A Review of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later
The United Kingdom is currently in the process of legalizing euthanasia. It has also recently decriminalized late-term abortion. That is, mothers who kill their infants during birth will not be prosecuted. The country is also roiled in controversy surrounding its foreign relations. Given the current grotesque state of British culture, Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later comes across as a shockingly blunt political allegory.
In the film’s prologue, we are introduced to the Teletubbies. More specifically, the character of the young boy Jimmy, who will only appear at the bookends of the film—still an important, unseen presence throughout. The allegory begins right away: he is locked in a room with other children by his mother to be hypnotized by the television as the world falls apart due to a disease of madness. Very relatable. Predictably, the zombies burst in and promptly begin tearing apart the other children. Where does one go when television fails? Jimmy runs to church, where his father — a priest full of apocalyptic fervor — is praying. He tells his son with a cartoonish smile: “It’s a glorious day: the day of judgment.” The stained glass of the church is then shattered by infected hordes, and from a hiding place, the boy watches as his father is converted into one of them.
It’s comical, it’s stupid, it’s grotesque, it’s anything but subtle — nevertheless, something about it feels true to the current state of British culture.
For the main story, we are presented with a fortress of survivalists. They live on Lindisfarne, a tidal island known for its role in medieval Christian monasticism, and their community has something of a Christian fundamentalist undertone: they call themselves the Holy Island Mission, and they teach the children to sing hymns in school. The symbolism of a slight stone passage across the sea being the boundary between the land of the living and the land of the dead is almost biblical in scope. The British mainland is covered in roving bands of “the infected.” The rest of the world is free of the disease, but NATO ships patrol the coast, keeping the island quarantined — presumably as a vague allegory of Brexit.
It’s very clear from the beginning that the director is interested in exploring ancient heroic themes as well as quintessential Englishness: the people of this small island colony are bowmen. As the island children train with bows, we are presented with spliced in old movie clips of schoolboys marching and medieval archers raining down arrows from castle walls. Notably, everyone on the island is very white. Their leader is a silver-haired woman.
Spike is 12 years old and undergoes his people’s rite of passage by walking with his father across the tidal causeway to the mainland to kill zombies. His mother, named “Isla” is struggling with some indecipherable form of mental illness — presumably she is an allegory for Britain itself, the motherland, precious, beloved, but unstable and frail. His father is nurturing but adulterous, the discovery of which breaks his son’s heart. Hearing rumors of a doctor on the mainland, the boy sneaks out with his mother to see if he can find a cure for her. To distract the guards, he sets fire to a shack, and we see a flag of St. George alight in flame portentously. Along their journey, they visit the Angel of the North and sleep in the crumbling ruins of a church.
Despite the lack of subtlety, the symbolism still feels potent. There is something tragic about seeing the heart-achingly beautiful English countryside filled with shambling dead. And from my time in the country, I can attest that England in real life is filled with those who are spiritually dead. They must repent. Sadly, the film doesn’t seem capable of comprehending the gospel or expressing an idea of Christendom other than as a ruin of something beautiful and forever lost. At best, it can only continue on alive, in an unhinged apocalyptic mindset. I pray that isn’t true, though only time may tell.
Strikingly, the only non-white actor in the film is the so-called Alpha zombie “Samson” who is depicted as a kind of zombie patriarch, full of rage and bearing an enormous phallus. In the savage world of the infected, he reigns supreme and pursues his prey relentlessly across fields, bridges, and trains. He can only be pacified with morphine. He’s not only a symbol of toxic masculinity, but seems to be a kind of racialized allegory embodying Britain’s replacement.
If Samson represents grotesque masculinity, grotesque femininity is represented by a pregnant zombie who gives birth to a clean and healthy baby. Strikingly, while giving birth, the infected mother clasps hands with Isla and shows no aggression — redeemed during childbirth — but moments after the baby is born, she begins to revert back to her rage and is killed by a young Nordic NATO soldier. The young Nord also wishes to kill the baby before he has his head ripped off in a surprise attack from Samson.
Spike and his mother escape and discover the eccentric doctor they’ve been questing for. He has constructed an enormous complex of pillars made out of bones, which he collects as relics from both infected and uninfected alike, forming a giant pillar of their skulls right at the center. “Memento mori,” explains the doctor, very explicit about continuing this ancient tradition in his own eccentric way. “Remember that you must die.” He has an altar, though it does not seem to be a Christian altar. He keeps a fire burning regularly, collecting bodies and burning away their flesh to continue building his temple bone by bone.
The doctor quickly diagnoses Spike’s mother with terminal brain cancer, and drugs Spike to calm him down. “There are many kinds of death, and some are better than others,” says the doctor. “The best are peaceful, where we leave each other in love.” The music swells sentimentally and the boy and mother embrace. The doctor then takes Isla away to be euthanized. The sparks of her cremation float up towards the camera. Within moments, he brings Spike back his mother’s skull.
This is either the most saccharine euthanasia propaganda ever produced, or subtly, we are being asked to question the ethics of a system like Canada’s MAID, which so swiftly and unaccountably renders recommendations of death. How do we know that the man who has been building skull pillars in isolation is to be trusted as a medical authority? What if he just wanted her skull? I’m genuinely not sure how the movie wants us to feel. Maybe the sequel will elaborate for us when we discover how Spike’s father feels about this whole procedure taking place without his knowledge. Maybe there will be some twist.
In any case, Spike receives this all straightforwardly. He does not trust his father, but he does trust this random doctor who builds bone pillars in the wilderness of zombies. He names the newborn baby girl Isla after his mother and deposits her on the doorstep of the Holy Island Mission. Allegorically — maybe the motherland as we’ve known it has a terminal disease, but there is still hope for a rebirth out of the unclean. Nevertheless, Spike chooses not to return home himself. This turn is very individualist and vitalistic — there is this sense that the young man must carve his own path. He cannot remain on a little island hunkered down with the fundamentalist survivalists, ruled by a woman. Rather, he must walk in the wild among the savages and live as a hunter, defending himself with bow and arrow.
But of course, there are too many zombies for him to fend off all by himself. At the very end, Jimmy from the prologue returns as a grown man to the rescue of the young boy Spike, a savior in a purple tracksuit bearing a golden cross, with a crew of young killers similarly dressed and with hair done in the likeness of notorious rapist Jimmy Savile. They welcome the young man into their league.
So the ending note is this: all that will survive of Britain will be a tribe of chavs who have inherited a form of Christendom so apocalyptic, savage, and bloodthirsty that it’s almost unrecognizable to us. “Behold Jimmy is coming with the clouds” declares graffiti boldly at one point. The kind of salvation offered here is deeply ambiguous.
The movie has been set up for a whole trilogy, so we’ll see how they develop or subvert this message in subsequent episodes, but as it stands, that seems to be the undeniable takeaway.
In technique, the movie is a hot mess. Everything’s inconsistent — some shots are spectacularly beautiful, some are horrendously bad. The landscape is the handiwork of God. The CGI effects of stars in the night sky or stampeding herds of deer look laughably fake. The dialogue and character tensions often feel maudlin and clunky. The symbolism is laid on incredibly thick, yet still feels true. And I cannot emphasize enough how the film is absolutely disgusting all the way throughout. Non-stop blood and guts — it’s wretched, it’s fetishistic, and I’m concerned for the souls of people who watch flesh-tearing for entertainment. Avert your eyes! For the gore alone, the film probably isn’t worth watching.
What lured me was the allegory. In spite of all the filth, it is still a breath of fresh air to see a movie interested in piercing straight to the heart of what it means to be alive in Britain.
Image Credit: Unsplash
