After a few years of playing it safe, 28 Years Later is remarkable return of the pioneering, adrenaline-fuelled Danny Boyle of old. A wonderfully interwoven mass of intertextual paranoia, obsessed with pushing itself beyond its previously established boundaries, it manages to both imagine a Britain that is somehow bleaker than reality; and use that to argue that even in the darkest of days, there may still be hope for a kinder tomorrow.
How did we get here? That one of the most recognisable and impactful British films of the 21st century was essentially mothballed for two decades?
28 Days Later’s huge profit – taking around $80 million on a budget of $8 million – meant that a sequel was considered a must. But Danny Boyle only returned to direct (what turned out to be the best) 15 minutes of the film, while Alex Garland only supplied some input for script-rewrites. Without their guidance, while the second movie was still good, and returned another healthy profit – it did not live up to its predecessor.
A mixture of rights issues (Garland previously suggested that the rights were owned by undisclosed people who were not on speaking terms), and creative discontent (he also said some aspects of Weeks’ story “bugged” him) meant that even while talk of 28 Months Later began in 2007, a third instalment ultimately took 18 years to manifest.
When talk began to emerge of 28 Years Later in 2023, I wrote it off as clickbait gossip. Over the years, there had been so many casual ‘maybe’ statements fired off by Boyle and Garland that had raised my hopes, only to be dashed. Even after the spectacular release of a trailer last year, even after I had booked my seat at Lab111’s late night screening, I was trying not to count my chickens before they hatched.
Then the adverts and the trailers subsided. And honestly, it felt like coming home.
Too many years later
If you want to enjoy that experience for yourself, watch the film before you read on. There will be spoilers ahead.
I’m not under any pretences that this film is perfect – at least. Professionally speaking, I need to acknowledge there are some rough edges which might rankle general audiences.
The more indulgent impulses of Boyle, Garland and company do occasionally get a look in. As far as Boyle is concerned, his interwoven, overlapping editing is often a feverish blessing – but a couple of key moments see their impact diminished a little, either because they aren’t given the time to breathe, or because it is unclear where the characters are positioned, corresponding to the action.
Garland, meanwhile, is great at imbuing the darkest of horror films with wry wit – but has a tendency of going a little too far with it sometimes. Writing in a group/gang/cult of survivors who seem to have modelled themselves on Jimmy Saville is what you might generously call an interesting choice. And while in this timeline, the world went to hell in a hand-cart before Saville was outed as a serial child-molester, the gang’s presumed prevalence in the next film will be potentially incendiary for Nia DaCosta – taking over from Boyle (who will return for the final film in the planned trilogy) as director.
With all that being said, Garland has remained as writer for the project, which is already understood to be in the can. With Boyle remaining to produce, it’s not a situation I feel they’ve just palmed off onto DaCosta, and on the basis of everything else about 28 Years Later, I have no reason to believe the team cannot make it work in The Bone Temple.
At the same time, all of this constitutes a worthwhile trade-off, because the delirious intertextuality of Years is arguably the most impactful addition to the 28… world. Boyle has transplanted his sometimes amusing, often horrific knack for layering references and construct meaning from his other works – for example, Trainspotting, or 127 Hours – to bring out a new layer of subconscious insight here.
In Days and Weeks, besides dream sequences, we get very little insight into the inner workings of our protagonists. There is little opportunity to understand what makes them tick – or doesn’t – with the base motivation of not wanting chunks of flesh taken out of you by hordes of screaming infected deemed enough of an explanation for their general actions. But in Years, the constant mental churn of Spike (Alfie Williams) gives rise to a number of agitated and contradictory images that drive and inhibit his quest for survival.
Almost three decades after the original outbreak of Rage – a lab-created virus which turns the infected into bloodthirsty, highly-contagious cannibals – mainland England, Scotland and Wales are largely deserted. Survivor colonies exist, but mainly in coastal strongholds. Continuing the ‘diseased little island’ motif from Days, the UK has therefore been placed into quarantine – with Nato forces patrolling the oceans to ensure nobody makes a break for mainland Europe (where we are told, the outbreak was pushed back).
Marched proudly from the safety of Lindisfarne by his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) at the tender age of 12, the pair embark on Spike’s first foraging mission. Spike is the same age I was when I first tried to sit through 28 Days Later – and didn’t get past the opening scene. What chance does he have?
As much as Jamie insists his son is “ready”, it soon becomes clear that his extensive training hasn’t really prepared him for life on the mainland. Primed with a bow and arrow, Spike’s mind immediately fills with images of Henry V, and the famous scene where Laurence Olivier orders his archers to rain death on the French ahead of the battle of Agincourt. But amid the horrors of a gloomy forest, these images are countered by visions of a clan of infected who reside in the woodland territory – and what they did to a stag the night before – like some R-rated episode of Springwatch.
The phony patriotism Spike’s community has worked to imbue him with does little. The idea ‘our people have been fighting off some foreign other with bows for generations’ makes little logistic sense, considering the English have been more or less wiped out by this latest foe, despite owning a much more extensive arsenal of modern weaponry. But even beyond that, it is a set of iconographies which has no material meaning to Spike. England (at least in this sense) is a set of negatively-defined constructs, centred around fear of outsiders. But to get his arrows flying straight, fear is not what Spike needs any more of.
Waking nightmare
Spike couldn’t hit a barn door on his first expedition. But it’s clear to us why that is – we’ve been expertly drawn into this terrifying world with both vision and sound. Johnnie Burn and Brendan Feeney’s sound design creeps up on us from every angle, even in the most tender or human of moments. This creates a horrific dissonance, where screams drift into loving conversations, keeping us on edge and driving home the point that we are never close to being safe.
Adding to that, is the inspired choice of Scottish band Young Fathers for the film’s soundtrack. They previously provided an original song for T2, which Boyle described as “the heartbeat” of the movie – and here they provide another metronome; but one with a serious case of arrythmia. Just as the score swells to peaceful, more tranquil tones, heavy breathing, performative huffing, repeated shrieks or gibbering vocals interject – and in a way that blends seamlessly into the sound design.
It becomes impossible to tell where the diegetic sound and the soundtrack are parted – when we are safe, or when we need to start running. It’s a wonderfully exhausting experience, one which few horrors in the years between the other 28… films have come close to. And while I loved John Murphy’s original soundtrack, having it return here would probably have felt too formulaic – rather than giving us such a wonderful new evolution on this world’s atmosphere.
Speaking of evolution, Garland and Boyle have also had to adapt the 28… world to keep pace with the films which have built upon it. In particular, the curious fungal ecology of The Last of Us has provided an important reminder that a human apocalypse does not have to mean the end of life on Earth. Years more than steps up to the task of imagining how nature would realign itself around a landscape where people suddenly became scarce.
In an island long deprived of a true apex predator through the persecution of wolves, bears and lynx, a rewilded Britain has seen deer populations explode. And, with no competition, the infected have learned to survive by preying upon them – as the only predator large enough. This helps to partially explain why – contrary to Days – they haven’t simply starved to death with no humans to attack.
At the same time, the few humans left to munch on have found their relationships to birds have suddenly changed dramatically. With millions of humans generating waste to consume, crows were smart enough to build a niche shadowing us in our trash-rich society. But the few humans who now live in Britain generate little waste – they can’t afford to – and so crows have changed tact. An infected feeding frenzy presumably generates a lot of tasty viscera for the birds, so they have turned informers for the infected – flocking noisily, attracting attention, wherever survivors are to be found.
Memento Amoris
In such a desolate equation (for us, anyway), every encounter can seem cold, lonely, and hopeless. That takes a toll on Spike during his first expedition – because ultimately, he has only been equipped to fight it back with an exclusionary, isolationist ideology. But in an unexpected coming of age story, his second adventure shows him – and us – another way is still possible.
Spike’s mother Isla (Jodie Comer, who along with her on-screen son, is the standout performer of the film) is in bad need of medical attention. With nobody willing to address it on the island, he commences a desperate journey with her in tow, in search of a ‘lunatic’ who might also be the final doctor alive in Britain.
Amid the journey’s many perils, Spike’s arrows begin to find their mark. And while that isn’t a simple solution to all his problems, it does show that when he fights for someone he cares about, when his actions are motivated by love rather than fear, he is at his best.
As the journey draws to its end, this is driven home by Spike and Isla’s encounter with Doctor Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, embodying every GP you ever had a positive experience with). Kelson has spent years constructing a gigantic memorial from skulls in the middle of the forest. But he has not done so out of some grisly desire to scare people, or make some bold claims about his body-count as a survivor.
There is no lunacy here – but rather he is one of the few people left with a healthy relationship to death in the country. That is not to say he worships the force of death, or has some nihilistic outlook, that we are all going to die – but rather that death is a punctuation on life. It underscores it, makes it worth something, and makes the brief moments of happiness and love all the more important.
It’s an enjoyable riff on the Colonel Kurtz character – judged insane in Apocalypse Now for his “unsound” methods, amid the absurdity of a criminal war his superiors are trying fruitlessly to sanitise. The people who have judged Kelson (a bald Fiennes who almost seems to be cosplaying as Brando) insane for addressing the carnage of their world, of processing it, and trying to live normally. Meanwhile, they desperately desensitise themselves to it, living in denial, and clinging to nationalist fairytales as a means of surviving instead – at the expense of the supposed loved ones they ought to be trying to protect.
In the end, the ‘unsound methods’, and Kelson’s ability to process death as a part of life, rather than something only to dread and ignore, means he can even approach it as a form of compassion. While Isla has been locked away in her suffering, back among her community, in his company, she can see that while there are many kinds of death, some are indeed better than others. The very best, as anyone fortunate enough to go through the journey themselves would tell you, are peaceful, surrounded by those we love.
Ultimately, as Kelson asks Spike to place one final skull atop his installation, this is a memorial to remember to love. And in a world which gets darker by the day, in which previously unthinkable horrors manifest on repeat, and where death comes in many forms – fewer and fewer of them peaceful – being motivated by kindness, hope and love, can make us both more appreciative of the time we have with those around us, and more effective in our battle to turn the tide.
So, on a personal level, with family, friends, people I miss and love back in the UK – an island where the health and care systems are being knowingly decimated, while the government and opposition squabble over how afraid of foreigners they should be, and how much they should invest in shelling them – Boyle and Garland’s triumphant return to this franchise was perfect. A reminder of what I have, and what I must help fight to protect.
I only have six months to sit through for a sequel this time. But whatever happens after that, 28 Years Later was well worth the wait.