In post-apocalyptic stories, most of the eight or so billion people on planet Earth are dead. Some of them are holding on to life by the skin of their teeth. These are usually the ones who are the main protagonists of the story — think Ben in Night of the Living Dead, holed up in an abandoned farm house, surrounded by zombies, using his intellect and resolve to gather enough resources to live another day.
Then, there are characters who thrive in the aftermath of ultimate catastrophe. The Mad Max franchise is full of them. There’s Lord Humungus from The Road Warrior, Immortan Joe from Fury Road, and Dementus from Furiosa. My personal favorite is Tina Turner as Aunty Entity in Beyond Thunderdome. Aunty tells Max that she was “nobody” in the Before Time. Now, she is the sovereign of Bartertown, the last bastion of civilization in the Wasteland.
But mere warlordism is not the only sign that you are cut out for the post-fall lifestyle. Some eccentrics take the opportunity of an apocalypse to carve out their own little worlds. In I Am Legend, the 1954 Richard Matheson novel which inspired Omegaman and The Last Man on Earth, as well as the 2007 Will Smith film, Dr. Robert Neville makes his own little paradise in the ruins of vampire-infested Los Angeles. In “Time Enough at Last,” the first-season episode of The Twilight Zone that cemented Rod Serling’s reputation as a genius, Burgess Meredith is a bookish introvert who finally gets left alone when he accidentally survives a nuclear war, which goes great for him until he breaks his glasses.
How normal people react to apocalypse is one of the recurring themes of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later. The 2002 film is told from the point of view of Jim (Cillian Murphy), a working man who survives the zombie apocalypse because he was in a coma when the Rage virus spread. Jim is definitely in the “Ben” category of survivors who got lucky, and are trying against all odds to stay lucky.
Last year’s long-awaited sequel, 28 Years Later, introduced us to a post-viral warlord: Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). Jimmy was the son of a parish priest who watched his entire family get eaten by Rage zombies in his church. This, naturally, had some negative effects on his mental health. Twenty-eight years later, he’s taken on an identity based on Jimmy Savile, the British TV presenter who was the longtime host of Top of the Pops, the English version of American Bandstand. Savile was beloved during his lifetime, but after his death, it was revealed that he was very probably the most prolific child molester and rapist in the history of the British Isles. This is a subtlety that will likely be lost on American audiences, but O’Connell leaves no doubt that he’s playing a bad guy. He forces his followers, The Fingers Gang, to dress like him, down to blonde wigs and gold chains, and to fight to the death for his amusement.
When director Nia DaCosta takes over for Boyle in The Bone Temple, our surviving protagonist from the last film, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), is the latest captive of the Fingers Gang. He is thrown into a fight with Jimmy Shite (Connor Newall), a bully who is another thriver. But Jimmy Shite gets a rude awakening when Spike’s desperate knife thrust finds the femoral artery, and his fellow cultists refuse to help him as he bleeds out.
This is why we don’t play with knives or join Satanic death cults, children.
Meanwhile, 28 Years Later’s Thriving Eccentric Loner, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), is living his best life. Most of the time, he’s stripped to the waist and covered in red iodine, which he says helps prevent infection by the Rage virus. He spends his nights dancing alone to Duran Duran, and his days scouting the countryside and dragging the unburied dead back to his lair, a grove of ash trees where he boils off their skin and incorporates their bones into the Bone Temple, a towering monument to those lost in the apocalypse. “It’s an ossuary!” he tells anyone who will listen, which, given the circumstances, is not many people. These days, his most frequent guest is Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) a hulking infected who is, in his own way, also thriving as the alpha zombie of the north woods. The first time Samson got too close to the Bone Temple, Dr. Kelson was forced to use his weapon of choice: a blowgun firing darts laced with morphine and thorazine. But unexpectedly, Samson really enjoyed the drug cocktail, and now he brings Dr. Kelson little gifts, like the head and spine of a deer, in exchange for another hit.
For Dr. Kelson, this is a breakthrough. It’s the first evidence that the Rage zombies have any kind of mind which the Rage virus hasn’t erased. Once he feels like he has engendered Samson’s trust, Dr. Kelson decides to join him, and the two have regular opiate-driven dance parties among the bone towers. But you know how these things go: It’s all fun and games until the morphine runs out, and Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal’s death cult finds the Bone Temple.
The biggest revelation from The Bone Temple is the confident, elegant direction by Nia DaCosta. 28 Years Later was a revival of the early ’00s chaos cinema which Boyle pioneered. The Bone Temple is exactly the opposite. The action sequences are efficient, clear, and compelling. When Jimmy Shite receives his fatal wound, DaCosta stays with him as he bleeds out, shoving the horror of an ordinary death in our face. The film’s climax, which revolves around an epic needle drop of Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast,” put me in mind of Ryan Coogler’s barn burning sequence from Sinners — another film where O’Connell’s talent for villainy shines through. And it should come as no surprise that Ralph Fiennes steals the show. King Charles III should knight him, because the man is a national treasure. With The Bone Temple, Garland, Boyle, and DaCosta make the case that, despite all of the mediocre takes on the zombie genre, there’s still a little meat on the bone.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
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