As the list of legacy sequels keeps growing, audiences have become more discerning, reflexively sorting each new offering into one of three categories. The first bin might as well be labeled ‘knock off brand,’ its compartments filled with titles like Dumb and Dumber To, The Craft: Legacy, and Mary Poppins Returns. They seem to evaporate from our cultural memory as soon as a quick opening weekend buck is made, though the second bucket, termed ‘real sequels’ here for ease of use, only has slightly more staying power. Last year’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice comes to mind, as does Matrix Resurrections; both benefited from a tidal wave of anticipation only to be met by tepid appreciation and a brief moment in the spotlight. Those two take up most of the pie, but then there’s the third bunch, movies that fully meet the moment and, in the hushed, tentative musings of a select crew, might even surpass the original. It’s hard to come by the status afforded to Top Gun: Maverick, Blade Runner 2049, and Mad Max: Fury Road, but that doesn’t stop us all from dreaming, and the nerve-racking trailer for 28 Years Later sure brought viewers into a lofty headspace. Danny Boyle and company know the stakes, but seem bored by the pre-existing designations. Shooting at or above, in their eyes, is nowhere near as fun as aiming upside down and to the side.

Or right back to the early aughts, as witnessed in Years’ opening frames, which employ quasi-nostalgic footage from an episode of Teletubbies to bring us back to 28 Days Later’s 2002 setting, and attendant aesthetic. The micro-budget original may have gained instant notoriety for its deployment of fast-moving zombies, but its DIY veneer is just as enduring, largely shot on a tiny, handheld Canon XL1 digital video and edited with the free-wheeling verve of a mad scientist. Technology has aged along with the series, though cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle’s choice to shoot large swaths of Years on iphone cameras cloaks the film in the grainy gloss of yesteryear. There’s synergy in the decision, but also sweat and debris, an amateurist grime that’s wholly absent in other recent blockbuster offerings. Taking on the twitchy, manic affectation of its diseased antagonists through visuals alone would be enough for most filmmakers, but Boyle is hardly one to fall in line.

Neither is Spike (Alfie Williams), the 12-year-old aspiring hunter who serves as Years’ protagonist and audience avatar, catching us up on nearly three decades of rage virus lore through simply inhabiting the world. Living in a commune of survivors somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, we meet the boy on the morning of his first trip to the mainland, his gruff and calloused father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) occupying dual roles as teacher and chaperone. A string of close calls, as well as Jamie’s dubious recounting of the journey upon their return, have Spike questioning a few instinctively-held truths, and wondering whether a cure for his bedridden mother Isla (Jodie Comer) could be waiting just outside the community’s heavily-guarded gates.

The narrative architecture here, which pairs coming-of-age elements with basic adventure film principles, is rudimentary and primordial, though anything more elaborate would be hard to track amidst such a whirring melee of formal freneticism. Playing out in a cacophonous parallel universe of layered sound and counter-intuitive needle drops, Young Fathers’ score is so dense as to be tactile, the audio attack coming at the ears from every imaginable angle. Shock and awe rule the day, marching orders that extend to Jon Harris’ turbulent editing, which incorporates a sizzle reel of stock footage from humanity’s violent history with enough roving bluster to make Oliver Stone blush. It’s almost too much to take in, and while the bombardment clearly comes from a place of enthusiasm, it can be hard to settle into a movie that’s so hellbent on ejecting you from your seat. Then again, when has expeditionary invention ever gone down smoothly?

In terms of construction, Years really does feel like a new frontier, one that only adheres to commonly-held notions of good taste when they serve its purposes. Never dipping below a full sprint, biting and clawing at everything in its path, the movie’s itchy agitation will prove noxious to some viewers, while requiring even the most intrepid cinephiles to steady their sea legs. Some of the structural pyrotechnics are pared down in the second act, but by then the vice has already taken hold, and tempers can only be warily corralled. Despite the horror scaffolding, the excitement here is more in the vein of a rip-roaring action spectacle, pulses set to pounding by hair-on-fire kineticism rather than fear’s slow, shivery drip. Leisure is hard to come by when there’s no familiar ground to stand on, with a specific, repeated shot, which pans across several cameras in the blink of an eye, embodying the flick’s avant garde mission statement through fevered splendor. Its beauty will be in the eye of the beholder, but those same irises have certainly never seen anything quite like it before. 

You’d hate to compare an offering of such heightened ambition and scintillating execution to Francis Ford Coppola’s misbegotten Megalopolis, but the two films have the shared quality of squinting into a filmic future for which you might not be ready. Trailblazing is an uneasy business, but so is directly citing the classics, which screenwriter Alex Garland does with a confidence that borders on egomania. Both Jurassic Park and its underappreciated direct sequel are touchstones here, as is the aforementioned Fury Road. For the more high-minded among us, a silhouetted, sundown interstitial is pulled directly from Night of the Hunter, and the phonic kinship between the names Erik and Yorick offers some foreshadowing in the shape of a Shakespearian play on words. But the most pronounced of all revisits Coppola back at his apex, mimicking both the rabbit hole intensity and poisoned machismo of Apocalypse Now.

He’s even provided his own Colonel Kurtz in the form of Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Ian Kelson, who spearheads a third act that’s somehow grisly and elegiac without either quality eating into the other. Credit Garland’s galaxy-brained idea, Boyle’s staggering visualization, and Fiennes’ graceful aura, but none of it would be possible without Williams. All of twelve years old at the time of filming, the burgeoning thespian effortlessly holds his own against more seasoned castmates, his quiet resolve negating any need for histrionics. The hammier stuff goes to Comer, who does her best with broad and underwritten material, a theatrical counterpoint to Taylor-Johnson’s ongoing manifestation of masculine cool. They’re fine, Williams is great, and Fiennes is, predictably, best in show, but there’s a reason it’s taken this long to take inventory of the performances. It’s hard to see the forest when the trees are on fire. 

You’ll find all the matches and lighter fluid on the other side of the lens, and if downplaying the human element feels like damning with faint praise, it’s worth reiterating the towering technical achievement on display. Nostalgia has all but overtaken Hollywood, but it’s usually geared toward memorable moments and beloved characters. Years reawakens the feeling of discovery that Days conjured over two decades ago, and for all the tears that were shed when Tom Cruise meditatively uttered “Talk to me, Goose,” three summers ago, the climactic return of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s rousing, magisterial East Hastings offers a blood-racing rejoinder. Boyle and his team make hell sound and feel like heaven, even if you’re too tensed up to notice.