Review by Tim Robins
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
Kes (1969) meets Night of the Living Dead (1968) in Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Years Later, a tense and surprisingly touching take on a post apocalyptic Britain, as seen through the eyes of Spike, the son of two survivors of the ‘Rage’ virus.
Following 28 Days Later (2002) and 28 Weeks Later (2007), the new film is the third in what I suppose should be called the ‘Later’ franchise (there are two more to come). The films explore a Britain laid waste by a virus that sends its victims into an uncontrollable rage (hence the virus’s name). The films are sort of part of the zombie apocalypse genre, at least as much as TV’s The Last of Us is – or, rather, isn’t.
In 28 Years Later, the infected are sometimes called zombies, but ‘Rage’ victims are not undead. In fact, Garland’s script is decidedly life affirming. Thanks to pregnant people’s – sorry, I’ll read that again – thanks to women’s placentas, babies can be born free of the virus. The virus itself has found new life by evolving to create ‘Alphas’, who have extraordinary strength and intelligence, along with formidable sexual organs, or ‘dongs’ (as Australian reviewers on The Weekly Planet podcast would have it).
In some respects, the film is a (very) dark coming-of-age story. We follow Spike’s struggles to find his own way in the world. Actor Alfie Williams, as Spike, plays his role with conviction and becomes the often intensely moving, emotional core of the movie.
Spike must find his own path between the physical and emotional needs of his parents. His mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is virtually bedridden by a mystery illness. Spike does his best to feed and comfort her while she lapses into hallucinations, in which past and present become confused.
Spike’s father, Jamie, (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) struggles to fulfill Isla’s nurturing role, but his main concern is making sure Spike grows up to conform to the norms of masculinity. To this end, Jamie wants Spike to undergo a rite of passage although the 12-year-old is younger than others undergo the passage to manhood.
The rite involves leaving the safety of the island community and crossing a potentially treacherous causeway to the mainland. (The island is Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, but is unnamed in the film).
Once on the mainland, much as in fox hunting, Spike is to be ‘blooded’ by killing his first rage victim in the wild. However, the trip doesn’t exactly go as planned. The infected don’t hang about waiting to be killed by Spike and his fathers’ bows and arrows. The pair narrowly escape several attacks by the infected, and are pursued by an ‘Alpha’ in a chase across the causeway – one of the film’s tense, edge-of-the-seat moments.
With father and son safely returned, the village celebrates. But, at this moment of celebration, cracks appear in Spike and Jamie’s relationship. Jamie hails Spike as a hero, eulogising him to the revellers. But what Spike really wants is for people to hear and accept the truth of his own feelings – he was so terrified, he could barely shoot an arrow at the raging humans.
Faced with the gap between his father’s mythologizing and his own emotions, Spike struggles to become his own man in the face of the normative expectations of masculinity. His father is one role model, the extreme Alpha zombies are, almost paradoxically, another.
As the revel’s end, Spike sees his married father having sex with a village woman. Faced with this act of infidelity, Spike decides to take his critically-ill mother to the mainland, in search of a legendary Doctor to diagnose and cure her. Outside the boundaries of village ritual and beyond the protection of his father, Spike begins his actual journey to adulthood.
28 Years Later may be seen as a drama of ‘toxic masculinity’. Jamie is a man who cannot admit to his own emotions and protects his personal boundaries with violence. He further breaks Spike’s trust by hitting the boy across the face, and we get to witness the fragility of the masculine norm. But the greatest challenge, for any child. is recognising parents are human beings like everyone else. Accepting their mortality is part of that process, a dilemma that grounds the film in authentic, very human, feelings.
Among the men Spike meets on the mainland is Ralph Fiennes, a terribly refined eccentric, Dr Kelson, who has been busying himself building Memento Mori from the skulls of the dead. Fiennes brings a remarkable sensitivity to the part, even if the actor appears to have been painted entirely in orange (Kelson explains that a covering of iodine keeps the virus at bay).
Boyle sometimes shoots the movie through the augmented lenses of a mobile phone, giving the film intimacy, but also contributing striking cinematographic effects. Sometimes events appear as if seen out of the corner of the audience’s eyes. Isla’s fevered dreaming mirrors the construction of the film itself in which dreams, hallucinations and reality are spliced with film clips and other material, to become a fever dream of the British nation.
Boyle’s insertion of war-time footage and the, deeply ironic, clips from Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1944) contribute to the hallucinatory evocation of Britain. However, the clips have bewildered some commentators.
In an even-handed review, American YouTuber ‘Charlie’ (aka ‘Penguinz0’), bemoaned the way the film splices together “1980’s and 70’s footage and Medieval footage,” complaining “they’re shooting arrows and it’s meant to parallel the society we follow in 28 Years Later where they are all also shooting arrows. Ok, I get it, but what the f**k did that add?… It’s kind of just goofy.”
It is the case that the meaning of the clips is not explained within the film’s fictional world. So it is certainly true that some interpretive work has to be done here on behalf of the film.
Part of the oddness of the film arises from the fact that these clips are Boyle directly addressing the audience. They serve as a means by which the director turns the film into a deeply ironic exploration of the way Britons imagine themselves as an island ‘race’.
The cinematic inserts allude to powerfully mythologised moments in Britain’s national narrative. World War Two and Olivier’s Henry V are inextricably yoked together. Henry V was overtly propagandistic – a morale booster and, as such, partly funded by the British government. On release, Henry V came with a dedication to the “Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempting to recapture.” This is a reminder that wars are fought simultaneously in reality, and in the imagination.
Our notions of Britishness have a fantastical quality, within which St Crispin’s Day and The Battle of Agincourt exist as touchstones that tested Briton’s metal. The 1944 Henry V becomes a reminder of a time when Britain seemed to stand alone against Nazi Germany. This memory cements Briton’s sense of self – of being isolated, and having to find an entirely inner resolve.
Britishness exists as a distinctly embattled sense of self identity. The small boats arriving on our shores today are surely, if implicitly, being contrasted with the little ships of Dunkirk. For some Brits it is as if the Battle of Britain is being fought every day, over and over again but, like Dunkirk, it is a battle “we” are losing.
Boyle himself has said that 28 Years Later can be seen as an allegory for Brexit. Talking to El Pais, he said, “Brexit has constrained us, locked us in, and that’s what 28 Years Later is about. They pretended it was about growth in trade, but in reality it’s navel-gazing, it’s this nonsense of believing ourselves superior to the rest of Europe. That great England, those historic victories… we’re a small, shitty island, not an empire”
There are scenes with Eric, a Swiss soldier stranded on the British mainland, where Spike gets to learn about how Britain is seen by others. Contrary to the fate of Europe suggested by 28 Weeks Later, the Rage has been beaten back, and Britain has been placed in quarantine, so anyone who tries to escape our shores is shot. The scenario reminded me of the entirely apocryphal British newspaper headline, “Fog in the Channel, Continent Cut Off.”
Given 28 Years Later focuses on the impact of a virus, I couldn’t help but see it as an allegory for the way the Covid-19 pandemic ruthlessly dismantled notions of British exceptionalism. And why do us Brits dream of escaping safely to an island? After all, we already live on an island – much good that it did us.
The real-life virus arrived here with flights from Northern Italy while Prime Minister Boris-let-the-bodies-pile high-in-the-streets Johnson and friends were quaffing champagne and partying on down. It’s impossible to think of Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle, without flying into a rage.
It is not at all coincidental that the film is accompanied by Rudyard Kipling’s grim 1903 poem, “Boots”, a reflection on the plight of soldiers in South Africa during the Second Boer War. Also, in the context of Spike’s rite of passage into manhood, it is also worth remembering the baleful influence of Kipling’s poem “If” on a certain generation of boys and on the 1968 film of the same name – a disturbing exploration of boyhood, desire and violence.
Despite all this, the film’s spliced-together evocation of Britain remains moving and deeply nostalgic. This includes the way shots linger on the British landscape, with the green, rolling hills and the shots of huge herds of stampeding deer. There are particular gestures towards landmarks that give different areas of Britain their distinctive character. So Spike and his Da’ gaze in awe at The Angel of the North, and we are treated to shots of Northumberland’s Sycamore Gap tree (now consigned to memory, after being felled in an act of vandalism).
While 28 Years Later locates itself in “the North”, it also finds its home in a very British apocalyptic tradition. The film evokes John Wyndam’s The Day of the Triffids and many of the works of John Christopher, including The Death of Grass and The Tripods trilogy. Many of the set-ups recall British TV dramas, such as Survivors (1975-77) and The Changes (1975). The film is as much a recollection of the products of Britain’s film industry as it is of Britain itself.
Of course, 28 Years Later is full of unnerving scenes with the infected. Here, the make-up is grotesque and all too plausible. But alongside all the action, there is a really dark sense of humour. There’s a moment where a shipwrecked Swede called Eric (Edvin Ryding) shows Spike a photo of the girlfriend he has left behind. Eric sees her as beautiful but, in a laugh out loud moment, we see that she is an utterly grotesque creation of botox and slap. In comparison, the infected seem more normal.
Another scene that plays like a gag sees Spike drop off a baby, freshly birthed by an infected woman, on the doorstep of the survivors’ village. It is as if Spike, or maybe the film itself, was saying, “There you go da’, that’s what you get when you sleep around.” Can that have been intended by writer Garland? I honestly don’t know.
There is, however, one jarring moment near the end that lurches the film into the ribald, black humour of early 2000AD“Judge Dredd”strips. It’s all a touch sinister, and somewhat bathetic, but also outright ridiculous, and, after a challenging, exciting, emotionally exhausting adventure, I could have lived without it.
I’ll stick around to see what 28 Years Later, Part Two, has to offer. After all, Part One had more than enough excitement and drama to warrant another trip to the cinema. Until then, “laters people!”
Tim Robins
28 Years Later is in cinemas now
Official Web Site: 28yearslater.movie
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A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews
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