Some folks were taken aback, but frankly I enjoyed the utter chaos of the sequence. There was also obviously more at work than just a gag about “the apocalypse is nuts, right?” As many astutely British viewers picked up on, O’Connell’s Jimmy Crystal has seemed to model his adult persona partially on Jimmy Savile, a disgraced children’s entertainer on the BBC who secretly abused and preyed on hundreds of children (but whose predations did not come to light until after his death in 2011). That was the first indication of how dark things could be going as we learn more about O’Connell’s Jimmy, the man who tells Spike “let’s be pals.” The next is the new trailer for the immediate sequel, January’s fast-approaching 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
With a new director in Nia DaCosta behind the camera—but Garland staying on as screenwriter, and Boyle as producer—the tone appears to shift again as O’Connell’s Jimmy holds an authoritarian and insidiously oppressive hand over his fellow survivors. “Are you ready?” he ominously asks Spike in the trailer… but only after we’ve seen that the tortured dude Spike and his father found in the last movie was probably Jimmy’s victim as well. Elsewhere in the trailer, we and Spike see all the Jimmys holding court over individuals who are gagged and frightened before their captors. If O’Connell seemed menacing in this year’s most popular horror movie, Sinners, he will apparently become genuinely demonic in Bone Temple.
All of this seems to be of a piece with the larger themes Garland and Boyle have infused in their new trilogy set 28 years after the original film’s events. This past June’s film quite deliberately tapped into themes of British isolationism and regressive-thinking in a post-Brexit world. In Spike’s far more idyllic home on Holy Island, folks have returned to an agrarian and frankly medieval lifestyle. They live each day to sow the seed and harvest the crops; and every night they drink under a portrait of their queen (in this case the long gone Lizzy II).
Yet Jimmy and his minions might represent another side of this descent into backwards-thinking: those who consider themselves noble, entitled, or divinely chosen to live above the rest.
“I’d say, let’s see if we ever get to make three movies, because it would essentially address that,” Garland previously told me when I asked if we would ever see a 28 Days movie with kings, queens, and an aristocracy returning to this world. “If you take technology away, where do people look and what is it they choose to remember, and how do they configure themselves? So it’s kind of a background note rather than the whole scheme, but by the end of the second film, the scheme starts to get more stated.”
Whether Jimmy thinks he has the divine right to rule, the grandiloquent way he introduces himself to Spike, complimenting “the poetry” of his archery skill, as if he were a knight of King Richard’s who had just come upon Robin of the Hood, speaks to how Jimmy views himself. The fact he also keeps his father’s crucifix (if eerily turned upside down) likewise hints at how he twists religion to inform his self-image: a warrior knight leading his merry band into battle.
