28 Years Later: The Bone Temple premieres in theaters on January 16.
There was a guy sitting behind me at my screening of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple who, when the credits began to roll, stood up and loudly declared to his buddies that “we can put the worst movie of the year debate to bed” because this movie was that bad. Now forgetting for a second that January 12 is a little early to rest your case on that particular argument, he went on to say that a movie about murderous cult followers indiscriminately killing has nothing to do with zombies taking over society. Which means he was not only wrong, because this movie is really good, but he also missed the whole point of the thing.
Picking up where last year’s long-range sequel installment left off, Nia DaCosta’s film is a gruesome and fabulously shot new chapter of the franchise that, with all due respect to the dude sitting behind me, will very much not be the worst movie of the year.
There is part of me that can imagine screenwriter Alex Garland just scripting way too much for 28 Years Later. Maybe he wrote a 300-page script that was all great, so he and his fellow 28 Days/Years creator, director Danny Boyle, decided they couldn’t cut any of it, but Sony made them split it in two. That doesn’t feel quite right, however, because even though The Bone Temple starts immediately after the events of 28 Years (maybe even minutes later) and was filmed back-to-back with its predecessor, the films deserve to be their own stories.
The Bone Temple is concerned with something else. It’s got different aims visually, thematically, even tonally, which makes the choice to hand the directing duties over to Nia DaCosta all the more crucial. DaCosta is a very interesting filmmaker; with her work in horror on Candyman a few years ago, the unconventionally violent Hedda last year and now The Bone Temple, she’s putting together a wide variety of work and all of it is forceful. There are no pulled punches in her films and The Bone Temple is certainly no exception.
I found it to easily be the most gruesome of the 28 Later films and that’s not a low bar to clear. In one especially gnarly scene, the roving band known as the Jimmys take their version of satanic “charity” to an extreme. This is not violence committed against an infected, but instead against their fellow man, which is what made this the hardest to watch of the franchise and, very probably, what set off the dude behind me. And while I don’t want to turn this into an essay about zombies in pop culture, part of the point of the monsters is to mirror the potential for us to become monsters. And that’s one of The Bone Temple’s biggest wins.
Jack O’Connell is magnificent and nearly steals the show as cult leader Jimmy Crystal, a type of role for which he’s now in danger of being typecast. His performance and the theme his character represents work hand in hand better than any I’ve seen lately. The Fingers, as they’re called, that form the fist of his followers, are every bit as infected as the zombies, and every bit as mindless. As an American, I had to get educated about Jimmy Savile after 28 Years Later sprung that image on us in its closing minutes, but The Bone Temple, and the things that come to light in the sequel about O’Connell’s villain, makes the choice downright brilliant.
It’s such a wild and unexpected place to take the franchise, and fascinating to watch creators like DaCosta, Garland and Boyle (who with Garland serves as a producer on this installment) pull on interesting threads. There’s a scary amount of freedom sitting down to a blank page with these movies. Anything could’ve happened in 28 years in this world, but they’ve used such a light touch, and at every juncture made very well-reasoned, logical choices.
Yes, pitting psychotic acrobat zombie killers fashioned after a national treasure who was secretly a sex criminal against an iodine-coated doctor who made an entire temple out of bones is a well-reasoned and logical choice.
Did I mention the movie is funny too? Because it’s downright hilarious at times. DaCosta employs a darkly comedic sense of timing, whether it be punctuating a quiet conversation with a man engulfed in flames, bursting through a door, or interrupting a morning shave with a deer head, there is a gross-funny vibe in this movie that’s pitch perfect. It reaches a level of absurdity that’s absolutely necessary for the film to work as well. For the ideas to really land, the seriously satirical aspect of zombies needs an opposite number in some dark humor. It allows for a distance at which you can see the thematic forest for the trees, unless you’re the guy behind me…
But I’ve come all this way without mentioning Ralph Fiennes and for that I must apologize. This character may be my favorite flavor of Ralph Fiennes. He’s kind and gentle, wise and willing to listen. There’s a pathos to him, a depth that’s communicated simply and truthfully in things like the slump of his shoulders as he sits looking at a river. There’s no colder take than “Ralph Fiennes is great” and that’s not what this is, because he can be great in a bad movie. DaCosta positions his performance so deftly that every time he’s funny, he’s hilarious. Every time he’s sad, he’s unbearably tragic. By the end, it’s all of the above and rolled into one of the best Iron Maiden music videos that’s ever been made.
Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson also develops a remarkably unlikely relationship with 28 Years Later’s returning Alpha infected, Samson. Chi Lewis-Parry is doing some incredible work here as well, going from the rage-fueled heavy from 28 Years Later to a much subtler, engaging take on an evolving zombie. He’s so much more than just a canvas on which to paint Kelson’s charismatic empathy. There’s a real story to tell from both sides of their relationship and it’s told effectively and often wordlessly.
On the other side of the film, you’ve got the rest of the Jimmys, a collection of bloodthirsty true believers following Jimmy Crystal’s lead. Among them is the returning Alfie Williams as Spike, having been recruited into their ranks in the only violent way there is to join them. Spike doesn’t have a ton to do in this movie, but what he does continues his good work from 28 Years Later. This movie is just not his journey.
Erin Kellyman, however, as Jimmy Ink, is the same engaging screen presence as always, and carries more of the weight on the antagonist’s side of the plot. She’s curious and questioning, beginning to see things for what they really are and her dynamic with Spike is a great companion to Kelson and Samson’s burgeoning relationship. It speaks to a wonderful efficiency in the film. There aren’t too many characters, but they’re all painted with the same brush, going on different flavors of the same journey that speak to one larger idea. As disparate as they seem on paper, they’re all working together in ways that are simultaneously surprising and organic. It’s always a good sign when an odd couple makes sense together.
Nia DaCosta and Director of Photography Sean Bobbit’s visuals, meanwhile, also could not be better. While they don’t pick up Danny Boyle’s penchant for mixed media filmmaking, there are moments that clearly call back to shots from the original 28 Days Later. Some wide shots are framed through broken glass or dirtied by trees or tall grass in the foreground. It’s a classic trick to make it seem as though we’re looking through somebody else’s POV, like there’s a lurking presence the characters on screen don’t know about.
Some of the imagery is a bit on the nose. Frankly I’ve yet to meet the Christ imagery that isn’t, but that’s mitigated here by the characters pointing it out and making the whole thing so on the nose that it comes back around to almost working again. But there was one moment early on, a single edit that gave me confidence in whatever was coming next. It was a match cut, which is when an edit ties together two images that are different, but more or less the same shape or moving in the same direction so that the combination creates a separate idea. The most famous example is probably the bone turning into the satellite in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In The Bone Temple, it’s a ruined cityscape juxtaposed with the spires of the titular temple.
The city we see in the distance is a wreck, smouldering and dead. It’s a reminder of the civilization that’s been lost. The second half of the match cut is The Bone Temple, standing tall in roughly the same arrangement as the skyscrapers, but gleaming and meticulously cared for even though it too is quite literally dead. An old, destroyed civilization, giving way to a different one built by Kelson’s lonely, painstaking work. It’s a visual statement that says everything about the movie you’re about to watch, and it’s the kind of thing that, and the guy behind me may disagree, makes a good movie great.
Ultimately, as the subtitle of the film makes clear, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a companion piece. It goes without saying to some degree because it’s a sequel, but you really need to have seen 28 Years Later for any of this movie to make sense. Of course you could say the same thing about The Empire Strikes Back or Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, but prior knowledge of the franchise was not a prerequisite for the other 3 films. 28 Years Later, for example, could be the first film you watch in the series and you wouldn’t be lost.
The Bone Temple is much more of a middle chapter, neither a beginning nor end, but the movie also wants to stand alone. Maybe that feeling will go away with the third entry. That story, like the Jimmys were in 28 Years, is set up the old-fashioned way in a mercifully PRE-credits scene, but for now there are parts of The Bone Temple that feel more like an appendix to 28 Years than a part of a new story that stands on its own. It’s a structure that doesn’t break the movie by any means. What it does is move the film squarely into franchise territory, for better or worse, where every movie depends on the one that came before it and isn’t fully realized until the next film. It’s a gutsy choice to which they’re now committed. However, if there’s a creative team I trust to tell a continuously interesting story, it’s this one.
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