The post-apocalyptic horror of the ’28 Years Later’ saga returns to theaters worldwide this week with the sequel ’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’, which draws new alliances and offers a hopeful message according to its protagonists.
For British actor Ralph Fiennes, who reprises his role as Dr. Kelson, the notion of trust is key in this new plot.
“Does Kelson trust Samson?” he wonders about his character’s unexpected relationship with the alpha zombie. “Does Samson trust Kelson? (…) And within the sadistic gang of the Jimmies everything is built on the subversion of trust,” he adds in an interview with EFE about that gang of a sectarian nature, which channels its anger against other survivors.
The film stars American Nia DaCosta as the director and Fiennes and Jack O’Connell as the antagonists: the former as a doctor who persists in the idea of preserving some sense of humanity in a world that seems to have lost it, and the latter as Jimmy Crystal, leader of a cruel and bloodthirsty cult.
This universe created by the British Alex Garland and Danny Boyle originated in 2002 with ’28 Days Later’, with Cillian Murphy as a survivor in a devastated United Kingdom after the rabies virus had escaped from a laboratory.
It was followed by ’28 Weeks Later’ (2007) and in 2025 the story was revived with a trilogy that opened with ’28 Years Later’.
In the second part of this trilogy, as highlighted by the production company Sony Pictures, the infected no longer pose the greatest threat, as the “inhumanity of the survivors” is more terrifying.
When the original film was released at the turn of the century, covid was almost two decades away from quarantining the world and experimenting with the concept of isolation on a global scale.
Now, as the British Chi Lewis-Parry, who plays Samson, stresses, talking about viruses and contagions is “far from science fiction. It’s real life every day”.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ and its connection to the real world
The severity of a pandemic is “something we know about and could very well repeat,” adds Fiennes (‘Schindler’s List,’ ‘The English Patient’). “And, sadly, humanity doesn’t seem to have outgrown its patterns of extreme violence. We’re still going to war and sending tanks into other countries because we think we should dominate them.”
The temple of bones that gives the title to this installment is the funerary monument that his character erects with skulls of the deceased and that reminds us that although death is inevitable, love and human bonds give meaning to life.
“I find it really fascinating and beautiful. I think it’s essential that we always keep these two ideas in mind,” stresses DaCosta, who entered this tightly meshed cinematic universe with the task of bringing Garland’s script to life and “keeping the logic of that world as it was,” but with the possibility of putting his own stamp on it.
“I was able to take characters that had a very small role in the first film and give them a full life. In the end, the balance I found was simply to trust the script, shoot it as it was and, at the same time, direct it as I would any other,” maintains the filmmaker, who is preceded by titles such as ‘Candyman’ (2021) or ‘The Marvels’ (2023).
’28 Years Later: The Temple of Bones’ fleetingly recaptures Cillian Murphy’s character and hints at his presence in the trilogy’s finale.
For the moment this film, DaCosta concludes, reflects that when everything that defines us as humanity disappears, “you can decide how you want to live and what you really value. You have to find your own value, your own beliefs and your own meaning in life. At the end of the day, we are left, and that’s the most beautiful thing. We can always count on that,” reported Agencia EFE.
Here is the trailer for ’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’.
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