It begins with children watching the “Teletubbies” on the tube, reaching for a more innocent time.

But the TV is just a distraction. Parents have parked their kids in front of it while they cope with the awful news they’ve heard of outside of that room, which they lock when the inevitable happens. And when a child opens that door, there’s another inevitability — wanton, pitiless and horrific slaughter of the innocents.

Danny Boyle’s return to his “rage virus” zombie universe comes 18 years after “28 Weeks Later,” years further removed from “28 Days Later.” And “28 Years Later” faces the grim cinematic landscape of zombies over-exposed, an Oscar-winning director forced to try and top “Zombieland” and “Train to Busan” and whole TV series devoted to life in a crumbling civilization where zombies are an ongoing threat.

Aside from far more graphic gore, Boyle doesn’t top himself or the best of the zombie offerings from Korea and elsewhere in intensity and terror. So the Oscar-winning director, working from a script by “Civil War” writer-director Alex Garland, struggles to give relevence and intellectual/allegorical heft to a story about “the other” and a humanity deadened to the reality of an enemy that must be killed on sight ad infinitum.

But all the sizzling in-your-face editing, the black and white montages of 2archival conflict footage, the aural montages of the decades that have passed since “28 Days Later” put Boyle over the top and Cillian Murphy on the map (crackling dial-up internet, etc.) fail at topping the heart-stopping suspense and terror of Boyle’s earlier zombie films, or their Korean offspring.

It’s the suggestions of humanity’s rising inhumanity, the allusions to Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” with a Kurtz who has reconciled and resigned himself to the horrors around him that make this picture worth chewing over.

I can’t be the only one who wishes “Slumdog/127 Hours” Boyle had found fresh filmic subject matter and that he had the blank check to film it that a zombie sequel offered. But “Yesterday” punctured that balloon.

All these “Years Later” a survivor from that “Teletubbies” massacre has grown up to be a bearded, longbow-armed warrior (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) with a son of his own. And Jimmy thinks twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is ready to leave the island refuge where British civilization clings to life, to go on a foraging expedition and collect his “first kill.”

The signs of a “keep calm and mind the ‘limited resources'” society are all over “Holy Island” (Holy Island of Lindisfarne, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, England, UK). They’ve survived the end of Britain, “quarantined” from the rest of Europe, which escaped the worst of the “rage virus.”

As the Elders of Holy Island offer little resistance to the idea of a boy going with his father to kill
“the infected” while scrounging for anything useful on the mainland, and Spike’s mother (Jodie Comer) is having mental episodes and incapable of pushback, off they go.

“He’s got no mind, he’s got no soul,” Jimmy coaches his kid on facing assorted zombie “types.” “The more you kill, the easier it gets.”

The wonders of the vast, nearly empty “mainland” get lost in that lesson. But seeing distant smoke and hearing that a far-off “doctor” is responsible for it puts Spike in mind of “saving” his mother by getting her treatment. Seeing his insensate lout of a father cheating on her after a night of drunken revels in the Holy Island pub when they return seals that pact. He will steal away and take her to mysterious and “mad” Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes).

They will encounter Swedish commandos patrolling Quarantined Britain, and one (Edvin Ryding). And they will find that doctor and his “Memento Mori” bone-statue monument to the dead, all of whom — “infected” and uninfected, were human at one point and mortal in the end.

Little about this is original enough to the zombie genre to note — zombies “evolving” into different strata of threat (Dwayne Johnson/Jason Mamoa-sized “Alphas” being the worst), odd flashes of humanity (childbirth) in them.

And Garland and Boyle, for all their allegories about the dehumanizing nature of conflict — the ingenius use of a 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots” as a soundtrack cue — stumble to keep track of “rules” for their zombielandand, throwing logic to the wind as often as not. They deliver an ending that’s the equivalent of both of them throwing their hands up.

So “28 Years” isn’t as good as “28 Days” or even “28 Weeks” or “Train to Busan.”

But they Boyle and Garland have made a go at making a zombie movie for the moment, a post-Brexit, Israeli genocide, Middle East war, insensate MAGA ICE-goons thriller that makes you think even if all the technique, editing and new levels of violence can’t hide the fact that the filmmakers haven’t quite made up their minds about what they’re trying to say.

Rating: R graphic, gruesome and bloody violence, nudity, profanity, an explicit scene of childbirth

Cast: Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams, Edvin Ryding and Ralph Fiennes

Credits: Directed by Danny Boyle, scripted by Alex Garland. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:55