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USA Today
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Spoilers! Who is that mystery man at the end of '28 Years Later'?
Spoiler alert! We're discussing important plot points and the ending of '28 Years Later' (in theaters now), so beware if you haven't seen it yet. The horror sequel '28 Years Later' introduces several new characters into the post-apocalyptic world director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland envisioned in 2002's '28 Days Later.' And the most fascinating personality is the first person we meet in the new movie who we don't get to see again until the very end. '28 Years' centers on a quarantined U.K. three decades after a rage virus broke out and infected habitants, turning them into zombie-like people. In an isolated survivor community on Holy Island, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is taken to the mainland for the first time by his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to kill an infected. Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox Spike learns of a mysterious doctor named Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) so, with his mother Isla (Jodie Comer) ailing from an unknown disease, he returns to the mainland to find him. There, Spike runs afoul of the muscular infected Alpha known as Samson and witnesses his mom help an infected woman give birth. (The baby, shockingly, seems healthy, though its mom dies.) They then are saved by the odd but compassionate Kelson, from whom Spike gets an important lesson on life and remembering death. Let's dig into the biggest spoilers and lingering questions, including who that bad guy is in the film's final moments and what fans should expect in the next installment, '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple' (out Jan. 16): What happens in the ending of '28 Years Later'? Kelson examines Isla and discovers she has breast cancer − it's spread to other parts of her body and is terminal. He helps to end her life, burns the body and returns the skull to Spike so he can place it atop Kelson's extremely tall Bone Temple, which memorializes the dead. Kelson helps Spike and the baby to escape another attack but Samson follows Spike to the island, where the Alpha is killed. But instead of staying, Spike leaves the baby with his dad to be raised on the island while he decides to live his life on the mainland. In the final scene, Spike is attacked on a road by a bunch of infected but is saved by a group of blond-haired strangers, and that's where the unnerving Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) introduces himself. In the movie's opening, Jimmy is seen as a child at the outbreak of the virus, watching 'Teletubbies' before infected family members attack each other. His preacher father is scarily happy to see God's Day of Judgment come, and he gives his son a cross, which as an adult Jimmy wears upside down on a necklace. Jimmy and his cult – with names like Jimmima and Jimmy Ink, and a violently amusing air a la Alex and the Droogs from 'A Clockwork Orange' – feature "very heavily" in 'Bone Temple,' Boyle promises. 'The first film is about grief and the nature of family. And these Jimmies are one of the families that it sort of looks at. But the second film is about the nature of evil.' Garland adds that Jimmy is "someone genuinely frightening, but we understand how he got to be how he is. And the most interesting interaction for me is what happens when Kelson meets Jimmy.' What is the secret website in '28 Years Later'? If you visit the fictional 'dark web' page it fills in the blanks about what's happened in the U.K. since the rage virus broke out, maps that show the geography of this part of Europe after three decades, and other interesting world-building elements. (Need the password? It's "mementomori" – Kelson's favorite phrase.) What is Cillian Murphy's role in '28 Years Later'? Murphy, who won a best actor for 'Oppenheimer,' was the main star of '28 Days Later' playing bicycle courier Jim, who wakes up in a hospital after a traffic accident to find an empty London and an infected England. His main role in '28 Years Later' is actually as an executive producer: He doesn't appear on camera but Boyle has said that Murphy will appear at the end of 'Bone Temple' and play a central part in a planned third movie. Wonder if Jim will have something to do with Jimmy and the Jimmies? Does '28 Years Later' have a post-credits scene? It does not, but the ending hints at where things might go and who they'll involve, from Kelson to that little baby. And 'plenty of challenges' await Spike in 'Bone Temple,' Boyle teases. (Garland wrote the next movie but Nia DaCosta will be in the director's chair.) 'It's not going to be easy what he will have to overcome in the second film.' Boyle believes 'Bone Temple' is 'the most original piece of screenwriting since 'A Clockwork Orange.' There were lots of people saying, 'Oh, we should change this, we should cut this. It's too disturbing.' And it is disturbing and it is risky. 'The first film stands alone and the second film will stand alone,' he says, 'but they are umbilically connected in a way that will enrich the experience eventually.'
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Brainy and bizarre, ‘28 Years Later' shows a zombie series running into dark, strange territory
Zombies were dormant when screenwriter Alex Garland convinced director Danny Boyle to resurrect the undead — and make them run. The galloping ghouls in their low-budget 2002 thriller '28 Days Later' reinvigorated the genre. There's now been so many of them that they've come to feel moldy. So Garland and Boyle have teamed up again to see if there's life in these old bones. There is, albeit sporadically and spasmodically. '28 Years Later,' the first entry of a promised trilogy, has a dull central plot beefed up by unusual ambition, quirky side characters and maniacal editing. It's a kooky spectacle, a movie that aggressively cuts from moments of philosophy to violence, from pathos to comedy. Tonally, it's an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn't know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don't want the audience to know either, at least not yet. The plot picks up nearly three decades into a viral 'rage' pandemic that's isolated the British Isles from the civilized world. A couple hundred people have settled into a safe-enough life on Lindisfarne, an island that's less than a mile from shore. The tide recedes every day for a few hours, long enough to walk across a narrow strip of causeway to the mainland. Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Isla (Jodie Comer) were young when normality collapsed, roughly the same age as the kids in the film's cheeky opening flashback who are watching a VHS tape of 'Teletubbies' while hearing the screams of their babysitters getting bitten. But these survivors have managed to grow up and become parents themselves. Given their harsh circumstances, Jamie and Isla have called their son Spike. Name notwithstanding, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is a sweet kid. When his father slips him a precious ration of bacon, he gives his share to his mother, who now lies weak and confused in an upstairs bedroom. The script pushes too hard to make Spike naive — blank and moldable — instead of what narrative logic tells us he is, the hardscrabble child of two stunted children. His career paths are hunter, forager or watchtower guard, but he seems more like the product of a progressive Montessori school, even with his dad urging him to cackle at shredded deer intestines. When the boy's not looking, Johnson's shoulders sag as he trudges up the stairs to Comer's sickbed, showing us a hint of adult complexities he alone understands. Spike's storyline is a fairly simple coming-of-age journey. Once he's slayed his first infected ('The more you kill, the easier it gets,' his dad gloats), Spike decides to sneak his sick mother to the mainland in search of a mythological being: a general medical practitioner. But straightaway, the movie's editing (by Jon Harris) starts having a fit, seizing our attention as it splices in herky-jerky black-and-white archival footage of earlier generations of kids marching to protect their homes, both in newsreels and classical retellings including Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of 'Henry V.' The chilling electronic score by the Scottish group Young Fathers blurps and drones while an unseen voice recites Rudyard Kipling's 'Boots,' a poem about the grinding Boer War that was first published in 1903, but whose sense of slogging exhaustion sounds just as relevant to us as it would to Beowulf. These theatrics sound fancy, but they play deliberately abrasive and confounding. '28 Days Later' forced the audience to adapt to the ugliness of digital cameras, and despite the years and prestige that Garland and Boyle have accumulated since, they've still got a punk streak. The filmmakers seem to be making the point that our own kinder, gentler idealism is the outlier. Humankind's natural state is struggle and division. In this evocative setting, with its crumbling castle towers and tattered English flags, we're elbowed to think of battles, from Brexit to the Vikings, who first attacked the British on this very same island in 793. A 9th century account describes the Lindisfarne massacre as nightmarish scenes of blood and trampling and terror, of 'heathen men made lamentable havoc.' Those words could have been recycled into '28 Years Later's' pitch deck. As a side note, Lindisfarne remains so small and remote that it doesn't even have any doctors today. The one we meet, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), doesn't show up until the last act. But he's worth the wait, as is the messianic Jimmy (Jack O'Connell), who appears three minutes before the end credits and successfully gets us excited for the sequel, which has already been shot. (Jimmy's tracksuits and bleached hair are evidence that his understanding of pop culture really did stop at Eminem.) Their characters inject so much energy into the movie that Boyle and Garland seem to be rationing their best material as strictly as Spike denies himself that slice of pork. This confounding and headstrong movie doesn't reveal everything it's after. But it's an intriguing comment on human progress. The uninfected Brits have had to rewind their society back a millennium. When a Swedish sailor named Erik (Edvin Ryding, marvelous) is forced ashore, he talks down to all the Brits like they're cavemen. They've never even seen an iPhone (although the movie was itself shot on them). Upon seeing a picture of a modern Instagram babe plumped to a Kardashian ripeness, Spike gasps, 'What's wrong with her face?' The infected ones have regressed further still and they've split into two sub-species: the grub-like 'slow-low' zombies, who suck up worms with a vile slurp, and the Neanderthalish sprinters who hunt in packs. The fast ones even have an alpha (Chi Lewis-Parry) who is hellbent on taking big strides forward. One funny way he shows it is he's made a hobby of ripping off his prey's heads to use their spines as tools, or maybe even as décor. Dr. Kelson, a shaman, sculptor and anthropologist, insists that even the infected still share a common humanity. 'Every skull has had a thought,' he says, stabbing a freshly decapitated one with his pitchfork. He's made an art of honoring death over these decades and his occasionally hallucinatory sequence is truly emotional, even if Fiennes, smeared with iodine and resembling a jaundiced Colonel Kurtz, made me burst out into giggles at the way he says 'placenta.' Yet, I think we're meant to laugh — he's the exact mix of smart and silly the film is chasing. So who, then, are the savages? The infected or us? The film shifts alliances without taking sides (yet). I'm unconvinced that sweetie pie Spike is the protagonist I want to follow for two more movies. But whatever happens, it's a given that humans will eventually, stubbornly, relentlessly find a way to tear other humans to pieces, as we do in every movie, and just as we've done since the first homo sapien went after his rival with a stick. That's the zombie genre's visceral power: It reveals that the things that make us feel safe — love, loyalty, civility — are also our weaknesses. '28 Years Later' dares us to devolve.
GMA Network
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- GMA Network
Megan Young shares her expectations vs. reality for childbirth
Megan Young poked fun at herself in her latest Instagram Reel, as she shared her expectations versus reality for when she goes into labor. The new mom shared photos of her glowing with her baby bump and captioned them, "What I thought I would like in labor." In the second part of the video, Megan shared clips of her childbirth, where she looked pale lying down on a hospital bed. "What I actually look like," she wrote. The culprit, she said, was none other than her husband Michael Daez, who tied her hair. 'Akala ko may oras pa ako mag ayos para maganda sa picture after giving birth.. but when I woke up, I was fully dilated,' Megan said. 'I'm just thankful that at least Fofo was there to take care of me kahit na 'Teletubbies' na 'yung hairstyle na binigay niya sa akin,' the actress and beauty queen added. Megan and Mikael tied the knot in 2020 in intimate ceremonies. They welcomed their first child, a son, in May. The couple has been sharing life updates from their new era as parents. —Nika Roque/JCB, GMA Integrated News
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Space is going to patch up Britain's ‘not spots', but can Musk be trusted?
Like the Teletubbies' Sun Baby, Elon Musk beams down on every corner of the globe. Satellites from Starlink and its competitors are bringing data to the poorest and most isolated corners of the world. 'Data is doubling every year,' says Dr Adam Beaumont, an innovation advisor to the Government and founder of the pioneering network builder AQL, which created the first UK ground station for Musk's space constellation. 'We're handling many terabytes of data every day on behalf of the satellite community'. Space internet has traditionally relied on ancient, geostationary satellites that transmit data a few bytes at a time. But the revolution that Musk began involves low earth orbit (LEO) satellites that are far closer to us here on Earth. They bring far greater capacity and speed so we can use space directly for serious internet services, like Google Maps, rather than basics such as emergency text messages. 'We're now on the cusp of people being able to make [satellite calls] on their everyday smartphones,' boasted Ofcom's spectrum director David Willis last week. This is called 'direct to device' (D2D) communications, which mean you won't need a clunky satellite phone that wouldn't look out of place in the A-Team – you can just use the phone you already have, and no special SIM or app is required. In January, Vodafone made the first D2D video call in the world from a mountain in Wales, using an ordinary smartphone, in a location where there was no existing mobile coverage. The coverage bars on the phone lit up as the invisible satellite passed overhead. It's the result of a joint venture between the Texan space company AST Space Mobile and Vodafone. In layman's terms, they've put a standard 4G phone dish in space, so it becomes a seamless extension of the existing phone network. Only this 'dish' is around 300 miles away, and moving at 18,000 miles per hour. Five Blue Walker satellites are already operating, and dozens more will be operating by the end of the year. Around 90 are needed to provide full global coverage, says Vodafone. Ofcom is rushing to iron out the regulatory wrinkles. It really is a spectacular feat of engineering. The second generation of AST's Blue Walker satellite unfolds into a 2,400 square foot panel, around the size of a doubles tennis court. The surface is almost entirely an antenna. (Astronomers aren't very happy – these 'BlueBirds' are already amongst the brightest objects in the night sky.) Now you may well wonder why you can't get a decent signal from your mobile operator when the antenna is only hundreds of yards away, but you can from something 300 miles away. It's a good question. Size is everything, the boffins explain – while the panel in space is vast, the local dish giving you mobile service now isn't much larger than a chef's wok. 'The bigger they are, the more power and gain you can put on that signal,' explains Vodafone's Future Technologies researcher Rowan Chesmer, the technical lead for the group's D2D work. Cleverly, the design means that almost all the heavy processing gear – the racks and enormous air conditioner style units that sit underneath our terrestrial mobile base stations – can be left back on earth. 'You can focus all your power onto the transmitting,' says Chesmer. By the end of next year, some of us will start to see the benefits. Vodafone hasn't decided exactly how to market it, but expect to see the service offered as a a low cost extra or bundled with top tier plans. A basic, very low speed service will enable calls and WhatsApp messages – a higher bandwidth tier of around 3 megabits per second will allow more. Vodafone will wholesale the satellite service to competitors, such as O2. Rural voters will be relieved, particularly after Labour slashed the Shared Rural Network – the project meant to fix reception 'not spots' – to save money. And it helps build infrastructure resilience. If a fibre connection to a remote mast is severed, or one base station catches fire, satellites can fill in the gap. AQL's Beaumont says that every LEO operator is eyeing the D2D market. Musk isn't sitting idle. But as is so often the case with American technology tycoons, he views the market as a zero sum game – for him to win, someone else has to lose. His ambitions are clearly set on creating a global 'Musknet' – we can infer from regulatory bids for spectrum he has filed around the world. Musknet would effectively bypass Governments and incumbent operators. But his first D2D service, with T-Mobile in the United States, was a controversial project, since it impinged on the performance of existing networks and required a regulatory waiver. And Musk is more Man Baby than benevolent Sun Baby. His capricious nature hasn't escaped the watching world. Would someone who has toyed with cutting off Ukrainian armed forces hesitate to throw millions of us off Musknet if he felt like it, to prove a point? This question has even vexed Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni, a huge Musk fan. Negotiations between Starlink and Italy over a defence communications deal has stalled. When Vodafone's Tom Griffiths told an industry audience that AST is 'a European sovereign solution', everyone knew what he meant: it wasn't subject to the whims of one billionaire founder who could cut them off at any moment. Space isn't a panacea, but with smart, market minded regulation it will help 'not spot' Britain feel less blighted. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
31-03-2025
- Science
- Telegraph
Space is going to patch up Britain's ‘not spots', but can Musk be trusted?
Like the Teletubbies' Sun Baby, Elon Musk beams down on every corner of the globe. Satellites from Starlink and its competitors are bringing data to the poorest and most isolated corners of the world. 'Data is doubling every year,' says Dr Adam Beaumont, an innovation advisor to the Government and founder of the pioneering network builder AQL, which created the first UK ground station for Musk's space constellation. 'We're handling many terabytes of data every day on behalf of the satellite community'. Space internet has traditionally relied on ancient, geostationary satellites that transmit data a few bytes at a time. But the revolution that Musk began involves low earth orbit (LEO) satellites that are far closer to us here on Earth. They bring far greater capacity and speed so we can use space directly for serious internet services, like Google Maps, rather than basics such as emergency text messages. 'We're now on the cusp of people being able to make [satellite calls] on their everyday smartphones,' boasted Ofcom's spectrum director David Willis last week. This is called 'direct to device' (D2D) communications, which mean you won't need a clunky satellite phone that wouldn't look out of place in the A-Team – you can just use the phone you already have, and no special SIM or app is required. In January, Vodafone made the first D2D video call in the world from a mountain in Wales, using an ordinary smartphone, in a location where there was no existing mobile coverage. The coverage bars on the phone lit up as the invisible satellite passed overhead. It's the result of a joint venture between the Texan space company AST Space Mobile and Vodafone. In layman's terms, they've put a standard 4G phone dish in space, so it becomes a seamless extension of the existing phone network. Only this 'dish' is around 300 miles away, and moving at 18,000 miles per hour. Five Blue Walker satellites are already operating, and dozens more will be operating by the end of the year. Around 90 are needed to provide full global coverage, says Vodafone. Ofcom is rushing to iron out the regulatory wrinkles. It really is a spectacular feat of engineering. The second generation of AST's Blue Walker satellite unfolds into a 2,400 square foot panel, around the size of a doubles tennis court. The surface is almost entirely an antenna. (Astronomers aren't very happy – these 'BlueBirds' are already amongst the brightest objects in the night sky.) Now you may well wonder why you can't get a decent signal from your mobile operator when the antenna is only hundreds of yards away, but you can from something 300 miles away. It's a good question. Size is everything, the boffins explain – while the panel in space is vast, the local dish giving you mobile service now isn't much larger than a chef's wok. 'The bigger they are, the more power and gain you can put on that signal,' explains Vodafone's Future Technologies researcher Rowan Chesmer, the technical lead for the group's D2D work. Cleverly, the design means that almost all the heavy processing gear – the racks and enormous air conditioner style units that sit underneath our terrestrial mobile base stations – can be left back on earth. 'You can focus all your power onto the transmitting,' says Chesmer. By the end of next year, some of us will start to see the benefits. Vodafone hasn't decided exactly how to market it, but expect to see the service offered as a a low cost extra or bundled with top tier plans. A basic, very low speed service will enable calls and WhatsApp messages – a higher bandwidth tier of around 3 megabits per second will allow more. Vodafone will wholesale the satellite service to competitors, such as O2. Rural voters will be relieved, particularly after Labour slashed the Shared Rural Network – the project meant to fix reception 'not spots' – to save money. And it helps build infrastructure resilience. If a fibre connection to a remote mast is severed, or one base station catches fire, satellites can fill in the gap. AQL's Beaumont says that every LEO operator is eyeing the D2D market. Musk isn't sitting idle. But as is so often the case with American technology tycoons, he views the market as a zero sum game – for him to win, someone else has to lose. His ambitions are clearly set on creating a global 'Musknet' – we can infer from regulatory bids for spectrum he has filed around the world. Musknet would effectively bypass Governments and incumbent operators. But his first D2D service, with T-Mobile in the United States, was a controversial project, since it impinged on the performance of existing networks and required a regulatory waiver. And Musk is more Man Baby than benevolent Sun Baby. His capricious nature hasn't escaped the watching world. Would someone who has toyed with cutting off Ukrainian armed forces hesitate to throw millions of us off Musknet if he felt like it, to prove a point? This question has even vexed Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni, a huge Musk fan. Negotiations between Starlink and Italy over a defence communications deal has stalled. When Vodafone's Tom Griffiths told an industry audience that AST is 'a European sovereign solution', everyone knew what he meant: it wasn't subject to the whims of one billionaire founder who could cut them off at any moment.
