It begins with a deadly lab leak. Inside an English research facility in Cambridge, a bank of TV monitors is blasting clips of documentary violence — riots, hangings — into the eyes of a chimpanzee, a test subject in what we’d now recognize as “gain of function” virus research. Today, the rest plays out like Instagram highlights: Animal rights activists burst into this “Clockwork Orange” tableau and free an infected chimp. The chimp promptly mauls its human liberator. Then comes the familiar transformation — spasm, contortion, brisk snap into embodied demon — that starts murderous insanity spreading through the lab’s remaining humans, and then to those outside.
This was the start of Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later,” the movie that helped reboot the zombie apocalypse, turning a moribund horror subgenre into one of the dominant forces in entertainment. Boyle’s innovations — tonal seriousness, punk-rock filmmaking, speedy zombies bearing infectious disease — are still visible in everything from “World War Z” to “The Last of Us.” But it’s that opening scene, in which triggering media turns a primate virus into a fatal blood-borne psychosis, that sets up a prescient metaphor for what has happened in the decades between the movie’s release in 2002 and the arrival, this month, of “28 Years Later,” a new sequel from Boyle and the original screenwriter, Alex Garland. Across those years, a digital intoxication not unlike the film’s “Rage virus” really has made society feel angrier, crazier and more unstable.
The original film had a grungy kinetic intensity; Boyle used digital video and the fast, cheap Canon XL1 to energize his shots, finding a jittery, claustrophobic, hyperreal visual language. Using what Garland has called a “Tootsie” cut — after the moment in that movie when Dustin Hoffman is suddenly revealed dressed as a woman — the story jumps straight from the initial outbreak of the virus to the moment, 28 days later, when a young bike messenger, Jim, awakes from a coma in an abandoned hospital and wanders out into an indelible vision of London after a people-vanishing cataclysm. (The walls and kiosks, covered with missing-person fliers, are one of several images that were transformed by real-life events after the film began shooting on Sept. 11, 2001.) He is rescued from his first contact with the infected by two masked survivors, one of whom explains that the apocalypse first appeared as a news item — “and then it wasn’t on the TV anymore,” she says, “it was coming through your windows.” Jim’s small crew must resist both the infected and a company of British soldiers who offer protection at the cost of sexual slavery. Finally escaped to a remote Lake District idyll, they see a military jet flyover as proof that civilization still endures — that the late-’90s neoliberal order may soon be restored.
Clearly, things didn’t quite play out that way. A 2007 sequel, “28 Weeks Later” (neither original creator was involved) was rooted in post-9/11 security and warfare, imagining survivors huddled in a militarized safe zone controlled by American-led NATO troops, testing what a fearful society will tolerate to defend itself from an external threat. Then time passed and the paradigm shifted; ordinary people’s anger and fear was redirected from distant menaces to various enemies within. Real-life media and political institutions seemed to succumb to their own Rage, a process amplified by everything from new apps and platforms to a nonfictional pandemic. Now, “28 Years Later” shows us how the weaponized virus alters even the uninfected, reshaping society in terrifying ways.
‘Some of the stuff in this film is about people misremembering the world we had.’
The new film imagines a kind of extreme Brexit, extended a generation into the future. It, too, opens in the new-millennium world of pixels and screens, with a close-up of a TV playing the old British toddler show “The Teletubbies,” whose original series ended in 2001. But from there it moves to the residents of the tidal Holy Island, where, 28 years later, residents maintain a rugged nationalism apart from both the existing England and the smartphone-using world they’ve never seen. “We’ve gone backwards,” is how Boyle explained it to me. “Because inevitably you would retrench back to analog.”
The Holy Islanders tend subsistence farms, send their children to a local school and man a crossbow-fortified gate at a long causeway that leads to Britain. It’s into this dangerous wilderness that boys like the film’s 12-year-old protagonist, Spike, must venture on rite-of-passage hunts for the deadly hominids beyond — and reckon with abiding Garland interests like family, war and masculinity. A ghastly walkabout with his father reveals the man’s hollowed-out machismo. Spike’s love for his mother, Isla, who is quarantined with a memory-ravaging illness, forces him on a terrifying quest for a doctor rumored to live on the mainland. And after Isla and this doctor show a genuinely courageous, if heretical, view of the infected as fellow mortals, Spike considers exiling himself from a society that guards its walls and rejects modern medicine, trading in lies and toxic myths.
As a zombie movie, the film breaks new ground in grisly realism and Freudian horror, deploying a host of disruptive techniques: temporal jump-cuts, freeze frames of mortal impacts. And in a headline-grabbing update to the original’s Canon XL1, Boyle shot this film entirely on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, sometimes using up to 20 of them at a time.
But he also reveals a kind of serendipitous formal genius in the series, which enables a kind of quantum “Tootsie” cut past four presidential administrations, at least two U.S.-led wars and so much else. “28 Years Later” points the original’s fast-and-loose exuberance toward subjects like Brexit, Covid, Trump and the manosphere. In forcing a warrior mentality on his son, Spike’s father reveals a society built on a faulty memory of history. In one striking early set piece, the film cuts together archival and cinematic footage of Britain’s imperial past with a pulsing hip-hop rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s Boer War poem “Boots,” conflating fact and fantasy; clips of World War II soldiers and chain-mailed archers flying the St. George flag flicker briefly, as if in an act of self-hypnosis, summoning a spirit of nationalist conquering might from the murk of cultural memory. “Some of the stuff in this film,” Garland says, “is about people misremembering the world we had.” But, he says, it’s also about “the world’s capacity to ignore places that are in terrible trouble.”
Amnesia, denial, mental quarantine: These may be the subterranean roots of the entire modern zombie genre. Long before he ever cast a single ghoul for the 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead,” the director George A. Romero lived in a society where acquaintances were able to tune out the nightmares arriving via TV and radio from Vietnam, Selma and elsewhere. Shooting in the black-and-white of mid-1960s news broadcasts, he broke up his zombie siege narrative with deadpan news announcers relaying the unspeakable to the not-really-listening.
In a sense, “28 Days Later” made this background noise its inciting event — forcing primates to binge on high-impact footage, presenting “engagement” as fatal pathogen. If these filmmakers saw the future in 2002, maybe “28 Years Later” points to what’s next. In Spike’s first venture onto the mainland, he and his father encounter a dismayingly tall, strong and purposeful specimen of the infected who chases them across the causeway, his footfalls sounding over the slow crescendo that opens Wagner’s Ring cycle. In a twist that feels oddly suited to our fraught moment, this dramatic scene introduces a new character to the saga: Some rough beast born in a wilderness emptied of humans by Rage, a new variant emerged from a world without iClouds, timelines or even memory. Who knows? Maybe this analog savage will even bring a cure.
Chris Norris is writer based in New York City.
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