Another Green World
by Gavin Smith
28 Years Later
Dir. Danny Boyle, U.K., Sony
Zombie—such a tiresome word. It’s the horror that dare not speak its name. From Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie in 1943 to, oh, Shinichiro Ueda’s hilarious meta-zombie film One Cut of the Dead in 2017, characters seldom have recourse to the Z-word with regard to the recently arisen dead who are coming to get you. (The English-dubbed version of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 is the rare exception, if memory serves.) So, if we’re to be pedantic, despite superficial resemblances, 28 Days Later and its two sequels are not zombie movies—the ravenous hordes in these films, afflicted with a “rage” virus that transforms them into convulsive, bloodthirsty ravagers, are not dead. They’re just horribly ill and very, very angry. And though zombie lore maintains that only decapitation or a bullet to the head will dispatch a zombie, the Infected in Alex Garland and Danny Boyle’s films can be killed any old way since they’re very much alive. Nevertheless, the Infecteds’ ability to run rather than lurch after their prey has been credited as an innovative zombie-film gamechanger, a year ahead of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. Not true: the zombies in Dan O’Bannon’s tongue-in-cheek 1985 Return of the Living Dead deserve this accolade.
In case you didn’t see the other two films, 28 Years Later provides a quick refresher. Serving as audience surrogates, a living-room gathering of increasingly anxious children watch Teletubbies while all hell breaks loose outside. Only one of them makes it out alive, and after a pit stop at the town church, where the priest, his father, is exultantly raving about the Day of Judgement, just like the Teletubbies, it’s over the hills and far away for wee Jimmy (and remember that name because graffiti on an abandoned house later on lets us know “BEHOLD JIMMY IS COMING”).
If this is 28 years later, then the year is 2029. In a knowing wink to Brexit and Britain’s ongoing problem with small-boat illegal migrants crossing the Channel, the Rest of the World has turned its back on the UK, enforcing a zero-tolerance quarantine by patrolling warships—repudiating 28 Weeks Later’s nonsensical final scene, shot at the eleventh hour during the film’s editing, that announced that the infected had somehow made it to Paris. The Saint George English flag (red cross on white background) flies over Holy Island, a community whose way of life is essentially medieval. This settlement, oddly resembling the African continent in shape, is connected to the mainland by a causeway that submerges as the tide comes in. Bows and arrows and spears and knives have taken the place of modern weaponry. (Gee, why can’t the Rest of the World find it in their hearts to airdrop guns and ammo and other necessities?)
If 28 Days Later was a kind of road movie in which a makeshift family must contend not just with the Infected but also an undisciplined British Army squad with which it finds shelter, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s disposable 28 Weeks Later is more like a war movie featuring the U.S. military’s efforts to organize the return of refugees and put the UK back to its feet—nation-rebuilding, if you will. It’s also about the reconstitution of a family that directly causes a new outbreak of rage. The family in 28 Years Later is relatively more complex: it begins as a father-son story with 15-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) undergoing an Infected-hunt rite of passage on the mainland under the supervision of his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). It then pivots to become a mother-son story when a disillusioned Spike absconds with his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), in search of a rumored doctor on the mainland who might be able to treat her debilitating illness. When Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is finally located, we discover that he lives alone on the mainland, passing his time building giant “memento mori” monuments made of human skulls and bones—while somehow managing not to to draw the attention of the Infected who roam the countryside. As played by Fiennes, he’s not a madman, he’s just a typical English eccentric—but we’ll have to wait for the sequel to find out if he’s as benign as he seems.
Emerson said that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” but the way the goalposts keep moving across and within each film has always been irritating. There are plenty of logical lapses in 28 Days Later, but it smartly posits that the Infected will all die of starvation in due course, and 28 Weeks Later goes along with this. But Boyle and Garland cavalierly throw this and other ground rules from the first film out the window. Turns out the Infected have survived through hunting and feeding on wild animals (one even grabs and takes a bite out of a fish Spike is cooking over a fire). They also seem to care about personal hygiene, with Boyle showing them bathing in a stream. Moreover, through a convenient implicit mutation in the rage virus, sentient and physically powerful Infected, known as Alphas, have emerged to lead the rest of their Infected brethren—who can now also get pregnant and give birth to perfectly healthy children. Kelson marvels at “the magic of the placenta” when Spike and Isla present him with an uninfected newborn, and doubling down on the family theme, this infant is the presumptive progeny of an Alpha the doctor nicknames “Samson.” No doubt this will be another plot point in the upcoming Garland-penned contribution to the 28 Universe from Candyman director Nia DaCosta.
Wider in scope and cast than its predecessor, loaded with hardware and with a heavy body count, 28 Weeks Later demonstrated that bigger isn’t better, botching things completely, tacked-on ending and all. Fresnadillo and his three co-writers seemed intent on trying to top the first film and had the budget to pull out all the stops. 28 Days Later, by contrast, made a virtue out of its low budget and modest scale. Now, understandably, Boyle and Garland are acting as if the second film never happened (apart from a reference to Paris being nuked, according to a shipwrecked Swedish commando who turns up briefly to provide comic relief). But actually, it’s Fresnadillo’s sequel that introduces the idea of Infected sentience, here in the form of Infected dad Don (Robert Carlyle), whose rampage becomes a grudge match against his fleeing children, whom he improbably pursues all over London.
Boyle’s filmmaking instincts are prone to fall back on the “telling” incongruous cutaway or background that’s supposed to give us pause—a motionless wind farm here, Antony Gormley’s monumental “Angel of the North” sculpture there. Boyle also gets in his own way with a new tic—fleeting flash-forwards to what’s coming soon or next that privilege disruptive hype over smooth narrative flow, as if he isn’t confident that the frenetic energy he whips up for the action sequences will suffice.
That said, in the film’s early scenes Boyle comes up with something unexpected and genuinely impressive. The bow and arrow have taken on an all-but talismanic aura in this new/old world, and mastery of archery is now the measure of the man. Boyle ingeniously connects the archery of the present day with England’s historical past, intercutting imagery of the community’s defenses with footage from a range of archival sources that present Britain at war, including World War I footage and clips of massed archers letting fly in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Henry V. And the incantatory use of a creepy vintage recording of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 Boer war poem “Boots,” as Spike and Jamie set out for the mainland, reinforces the invocation of a nation retrieved from a half-imagined distant past. Boyle may be a Scotsman, but he’s got England on his mind.
His quiet attentiveness to the British landscape in the middle section of 28 Days Later is particularly underappreciated and is hardly the stuff of your bog-standard zombie flick. He conveyed a peaceful, bucolic vision of William Blake’s “green and pleasant land,” almost completely unblemished by mayhem. Unexpectedly, the use of low-resolution DV yielded a soft, almost-watercolor focalization to the passing countryside, and the reflective mood of the taxicab’s passengers as they travel north is underlined by Gabriel Fauré’s tranquil, meditative adagio “In Paradisum.” The family of wild horses glimpsed in the distance confirms that nature continues to flourish. The lush, refreshing beauty of the forests and dales of 28 Years Later capitalizes on this sense of landscape, and it’s as far away as you can get from the in-vogue postapocalyptic worlds of TV shows like Silo and Fallout.
Is the world a better place once mankind is removed? In the same symbolic register as the horses, 28 Days Later’s (improbably) toppled Double Decker bus in the middle of a deserted London main road stands in for the clean sweep of cataclysmic social breakdown. But while the silent trash-strewn streets of London are eerie enough, with their unmistakably nod to the 1963 film version of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, perhaps they also invite us to contemplate a sense of relief from the massive, consuming overload of modern life. They are also, of course, a prophetic glimpse of the entire world’s lockdown, 19 years later.