'28 Years Later': On Becoming a Man in the Zombie Wasteland
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's return to the world they created is far from a zombie slaughter fest. Thank goodness for that.
Although 2002’s 28 Days Later did not invent fast zombies, Danny Boyle’s indie horror film was a shot in the arm to the genre. The director and his writer, Alex Garland, worked to upend particular genre tropes while still staying firmly within the framework established by Night of the Living Dead filmmaker George A. Romero by acknowledging that although zombies are a threat, man is the true monster. 28 Days Later forced others to up their game when it came to zombie movies, but what could Boyle and Garland do as a follow-up? The pair skipped the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later, but are back with 28 Years Later, which continues their knack for playing against expectations. Rather than a simple story of surviving in the wasteland, the duo returns to the idea of “What does it mean to be ‘civilized’ when civilization falls apart?” with a keen focus on outdated notions of masculinity rooted in dominance and violence. Visually vibrant and emotionally textured, 28 Years Later honors the original and feels like its true continuation.
[I’m going to need to get into some minor spoilers because the trailers have been cagey about what the film is actually about, so if you want to go in completely cold, stop reading now and then come back after you see the movie.]
The world wasn’t overrun by zombies after the “rage virus” outbreak from 28 Days Later, but England did need to be quarantined and left to the infected and survivors eking out a medieval existence. On an island off the mainland (the mainland being England, not the European continent), 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) prepares to join his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in a hunt. Although Spike is more concerned with the health of his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), he also wants to show his dad and his community that he’s tough and can be considered a man. The father and son make their way to the mainland, but their trip only leads to more questions for Spike as he sees a way to possibly save his mother.
28 Years Later rests on an extremely good rug-pull, which is making you think that the movie will be about the relationship between Jamie and Spike. At first, Jamie doesn’t seem like such a bad dad. He struggles to support Isla, whose mental acuity is slipping away due to her illness, but he’s trying to be a present father for Spike. However, the entire first act functions as a critique of the masculinity Jamie and the community seek to foster. To be a “hunter” here means you go out, kill infected, and then tell great stories about your triumphs while getting hammered. Boyle makes the subtext into text by jump cutting to brief clips from war films and footage showing that the idea of masculinity is rooted in battle and violence. You shoot your arrow at the thing you want to die, and that’s how you become a man.
Except after his first hunt, Spike doesn’t feel great about himself. He killed some slow, fat zombies, ran like hell from the fast ones, and then he and his dad narrowly escaped a new super-powered zombie that chased them back to their island. Jamie then revels in the hunt, gives Spike some beer (which Spike promptly pukes up because he’s twelve), and then goes off to cheat on Isla. When Spike calls Jamie on it the following morning, he strikes his son, although he quickly regrets it. But in these brief moments, Spike can see the moral rot of his father’s masculinity—it’s a masculinity rooted in violence and self-glorification. Jamie has mostly given up on Isla, and while he’s not an evil man, his notion of masculinity is ultimately as brutish and violent as the rage zombie that chased him and Spike back to the island.
Spike then chooses a different path. After finding out that a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) lives on the mainland, Spike resolves to take Isla to see him even though it’s a massive risk. By turning away from Jamie and towards Isla, Boyle and Garland are making a pointed critique of civilization built on outdated masculinity. Jamie’s masculinity ostensibly serves the community, but we can see that resources are still scarce. The purpose of masculine combat appears to serve masculine glorification. Garland in particular took aim at toxic masculinity in his 2022 film Men, but whereas that movie had the subtlety of a sledgehammer, here he’s able to weave his ideas into the narrative in a far more effective and thoughtful manner. Rather than lunging straight at the themes, we’re invested in the overarching story involving Spike’s journey as he realizes that becoming a man isn’t about what you can kill, but who you can save.
The story extrapolates this beyond Spike’s journey to show the roots of toxic masculinity everywhere whether it’s in Spike’s community (it’s not a cult, but it also has weird markers of how it reveres violence and the hunt), the church (as seen in the film’s prologue), or the military when Spike and Isla cross paths with a soldier cut off from his unit. The film also feels topical with notions of the pandemic and isolation vis-a-vis Brexit highlighting that every idea rooted in violent masculinity only serves to make the world smaller and less compassionate. 28 Years Later keeps hammering the critique that if violence and indifference to suffering is what makes a person great, then how are humans any different than the infected? If all we’re looking at is a body count, then no human could ever be as murderous as a rage zombie.
Utilizing a larger societal critique, Boyle and Garland never need to resort to running into “bad humans,” like the characters in zombie movies typically do. Spike isn’t heroic because there are bad people in the world. His heroism—and more specifically, his coming-of-age—is all rooted in his desire to protect his sick mom. Comer delivers a reliably wonderful turn that makes Isla more than an object to carry to safety, but the film rests on Williams’ great performance that shows him becoming a man outside of the narrow allowances of his father or community. It’s not that violence is verboten, but it must be exercised in the service of protection rather than domination.
To knock tired patriarchal values off their pedestal, Boyle utilizes his delirious style of quick jump cuts, canted angles, and other visual surprises (with the help of his brilliant 28 Days Later DP Anthony Dod Mantle) to keep the audience off-balance. The director dances on a tightrope of trying to show us that we’re in a different world than the one we know, but also one that’s disturbingly familiar in deeper ways. That leads to a movie that feels far different from your typical zombie kill-fest and one that’s more impressionistic and surreal. There’s almost a point where it feels like Boyle and Garland are trying to rewrite Arthurian legend and update it into a modern lens where greatness comes not from being chosen, but by understanding hard truths about death and love.
Boyle, Garland, and the rest of us have certainly seen rapid changes in the past 23 years since the original’s release, a film that came in the aftermath of 9/11. Since then, we’ve had a Great Recession and a pandemic, along with rapid technological change that’s greatly diminished our understanding of baseline truth. We’re now a far cry from “The world would be normal if not for zombies.” 28 Days Later postulated that the thin film of civilization, once broken, would reduce men back to barbaric states. 28 Years Later argues that we need to stop celebrating barbarians if we ever hope to reclaim our humanity.