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Time Magazine
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
'28 Years Later' Ending, Explained
Warning: This post contains spoilers for 28 Years Later. 28 Years Later, the long-awaited third entry in the post-apocalyptic horror franchise that kicked off nearly a quarter century ago with 2002's revolutionary 28 Days Later, has finally arrived in theaters. And with it, a new breed of terrifyingly fast-moving infected. Although 28 Years is technically the third film in the series, it takes the story in a different direction than what was suggested by the ending of the original sequel, 2007's 28 Weeks Later. Instead of the Rage Virus becoming an international contagion, it's revealed the disease's spread was ultimately contained to the UK, where survivors were left to figure things out on their own as the rest of the world moved on. That switch-up is likely due to the fact that, although 28 Days director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland served as executive producers on 28 Weeks, 28 Years marks the first time the duo has returned to the saga in their initial creative capacity. The new movie centers on 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), who travels beyond the borders of his home on Holy Island—an isolated community connected to the UK mainland solely by a tidal causeway—for the first time for a hunting trip with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). It's during this harrowing outing that Spike learns about the existence of Alphas, a strain of infected that have evolved to be much larger and stronger, as well as Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a mysterious survivor who Spike believes may be able to cure his sick mother, Isla (Jodie Comer). While Spike and Jamie both make it back to Holy Island alive, once home, Spike grows disillusioned with his dad after seeing him cheat on his mom during an over-the-top celebration of Spike's hunting prowess. He decides to sneak his mom off the island in order to seek help from Dr. Kelson, though Isla's illness has resulted in her suffering from severe migraines and lapses in sanity, making their journey all the more difficult. On the road, Spike and Isla encounter a number of threats. But their most dangerous run-in occurs when Isla helps a pregnant infected give birth to a—surprise—non-infected baby girl and the newborn's father, an Alpha referred to as Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), shows up to claim her. Luckily, Dr. Kelson arrives in the nick of time to rescue them by shooting Samson with a tranquilizer dart. After examining Isla, Kelson concludes she likely has cancer that has spread to her brain and while he can't do anything to save her life, he can end her misery by helping her to commit assisted suicide. With his mom gone, Spike briefly returns to Holy Island to leave the baby in his father's care with a note explaining where she came from and why Spike has chosen to strike out on his own. 28 Years Later may seem like it's wrapping up as Spike begins his solo pilgrimage across the mainland. But the movie actually has a final twist up its sleeve in the form of a tonally jarring epilogue that sets up the forthcoming Nia DaCosta-directed sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. A third film, again helmed by Boyle, will then follow. Read More: Why the 28 Years Later Franchise Has Always Been About More Than Zombies How does 28 Years Later end? Harkening back to the movie's cold open, which saw a young boy named Jimmy (Rocco Haynes) escape the infected's slaughter of his family during the initial outbreak of the Rage Virus, the final scene of 28 Years features a now-adult Jimmy (Jack O'Connell) and his gang of followers rescuing Spike from a group of infected 28 days after he leaves Holy Island behind for good. The Jimmies, as they refer to themselves, are all sporting vibrant tracksuits and garish jewelry, and rely on a series of parkour-esque moves to kill the infected. The sequence is a bizarre departure from the mood of the rest of the movie and feels like a pretty odd note to leave things on, to say the least. But there are also hints throughout the film that Jimmy is looming large, first in the form of an infected man strung up in an abandoned house who has Jimmy's name carved into his flesh and later in a mysterious ode to Jimmy scratched into a wall. Whatever role Jimmy and his apparent cult are going to play in Spike's coming-of-age tale won't be revealed until The Bone Temple hits theaters in January 2026. But Boyle says fans can expect a "battle over the nature of evil" that, in the third film, will eventually lead to a "bigger story about redemption" centered on the return of Cillian Murphy's Jim from 28 Days Later. Until then, 'memento mori,' as Dr. Kelson would say.
RTÉ News
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Cillian Murphy will return in next 28 Years Later movie
28 Years Later director Danny Boyle has said that Cillian Murphy will reprise his role from the first movie in the next instalment of the zombie franchise early next year. The Cork-born actor played motorcycle courier Jim in 2002's 28 Days Later and Boyle and writer Alex Garland have another two movies planned for the series, both of which will feature Oscar winner Murphy. It follows speculation that the Peaky Blinders and Oppenheimer star would be back in the latest part of the franchise, 28 Years Later, which stars newcomer Alife Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jodie Comer, and is in cinemas now. Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, the 68-year-old director, who also made Trainspotting, Yesterday, and Slumdog Millionaire, said, "It's all linked to Cillian. He is a producer on this new film, 28 Years Later, and with his agreement, we didn't connect directly to that first film from 2002." The fourth part of the series, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, is due for release next January and there is also a fifth and final movie planned, with Boyle back behind the camera. "Cillian's character, Jim, will reappear and in fact he will appear at the end of The Bone Temple to take us into the fifth film and that will be his film, really," Boyle said. "28 years have passed and something is the same and something is very different. That's all I can tell you . . . " So, Cillian will be back? "Oh, he will be!" 28 Years Later is set on an isolated island in the northeast of England where a small community has continued to live uninfected as the rest of the Britain remains quarantined and contaminated by the Rage virus which turns people into a manic state. The new movie centres on 12-year-old Spike (Williams) and his parents, Isla (Comer) and Jamie (Taylor-Johnson), a scavenger and survivalist who takes his son on his first sortie to the mainland to make his first zombie kill. It is essentially a movie about a father and son relationship. "Yes, it is but it is flawed," says Boyle. "Jamie and Spike's relationship is intense but it is quite narrow in a way. Jamie wants to teach Spike quite specific skills but they are very gender-based and quite strict. "The girls are left at home and the boys are taken out to train and they have a nostalgia about when England was great and the long bowmen beat the French at Agincourt . . . Spike learns different lessons from his mother and, later, from Ralph Fiennes' character." A lot has changed since the first movie in the franchise back in 2002. Given the new film's themes of not so splendid isolation and a virus that has left Britain cut off from the rest of Europe, the tumults of Brexit and Covid were an irresistible framing device for Boyle and Garland. "It's definitely influenced by that," Boyle says. "You can't not be influenced by that but this is a not a political film about Brexit or a political film about Covid but they do pass through the film at times. "One of the wonderful things about the horror genre is that you can read things in that feel like the present day, like what's happening in Gaza or the way migrants are treated. "Covid had a particular influence on us and it's a slightly surprising one. It's not that cities were transformed in the way we saw at the beginning of 28 Days Later. It was the way behaviour changed over time after the initial alert, which was high scale panic and worry." Boyle adds, "People start to relax after that and they start to take risks and branch out and don't wear a mask all the time. It's just human nature to do it." Of course, Garland and Boyle do not forget the gore. The zombies in this franchise are not quite the shambling undead of B-movie yore but fleet-footed berserkers who pose real and immediate danger. And in 28 Years Later, Boyle and Garland give us two new breeds of zombie - the sluggish "Slow-Lows" and super-fast and strong Alphas. It seems that as time passes, the half-dead are evolving. "That again was a Covid thing," Boyle says. "We saw how Covid mutated and the variants arrived and in this film the variants that have emerged are very dangerous indeed and if anything, the landscape is more hostile and dangerous than the first film." It's been a busy few days in Dublin for Boyle. As well as doing press duties for 28 Years Later, he also attended the gala opening of his new movie at the Irish Film Centre and was given UCD's Literary and Historical Society James Joyce Award. No doubt he talked about his new film's star - 12-year-old newcomer Alife Williams, who plays Spike. "When we cast him, his shoe size was 6, by the time we finished the film, his shoe size was nine-and-a-half," laughs Boyle. "I kid you not." "He's transforming from a boy into a man, which is what happens in the film so he is perfectly cast. He was exceptionally accommodated by the other actors who passed on their knowledge to him - wittingly and unwittingly.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘28 Years Later' Review: Danny Boyle Delivers Severed Heads And Broken Hearts In His Gory Zombie-Horror Threequel
Now/then, now/then… The past and the present exist in perpetual tension in the gory second sequel to Danny Boyle's zombie horror franchise. 'Time didn't heal anything,' goes the tagline, and as we learned from the recent pandemic, mankind isn't always prepared for the worst. By far the most political of the three films, 28 Years Later is particularly scathing about Brexit Britain and its little-islander mentality. But it does have global relevance at a time of rising tensions across the world, bringing to mind the possibly apocryphal quote attributed to famed German physicist Albert Einstein: 'I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.' More from Deadline '28 Years Later' Walking To $56M+ WW Opening, 'Elio' Orbiting $50M+ WW As 'Dragon' Looks To Lord U.S. Box Office – Preview '28 Years Later': Sony's Danny Boyle Pic Is Biggest Advance Ticket Seller For Horror Pic YTD, Eyes $34M+ Opening '28 Years Later' $5.8M, 'Elio' $3M Previews - Friday AM Box Office It's a moot point whether the film is set precisely in the present day, since the original 28 Days Later was made in 2002, which makes this two years early. Intriguingly, it begins with a roomful of children watching Teletubbies, the BBC kids show that first broadcast in 1997, 28 years ago. The peace is shattered by an agitated woman who begs the eldest, a young boy called Jimmy, not to open the door. Nevertheless, the walking dead break in anyway and the boy runs for his life, hiding out in a church where his father is the priest. But sanctuary is short-lived; his father is an end-times Christian who welcomes in his ravenous flock and hands his horrified son a crucifix, telling him to 'have faith.' This opening scene seems more like an overture and, indeed, has very little to do with what follows for most of the film's near-two-hour running time. We then jump forward 28 years to an island community off the northeast coast. By this time, we learn, the Rage virus has been contained to Britain, while European armies patrol the coast to prevent any of its inhabitants from leaving. The island itself is cut off from the mainland via a path that only appears at low tide, and its citizens keep a constant vigil at the ramshackle but heavily fortified entrance. The island is home to 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), who lives with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and mother Isla (Jodie Comer). Confined to her bed, Isla is given to violent fits and delusional behavior, slipping in and out of rational consciousness. It is during one of these rare moments of clarity that she learns of Jamie's plans to take Spike over to the mainland, which does not go down well. Indeed, the islanders also warn Jamie that Spike is a little on the young side ('14 or 15 is more in keeping'), but off they set anyway, man and boy each armed with a bow and a quiver's supply of arrows. The trip is filmed like a father-son safari, with Spike in awe at the sheer expanse of the mainland. 'It's so big,' he marvels. 'You can go for days and weeks without seeing the coast,' Jamie tells him. The zombie hordes, meanwhile, exist for Spike to make his first kill, starting with the fat, bloated ones that writhe around on the forest floor and seem to survive on worms. 'Head and heart,' his old man reminds him as he lines up the shot. Things have changed a bit since Jamie was last there, however, and the undead have mutated; a new strain has appeared — stronger, faster, more intelligent, more alpha. Back at the island, Spike is welcomed as the returning hero, with Jamie significantly, and drunkenly, embellishing his son's bravery. It also becomes clear that Jamie is cheating on Isla, a betrayal that Spike takes personally. Believing that Jamie is simply waiting for Isla to die so that he can move on with his life and be with his mistress, Spike takes his mother on a perilous journey to the mainland, where he believes a mysterious doctor (Ralph Fiennes), the last physician still alive in the area, will be able to cure her. The first film always seemed a little far-fetched, given the speed with which seemingly rational people took up cross-dressing and cannibalism in the space of less than a month. But nearly 30 years does the trick, and Alex Garland's script makes great play of how life in Britain has become stunted. Flirting with folk horror, he makes the islanders little better than the infected, inviting comparisons with The Wicker Man as they carouse in the community center while a faded portrait of Her Majesty the Queen looks down. Spike, meanwhile, has never heard of smartphones or the internet — both of which are flourishing in the real world beyond Britain's borders — and, ever playful, Boyle often drops the ancient sound of a dial-up modem into the ominous score by Young Fathers. Good horror, though, should always be about something else, and while it takes awhile to emerge, the zombies come to represent mortality, channeling the spirit of Damien Hirst's 1991 shark piece The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. As Spike goes further upstream in search of the strikingly Colonel Kurtz-like Dr. Kelson, he learns a lot about life and death, witnessing the birth of a baby and seeing a man's head and spine ripped from his shoulders. It's a very violent film in that respect, but the emotion is more affecting than the blood, most of it generated during Fiennes' powerful 30-minute screen time. Most threequels tend to go bigger, but 28 Years Later bucks that trend by going smaller, eventually becoming a chamber piece about a boy trying to hold onto his mother. It still delivers shocks, even if the sometimes over-zealous editing distracts from Anthony Dod Mantle's painterly cinematography, but the biggest of them all is the jaw-dropping final scene, a clapback to the film's beginning and an indication of how crazy Britain has become in its lonely isolation. It's a very specific cultural reference, and seemingly comes from nowhere, but Brits in particular are likely to have a very, very visceral reaction, as it happens. Title: 28 Years LaterDistributor: SonyRelease date: June 20, 2025Director: Danny BoyleScreenwriter: Alex GarlandCast: Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Edvin Ryding, Ralph FiennesRating: RRunning time: 1 hr 55 mins Best of Deadline Broadway's 2024-2025 Season: All Of Deadline's Reviews Venice Film Festival 2024: All Of Deadline's Movie Reviews Telluride Film Festival 2024: All Of Deadline's Movie Reviews
Gizmodo
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
Let's Talk About the Ending of '28 Years Later'
The sequel is coming in January, so there's a lot to break down in Danny Boyle's latest zombie film. One of the few flaws in Danny Boyle's new film, 28 Years Later, is that it ends a chapter, not a full story. That's because this new zombie tale is the first film of a proposed trilogy, one that has its second film coming in January of 2026. With at least one sequel guaranteed, Boyle and his writer, Alex Garland, can safely leave several threads lingering, offering hints of what's to come. Let's break it down with full spoilers. One of the biggest shocks in 28 Years Later is its manic ending. After we watch Spike take the surprise baby back to his home, he goes back to the mainland to live his own life. This, of course, is largely due to a distrust of his father, Jamie, who hit him in the past. All of this feels on brand for the movie, but then Jack O'Connell shows up. O'Connell, best known from films like Sinners and Unbroken, leads some kind of weird, almost Clockwork Orange group of people dressed in colorful jumpsuits, who proceed to gleefully dispatch a group of zombies who are chasing Spike. Spike welcomes the help but we have to question what the deal is. Especially when it's revealed that the character's name is Jimmy. Yes, the same Jimmy from the beginning of the film, whose father was a priest, gave him a special cross, and watched his mother and several childhood friends being eaten alive. What does that do to a person? And what happened to make that scared, lonely child into this flashy, charismatic presence? We don't know for certain but there are clues throughout the movie. For example, in the first third of the movie, Spike and Jamie enter a house and see a man hanging by his feet, waiting to be infected. In that man's chest, though not acknowledged, we can see the letters 'I-M-M-Y.' We can't see the 'J,' but we assume it's there. Jimmy carved his name into this man, for whatever reason. Later, when Spike is traveling with his mom Isla, the name Jimmy is also painted on the side of a shed, like some sort of post-apocalyptic graffiti. From these clues, we can begin to discern that Jimmy and his group are not nice people. They're evil, they're savage, and they are brash. They are certainly not people Spike can trust, though he has to in that moment. At the end of the film we're also left wondering what Jamie, feeling so rejected by his son, will do to get him back. Will Jamie go after Spike? Does he even have that ability? And how will the city deal with the fact that an infected man and woman made a child that isn't infected? That's the kind of revelation that can't be ignored. Plus, who does that child grow up to be? Is her DNA from the parents before or after the infection? There's also the very important piece of information that the sequel is called 'The Bone Temple.' That certainly seems like a reference to Ralph Fiennes' character, Dr. Kelson, and the structures he's erected. Is the movie just about him? Is there another temple of bones? How will that tie into the Spike and Jimmy story? We also know that Cillian Murphy's character Jim, last seen in the original 2002 film, plays a role. How the heck does that work? Certainly, there's lots to ponder and, thankfully, we won't have to wait long to get answers. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta, is scheduled for release on January 16, 2026.
Business Insider
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
A sequel to '28 Years Later' has already been filmed. Here's what to know about 'The Bone Temple'
Horror fans rejoice, the sequel to the long-awaited " 28 Years Later," "The Bone Temple," has already been filmed and is due out in theaters next year. 2002's " 28 Days Later" became a cult classic by taking a fresh bite out of the zombie movie genre: instead of a supernatural threat, the undead are infected by the Rage Virus. "28 Years Later," out Friday, is the start of a new trilogy from the director and screenwriter of the original film, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland. It tells the story of 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) who leaves the safety of the island where his family live to find a cure for his sick mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), on the UK mainland. By the end of the film, Isla lets the mysterious Doctor Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) euthanize her after he diagnoses her with metastatic brain cancer. Spike then roams the mainland instead of returning home, and in its final scene crosses paths with a man who calls himself Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell). The strange cult leader who has long blond hair are, as Boyle and Garland confirmed to Business Insider, dressed like Jimmy Savile, the infamous British TV presenter and prolific sexual abuser. The film ends as Spike chooses to go with Jimmy. Here's what to know about "The Bone Temple." The cast of '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple' includes Cillian Murphy, Alfie Williams, Jack O'Connell, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson The plot for "The Bone Temple" is unknown, but presumably it will explore Jimmy's past after he escaped the Rage Virus following the initial outbreak, as seen in the violent opening scene of "28 Years Later." His Savile-esque appearance raises an intriguing question: The Rage Virus outbreak started in 2002, meaning Savile's numerous sexual crimes may not have been made public in the film's timeline. In real life, the allegations were made in 2011 onwards, after Savile died. Garland told BI that the story will examine how misremembering key events can drastically change the world."We are living in a time right now which is absolutely dominated by a misremembered past," he said. Williams and O'Connell will return for "The Bone Temple" alongside Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who plays Spike's father, Jamie. Boyle also confirmed to BI that Cillian Murphy will return as Jim, the main character from "28 Days Later." '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple' is due in 2026 "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" will be released on January 16, 2026, so there isn't long to wait after that surprising ending. This is because "28 Years Later" and "The Bone Temple" were filmed back-to-back in summer 2024. Boyle didn't direct the second film, but he did return as a producer. Nia Da Costa directed the sequel with a script from Garland. Da Costa has previously helmed movies like "Candyman" and "The Marvels," as well as episodes of "Top Boy" and "Ms. Marvel."
