Available since Friday (2) on the streaming platform HBO Max, Extermination: Evolution (28 Years Later2025) illustrates two things. One is negative; the other, positive.

The first, most evident, is the seemingly endless trend of film studios only bet on what has already workedgiving up creativity and originality to invest in franchises or nostalgia, when resuming stories told 20, 30, 40 years ago. If In 2024 Hollywood launched more than 30 sequels, prolists, remakes and derivativesthe current season also has dozens of titles like this.

Extermination: Evolution and direct sequence of Extermination (2002)with the same director, Danny BoyleOscar winner for Who wants to be a millionaire? (2008), and the same screenwriter, Alex Garlandfilmmaker of Civil war (2024). The filmmakers ignored the events of Extermination 2 (2007), by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, and have said the movie now, set 28 years after the first, Opens a trilogy. The next chapter, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Extermination: The Temple of Bonesin free translation), is directed by Nia Dacosta, who signed Candyman (2021) e As Marvels (2023), and is scheduled to debut in January 2026.

Starring Cillian Murphythe first Extermination became a classic of the zombies subgenre while innovated. Instead slow and decaying undead, Boyle and Garland presented living and fast creatures, driven by insatiable hunger and uncontrollable fury awakened by a virus being developed in the laboratory. The film influenced works such as The Walking Deadcomic book created in 2003 by Robert Kirkman and Terry Moore who would later give rise to the eponymous and popular TV series, and World War ZRomance published in 2006 by Max Brooks who later gained adaptation to the cinema directed by Marc Forster and Brad Pitt in the lead role.

The second thing that Extermination: Evolution Illustration is the seemingly inexhaustible Ability for the zombies to lend themselves to metaphors about the time when they were managed.

Just observe the career of the master of this terror subgenre, George A. Romero (1940-2017). The night of the undead (1968) is a political allegory on minorities victims of intolerance and prejudice in the United States. In The Awakening of the Dead (1978), the director criticized consumerism, and in Day of the dead (1985), Reagan's militarism. Land of the dead (2005), in turn, alluded to social inequality, both in cities and in world geopolitics.

Southeast Asian filmmakers also stand out on this beach. In Zombie invasion (2016), from South Korean Yeon Sang-Hothe creatures that multiply on a train to Busan remind us: at any time, the circumstances (Political, economic, sanitary etc) They can make people around us unrecognizable. Always in check the social and affective ties that give us identity and security.

Another South Korea movie, #Alive (2020), of Cho il-hyungapproached, in full pandemic of covid-19themes such as fear of being contaminated, isolation, protection to loved ones, the ethics of survival strategies, the power of social networks, the need for cooperation, what keeps us clinging to existence and hope for a cure.

In Taiwan, the director Rob Jabbaz also reflected the climate of the world under the sign of coronavirus in The sadness (2021). But this Violent Odyssey goes beyond allegory, asking: What would be a polarized society if we only meet the impulses of the ID? What civilization would be possible if there were no mediating and repressive instances of the ego and the superego? And at what speed does all social constructions crumble, flowing a contagious and unmibodized blood bath?

Em Extermination: EvolutionDanny Boyle and Alex Garland advance on a theme that had emerged in Extermination: a toxic masculinityon which Garland, in the double function of director and screenwriter, leaned against the underestimated Terror Men: Faces do Medo (2022). It is a subject that generated the deconstructive western Dog -attack (2021) and that also yields comic approaches, as in the Spanish series ALFA maleswhich debuted in 2022 and already has three seasons.

In the first movie, the characters lived by Naomie Harris and Megan Burns are threatened with rape by military who are no problem using violence to generate children that guarantee human survival. In the new movie, even though women can hold power positions, The world seems contaminated by a typically masculine hostility.

The initial scenario is a community that, isolated on an island, remains safe from the angry creatures that infested the rest of the United Kingdom. The only connection with this vast wild territory is a Floor road that only appears during the low tide.

In this place, there are practically no professions that do not involve brute force. The protagonist, Spike (Alfie Williams), is A 12 -year -old boy about to face an aggressive rite of passage: in the company of the father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), should make the crossing to kill your first zombie.

This is no longer a struggle to remain alive, but a hunt in search of social status: Killing means, now, becoming a man. No wonder the weapon employed is an arrow, a notorious phallic symbol.

Later, Spike will have to make a new crossing, now in the company of his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), which is very sick. It is not the virility that guides the kid, but love. To help her, she wants to find a doctor who, the rumors say, continued to live on the "continent": Kelson, role of Ralph Fiennesthat lends dignity to any character, however exotic.

In the two crossings, The great danger is an evolved zombieall naked, marcombado, ultraviolent, faster and with a vault that is swinging while he runs (obviously, it's a prosthesis). Properly, creatures of this type are called alpha.

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