28 Years Later may have arrived 18 years after the trilogy’s last movie, but that delay’s not something Sony is looking to repeat. The long-awaited sequel was actually filmed back-to-back with the next film, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta rather than franchise steward Danny Boyle. The Bone Temple is set to release mere months after 28 Years Later refreshed audiences on its uniquely British zombie apocalypse, and will pick up directly from that confusing final reveal.
But aside from continuing the story of Spike (Alfie Williams) and a horde of Jimmy Savile impersonators, what is The Bone Temple really about? According to the trailer, the movie is about the futility of predicting the future, a theme emphasized by a quote from one of the greatest sci-fi authors ever. Check it out below:
The trailer hardly has any in-film dialogue, instead offering narration from an unseen British man. “Trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous occupation,” the voice says. “In fact, it may not even exist at all.” This is the voice of Arthur C. Clarke, the British author best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke has a reputation for predicting technological advances decades before they come to fruition; in the episode of the BBC’s Horizon that the trailer quotes comes from, he predicts telecommuting and the rise of AI (he also believes that monkeys will become commonplace domestic pets, but nobody’s perfect).
Much of the trailer is Frankensteined from the Horizon episode to play with Clarke’s meaning. When he says, for example, that “we may have diseases and barbarism,” it’s in the context of healthcare advancements continuing to address those diseases. So the quotes and their context have been somewhat manipulated.
But even if Arthur C. Clarke didn’t directly predict “diseases and barbarism,” the 28 Days trilogy certainly did. At this point, there is no communication between men. There is no future, just a wasteland fallen to the Rage virus. When Clarke says, “many of the things we take for granted will one day pass away completely,” you get what the trailer is going for.
But Clarke’s quotes also provide a glimmer of hope. “Look at the incredible changes we've experienced and survived,” he says. “And yet even greater changes are still to come.” In The Bone Temple, we’ll see these changes up close.
