‘The horror, the horror..’ Marlon Brando’s eerie utterance in Apocalypse Now encapsulates such a rich, horrifying theme of the capacity for evil and malevolence from one human to another. Colonel Kurtz was referring to the blasé nature of death and destruction in the pursuit of war and ‘the cause.’ In 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the rage virus continues to rage on, 28 years after Cillian Murphy woke up to barren and desolate London which the virus had ravaged. But after nearly three decades, the cause of fighting off the infected still exists, but a new world order has emerged.
At the end of its predecessor which was released in June last year, the world was introduced to Jack O’Connell’s Sir Jimmy Crystal. The first installment was ultimately about family and the strength of those bonds, but 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple takes a sinister turn to examine the other side of the coin, those bereft of families as a result of the virus must make a community out of something, even if that something is pure evil. Sir Jimmy Crystal, a post-apocalyptic pied piper leads his enthusiastic but sadistic group of ‘Jimmies,’ each of them adorned with a bleach blonde wig and named for their charming, charismatic Celtic leader: Jimmy Ink, Jimmy Jones, Jimmy Jimmy etc…
It was actually Jimmy Crystal who started the 28 Years Later franchise as the opening scene had shown a young Jimmy in the Scottish Highlands watching the Teletubbies before being interrupted by a sea of infected, killing his family in the process. Now a grown man, he has baked that pent up rage and unfairness into the ethos of his group, stalking around rural towns, taking opportunistic moments to terrorise others. There is a barn sequence in particular that will be talked about for years to come. That scene demonstrates the true brutality and the depths of Jimmy Crystal’s character.
In contrast, Ralph Fiennes’ character of Doctor Kelson who proved himself to be a bit of a Boo Radley character in the previous installment is very much a force for good. We see Kelson, the isolated Doctor in 28 Years Later had been dedicated to preserving the memory of the dead and the memory of death (‘memento mori’), whilst in The Bone Temple he is more focused on the depths of the living. Samson, played by Chi Lewis Parry is one of the infected, but the Alpha type, with super human strength who roams the fields where Kelson has set up his isolated enclosure. Samson and Kelson develop somewhat of a bond, or an understanding, one infected who used to have a life and another not infected also robbed of a life in a different way. Without words, Kelson and Samson are two humans trying to connect despite a raging biological difference between them.
The franchises next installment is all set up to welcome Cillian Murphy back, the very man who brought us in to this world in the first place and is a fitting way to go on. The bar is low these days but there are actual, tangible three-dimensional characters in The Bone Temple. The infected still run wild and fans of the franchise will rejoice, the virus is still rampant, but this next strain has mutated and it is the humans where the true horror lies.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is in cinemas everywhere January 14
FILM FOR THOUGHT 