. They reach it alongside Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a younger, novice photographer who idolizes Lee. In the end it’s Jessie who gets the most important shot.But before that, they have to navigate a treacherous military operation on Pennsylvania Avenue and the surrounding streets.The process of designing the sequence began with a trip to Washington with crew members including Garland, the cinematographer Rob Hardy and the visual effects supervisor David Simpson. The team walked the route of the invasion, Simpson said, mapping out how the troops would move from the memorial to the White House.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Civil War’ Is No. 1 at Box Office

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      Alex Garland’s movie, starring Kirsten Dunst, surpassed “Godzilla x Kong,” with an estimated $25.7 million in North American ticket sales on its first weekend.Hollywood executives — not all, but most — have insisted for years that uncomfortable, thought-provoking, original movies can no longer attract big audiences at the box office.Moviegoers continue to bust that myth.Alex Garland’s dystopian “Civil War,” set in a near-immediate future when the United States is at war with itself, sold an estimated $25.7 million in tickets at North American theaters, enough to make the film a strong No. 1, surpassing the monsters sequel “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” Ticket sales for “Civil War” exceeded the prerelease expectations of some box office analysts by roughly 30 percent. IMAX screenings provided nearly 50 percent of the “Civil War” gross.More than 70 percent of the total audience was male, according to exit-polling services. PostTrak, one of those firms, said that people with “liberal” or “moderate” political views attended most heavily.“Civil War,” starring Kirsten Dunst as a journalist on a military embed, became the latest example of ticket buyers breaking with Hollywood’s conventional wisdom about what types of films are likely to pop at the box office. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” a three-hour period drama about a physicist, took in $968 million, wildly surpassing studio expectations. “Poor Things” collected $117 million, a solid total for a surreal art film.Garland (“Ex Machina”) wrote and directed “Civil War,” which gave A24, the specialty film company, its first No. 1 opening. (A24 was founded in New York in 2012.) The movie also cost more to make than any A24 movie to date: at least $50 million, not including tens of millions of dollars in marketing.The R-rated film benefited from a savvy release date — a time when Americans, sharply divided, are paying attention to the coming presidential election but are not yet completely worn out by it — and a marketing campaign that positioned the story as more of an action thriller than a gritty exploration of the frightening but not unthinkable.“Dystopian thrillers are generally set in futuristic worlds that look very different from contemporary life,” David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers, said in an email. “They use a lot of special effects and science fiction to tell their stories. ‘Civil War’ is doing the opposite: It looks like right now.”That storytelling choice, he added, “is bending the genre into something contemporary and relatable. The story is not directly partisan, but it’s provoking partisan feelings. It’s a fine balance to strike. Audiences are emotionally engaged, and that’s impressive.” More