Warning: this review contains spoilers for the film “28 Years Later.”

In one of the most famous scenes from Danny Boyle’s 2002 classic “28 Days Later,” Cillian Murphy’s main character Jim wanders around an abandoned London in hospital scrubs, desperately searching for signs of life in a world infected by the Rage virus, with the pounding strings of “East Hastings” thrumming in the background. Insofar as Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor ever had a “hit,” it was that song off of their best album – a soundtrack to the apocalypse, shot on camera in grungy, grainy, authentic color by Boyle and collaborator Alex Garland.

Now, 23 years later (hello!), Boyle looks to recapture that same grim sense of movie magic in “28 Years Later,” the third installment in his not-quite-zombie saga, following 2007’s “28 Weeks Later,” which saw Jeremy Renner, Idris Elba, and others face a repeat of the original viral outbreak in quarantined, military-occupied London. The Rage Virus, as outlined in the first movie, is transmitted via bite, and turns people into rabid, shrieking, blood-vomiting, marathon-running versions of themselves. But not zombies, mind you – that word is never used, eschewing the Z-word for “infected.”

In “Years,” the United Kingdom has been totally quarantined and left to fend for itself, while the rest of the world looks on, containing the infected with NATO patrol boats. Small pockets of uninfected survivors have managed to survive, and eke out a watchful existence, protecting themselves from infected. One such pocket of civilization can be found on the island of Lindisfarne, a small chunk of rocks and grass off the coast of the Scottish Highlands, connected to the mainland by a long rock causeway that is submerged at high tide, protecting the village from the infected threat.

Inside the village’s walls, life has gotten positively medieval, with all able-bodied males trained in the use of bows and arrows instead of guns, and an agrarian-type lifestyle as the accepted means of doing business. It brings to mind post-post-apocalypse works of fiction like S.M. Stirling’s weird Wicca-influenced “Dies The Fire” series, or a simpler, slower “Thunderdome.” At points, the semi-pagan traditions showcased or hinted at in the film smack of darker fare, like another British island-based horror film “The Wicker Man.” But for the time being, the village is a spark of civilization in the ocean of blood-soaked anarchy that is the UK. (Much the same as present-day Britain, I would imagine. Kidding!)

Central in this story are Jamie and Spike, a father and son played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Alfie Williams, respectively. The film’s primary plot (after a chilling Teletubbies-to-total-slaughter-by-infected intro scene, of which a young boy named Jimmy is the sole survivor) hinges upon Spike’s first foray onto the mainland, where he is taught to hunt and kill the infected with a longbow. Spike’s mother Isla is bedridden with an unspecified disease that plagues her with bouts of temporary dementia and delusion, and since the island has no doctor, she goes untreated, thrashing around in the upstairs bedroom.

The medieval theme is daubed on with a heavy hand here, as Boyle contrasts shots of the archers, log walls, and watchtowers of the modern-day village with black and white shots of medieval archers and knights, ensconced in castles, preparing for battle. It’s this hyper stylized videography that evokes watching “Road Warrior” for the first time, and the black and white old newsreels that accompanied the narrator’s voice talking about nuclear war and the breakdown of authority in the old world.

Upon reaching the mainland across the narrow reinforced causeway, we are introduced to the cast of horrors that has taken over England in the intervening 28 years, including amorphous blob-type infected that crawl around in search of prey, sucking earthworms out of the ground in the interim; the Boyle-trademarked “runners,” who chase down their victims in nude packs; and a new subspecies of “Alpha” infected, who grow to enormous heights as a result of the virus, towering over their infected brethren and commanding them in sort of a wolf-pack display of leadership.

(Side note: It’s worth remarking at this point that not only were the zombies all naked, the male Alpha infected were packing some tremendous genital heat, which really served to rub it in for this, let’s say, averagely-endowed columnist. A frankly biologically improbable manifestation of the male organ, if you want my honest opinion. When what felt like a good quarter of the film’s runtime was dominated by the lead infected’s absolute dinger swinging around down there like a grandfather clock pendulum, one starts to consider the relative merits of the Rage virus. On the one hand, bloodthirsty rabid mindlessness and a life spent chasing down human survivors to disembowel with one’s teeth. On the other hand, a real Florida python to call your very own and wave around menacingly across infected England. A Louisville Slugger to brighten your mood and remind you that life isn’t all bad. I thought about it – and to my male readers, I’m certain that you would have to. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was extremely disconcerting.)

There are other biological oddities that come about as a result of the virus, which are central to the plot later on, so I won’t spoil them. Sufficed to say, the world has changed since “28 Days Later,” and things have gotten weird, for both infected and human alike. I’ve seen this movie described as “Arthurian” by several, and that tracks fairly well, with characters out of myth and legend appearing in brief snippets like in some Round Table-esque tale.

One such character is Ralph Fiennes’ Kelson, a former doctor turned eccentric who covers himself in a thick paste of iodine and lives on the mainland among the infected, a Kaczynski-esque figure in the Scottish woods. When Spike learns of his existence from a resident of the island after seeing a distant fire on his escapade to the mainland, he smuggles his mother, raving and catatonic by turns, off the island, in hopes of getting a diagnosis from Kelson. On his quest, which makes up most of the latter half of the film, he meets Erik, a marooned Swedish soldier, crashed on the island after his patrol boat sunk off the coast. (Don’t get too attached.)

Kelson, played with a gentle mania by Fiennes, marks the dead with towers and eerie sculptures made of their bleached bones, as a sort of “memento mori.” He explains to Spike that this is his way of memorializing and honoring the deceased, both infected and victims alike. It serves as a weirdly poetic and respectful counterpart to the rest of the movie, which revels in arrows through eyes and gory infected kills in slo-mo instant-repeat Matrix-style bullet time.

This is one of the themes of the movie – contrasting the hyper-violent village society that glories in sending Spike out to get his first kills, with Kelson’s form of slow living, maintaining a respectful distance from the infected and honoring those he has to dispatch with placement in one of his towers of bones. Another theme that stood out was the sense of scale of “Years.” “Days” was close and personal, intimate to Murphy’s character and his comrades escaping the infected threat and coming into contact with the human threat outside London. “Weeks” was more of a by-the-numbers action flick, albeit expanded to the city at large and the outside world’s reaction, foregoing the first movie’s intimacy and unique style for sniper shootouts and Idris Elba scowling.

“Years” is more of a synthesis of the two. It has bigger stars (Taylor-Johnson and Fiennes) and a wider scope, ranging from the protected island to the harsh neo-feudal reality of infected England. But it also zeroes in on the relationships and motivations behind the human survivors by analyzing Spike and Jamie’s give-and-take dynamic, studying the love for a mother by her son, and seeing the world through the eyes of a half-cracked doctor, stacking skulls in the woods like a particularly macabre Rodin.

The pacing is admittedly weird, and in places, it feels like two movies shuffled together like a deck of cards. The sequel, scheduled to release in January of 2026, will hopefully address the issues raised by “Years,” and the smash-cut ending where Spike meets with a group of ninja-sword wielding survivors who dispatch a group of infected with Die-Antwoord-style bravado is obviously intended to set up some wider “28 ___ Later” universe. With that said, “28 Years Later” was a strange, enchanting time in the movie theater on a scorching hot day. The needle drop on the aforementioned Godspeed You! Black Emperor track as Spike sets off into the wilderness in the last few minutes of the film was the perfect way to cap off Boyle’s latest entry into the infected canon, that drips gore and sentiment in equal measures.

Jacob Hersh was born and raised in Anchorage. He is currently studying law at the University of Idaho. He occasionally does movie reviews and writes weird columns for the Landmine to get extra money for beer.