Rage Reborn
Days... Weeks... Years... The infected were only the beginning. The real monsters are the ones who survived in a world where Rage rules.
Words Lee Curtis
This year, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland plunged us back into their Rage-infected Britain… 28 Years Later. The wait for this sequel spanned over two decades, the wait for the next is already nearly over.
Shot back-to-back with his predecessor, the second film in the trilogy drops us deeper into the chaos, with the island causeway’s safety already a fading memory.
After a sensational rescue in the gorge, Alife Williams’ Spike finds uneasy refuge among his saviours – but safety is anything but guaranteed in the company of Jack O’Connell’s peculiar Jimmy Crystal and his band of track-suited blonds. The cult’s spray-painted warnings and scattered corpses hint at a new nightmare – one where the living may be more dangerous than the living dead.
Meanwhile, Ralph Fiennes’ Dr Kelson continues his solo survival, building his tower of skulls and studying the infected – particularly his number one subject: the colossal Alpha, Samson.
As with 28 Weeks Later, Boyle steps back from directing and makes room for an exciting new voice. Candyman and The Marvels director Nia DaCosta takes the helm as the franchise twists into darker, stranger, and more unpredictable territory.
Boyle will be back to direct the final instalment and whispers of a Cillian Murphy comeback grow louder. Could Jim’s fate be one of the many shocks waiting in this chapter… and the next?
Now, Then
The Jimmy’s jaw-dropping entrance – fighting off infected in Power Rangers fashion, basked by a death metal cover of the Teletubbies theme – is a surreal clash of nostalgia and brutality, and the biggest talking point of 28 Years Later. Feral children shaped by Rage-infeced chaos around them and the nineties TV they cling to for comfort, they’re locked in a state of arrested development as the would-be “lost boys’’ of this post-apocalyptic world. They survive together in the image of their leader, Sir Jimmy, who witnessed his family’s death during the initial outbreak - a trauma that forged a cult of personality that manifests in shell suits, blond hair, and gold chains. As the story unfolds, a chilling truth emerges: they’re not to be trusted.
