‘28 Years Later’ Is Infectious

“There’s no discharge in the war,” observes the narrator of Rudyard Kipling’s 1915 poem “Boots,” about the drudgery and the terror of a life spent in the trenches. There’s also no place to charge your iPhone. Stranded in a field in England—more specifically Northumberland, which, like the rest of the British Isles, has been infested with scores of bloodthirsty living dead since the turn of the 21st century—a foreign soldier looks contemptuously at his cellphone, which is down to 1 percent battery. “It’ll be a brick in a minute,” he scoffs to his companions before tossing the thing into the tall grass. Given the postapocalyptic particulars of their situation, it’s not like he can call for backup anyway.