Final confirmation that Marvel’s Phase 4 sucks. You took Nia DaCosta, and threw her under the bus for The Marvels, chewed her up & spit her out. How did she rebound? First with one of the best movies of last year, and now showing us how she can handle a GOOD franchise. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a wonderful continuation of the reboot last year…and an 8th finger pointed in the direction of Kevin Feige.
8th finger you might be wondering. Well here’s where that came from. The Bone Temple picks up where 28 Years Later ended. Spike (Alfie Williams) passes his initiation ceremony, and joins Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) as one of his 7 Fingers. Jimmy leads his Fingers including skeptical Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) across post rage virus England, wreaking as much havoc as the zombies. That path leads them to encounter various people including a quiet scavenging couple (Louis Ashbourne Serkis and Mirren Mack). And, of course, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who attempts to strike up a friendship with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), the alpha zombie in the area.
Nia DaCosta’s task is just as hard here as it was with The Marvels. Danny Boyle got the fun job of resetting the world for everyone with the decades long reboot a la Force Awakens; he only has to raise questions, and not answer any. So that means it’s up to DaCosta and Alex Garland (same writer as the first) to deepen the lore and start answering some things. The pair settle on, well, settling: what is day to day life like on the inflected island. The targets they land on here: the religious debate in the end times. On one side we’ve got people like Kelson trying to live practically, looking at humanity through a secular lens while finding order in the ossuary process trying to bring the ragers back to the quiet. And on the other side is Sir Lord Jimmy, who like the generations of men before him, has twisted lore and the past into a system of beliefs that gained him followers…and power. Like all great zombie movies, Nia uses zombies as allegories and pawns to showcase other societal issues, and the way DaCosta goes about doing so, while keeping inside the spirit of the 28 … Later Franchise is visceral, sometimes very unnerving, and sometimes darkly committed and crazy sequences of mayhem…and excitement.
At least Danny left her Jack O’Connell and Ralph Fiennes. O’Connell is on a heater right now, just wowing everyone with his Irish jig last year. In The Bone Temple DaCosta gives him free reign to cook as England’s version of a demented minstrel. O’Connell has a blast using that cackling charisma to constantly shapeshift the scenarios he’s presented with to his advantage, and keep himself at the top of this society’s food chain. And yet, when he meets actual “adults,” all that swagger just melts away and he turns into that scared little boy with a horrible dad hiding in a church. His 7 Fingers give him fun people to bounce off of to, particularly Erin Kellyman’s Jimmy Ink willing to challenge him on the DL (pointer finger, obvi), and Jimmima (Emma Laird) as probably Sir Jimmy’s most loyal finger, his thumb I think? And then there’s Ralph Fiennes. The little Trainspotting like veg outs with Samson give the movie a much lighter touch than I was expecting, and clearly my audience too, unsure it was ok to laugh. But you should laugh: Fiennes really commits to the bit here as Kelson, culminating in one of the great sequences in the 28 Franchise History, that made my eyes bulge out of my head with psychotic glee.
And Nia also sets the stage for more movies, if we get more. As the uncertain middle, DaCosta and Alex Garland show their sure hands will make this franchise one I’ll delight coming back too. I’d be willing to wait a little longer too, making sure the best idea comes first, unlike Marvel’s 4th Phase cash grabbing nonsense. I hope Nia DaCosta had some Marvel hat on one of those skulls in the bone temple: one part joke, one park ossuarian processing and moving onto better things.