Released: 15th January
Seen: 1st April
28 Years Later was genuinely one of the best additions to the zombie movie genre in recent years, a visual treat filled with some of the most purely horrifying imagery. It was an absolutely great entry into the 28 Days Later franchise that promised to be the start of its own little trilogy, continuing the post-apocalyptic story by pushing it into a bold new direction. Well, if 28 Years Later was this franchise swinging for the fences, then 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple loads the franchise into a catapult and throws it over the fences with absolute fucking glee while doing so.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple picks up with Spike (Alfie Williams) being involuntarily initiated into the satanic Cult of Jimmy (a gang whose followers dress like noted pedophile Jimmy Saville and commit wanton acts of violence whenever they get the chance) led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). Sir Jimmy and the rest of the Jimmy gang drag Spike around the countryside looking for people they can maim, torture, kill and all that fun stuff. Meanwhile, Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his work trying to develop a cure for the infection that’s turned the world upside down, testing this cure out on the Alpha infected Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) in hopes he can find a way to fix the world. Naturally, these two will eventually meet and set things in motion for whatever the third part of this trilogy will be.
Choosing to push most of the infected aside for most of the movie (Really, there’s only one or two brief sequences where a horde of infected do what you expect them to do in this franchise) actually ends up being one of the smartest decisions that 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple could’ve made. Instead, the film really lets us get in deep on some core elements of this world, how people survived for so long and what a post-apocalyptic world can do to people’s psyche. We get the two different extremes with Dr Kelson not only trying to figure out a cure but also making a memorial to the dead, meanwhile, the Cult of Jimmy members just descend into acts of pointless cruelty led by a man who is knowingly lying to them at every step.
In my review of the 28 Years Later movie, I mentioned an element right near the end that I felt was in poor taste (though I was a good boy and didn’t give specifics). I was talking about the Cult of Jimmy, and at the time I thought it was a tasteless bit of shock… I’d like to retract that because this film really turns that little cult into a terrifying exploration of charismatic leaders pulling people down the wrong path, the ways in which people can manipulate the memories of history in order to gain control and how easy it is to turn horrible people into powerful symbols. Making the Cult of Jimmy members into satanists is a nice touch. It’s also a great bit of world-building to remind people of how different things are in the world of 28 Years Later, it makes sense that they would worship someone like Jimmy because they don’t know what he really was, since most of us only found out in 2012, so it adds an extra layer of creepy on top of everything.
Very pointedly, the reason that the entire Cult of Jimmy stuff works as well as it does is because of the absolutely unhinged (in the best way) performance by Jack O’Connell, who creates a truly nightmarish character who rules through lies and threats. Moments where you can see he doesn’t really believe the shit that he’s spouting are kind of hilarious, but then made terrifying when he just adjusts his plan to keep the lie going so he can maintain power over his little gang. It’s a truly fascinating performance that feels like it looked at Jim Jones and said “I can be more fucked up than that cunt”.
While Jack is absolutely great, he somehow becomes even greater when he’s paired up with this film’s other powerhouse, Ralph Fiennes. Ralph Fiennes is almost always great; I’ve yet to see him give anything less than a stellar performance, but here he’s on a whole other level. He bounces between the emotional heart of the film and some truly glorious insanity that I couldn’t begin to describe even if I tried, suffice to say you won’t look at “The Number of the Beast” by Iron Maiden the same way again. When these two men get to share a scene together, it’s truly a glorious thing to witness.
The whole film is just glorious, visually it somehow one-ups the last film which was already at a high bar. The scenes of brutality are also strangely beautiful; the horror is so visceral but it’s impossible to look away. It’s a true horror epic that really shows just what the genre is capable of in terms of pure scope, it feels like the world we’ve landed in is truly endless and that an infected could be anywhere. It’s almost more unnerving when they aren’t visible because then we’re just left with the horrors that humans are willing to do to each other.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a glorious middle chapter to this wild story. It takes the last moment of the prior film and just takes off, telling an absolutely brutal tale that plays with so many bold ideas, of pandemics, healing, cults and deception, all while blasting Girls on Film because it fucking can. It’s dark, dramatic and twisted with a wicked sense of humour to cap everything off. 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple sets everything up for a fantastic final act, hopefully they can clear the high bar that they’ve set.
Movie Meister Reviews 