28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s return to the zombie apocalypse franchise he started with 28 Days Later, is not the movie anyone expected.
Set almost three decades after the human population of Great Britain was decimated by the incurable Rage Virus, this film skips past the eerie urban imagery of the first two installments and introduces a version of England so far removed from the modern world it might as well have regressed deep into the past.
No militants with guns, cameras, or tanks rule the survivors of 28 Years Later. Instead, the isolated communities still resisting against the infected savages, with their bows and arrows and innate fear of the outside world, wouldn’t look out of place in a fantasy story. That’s because 28 Years Later, for all its modern zombie apocalypse trappings, is a fantasy movie.
Consider the plot: A young boy who lives with his scavenger father in an isolated island town cut off from the disease-ravaged mainland takes his sick mother on a desperate journey to find a doctor who might cure her illness. Along the way they run into a soldier from Sweden stranded on the mainland and are stalked by Rage Virus zombies.
Or…. A young hunter’s son from a remote village takes his mother, who is under a strange enchantment, into the wilderness to find a local wizard who may be able to lift her curse. Along the way they run into a knight from a far-off land and are stalked by supernatural fae creatures disguised in human form.
It kind of works. Actually, it totally works. Whether or not this was Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s intent, the events of 28 Years Later read like a swords and sorcery epic set in a world ruled by magic and myth.
The land the characters traverse is full of wonder and strangeness, with vast herds of deer rattling the foundations of houses and castle ruins looming over landscapes drenched in mist and greenery. Shots where the dazzling Milky Way wheels over a starry ocean are so potent with high fantasy energy you half expect a hand to pop out of the water wielding a sword. At the end, the protagonist even runs into a charming outlaw and his band of merry men.
None of this retracts from the fact that this is, at the end of the day, a 28 Days Later sequel. Rage zombies gallop across fields and spit and snort their way into the bellies of deer carcasses. Bloated “Slow Lows” slither across the ground, crows picking at their decaying flesh. The humans live on thanks to survival systems drilled into their heads, protecting themselves quickly and cleverly, and killing when they must.
But all of this exists in a new context, a vision of Britain before Roman conquest, a wild land of monsters and magic. There are specters, even, of Garland’s previous movie Men, which, as divisive as it was, had one of the most visceral depictions of the Green Man myth—a motif peculiar to British folklore—ever put on screen.
There is something very English about it all—mainly because, as far as the characters are concerned, the British Isles are the only land that exists.
28 Years Later is a movie about wartime Britain, as evidenced by the inclusion of Rudyard Kipling’s sonorous “Boots” poem and montages of troops marching off to World Wars and the Crusades. And it’s a movie about Brexit, as it’s set in a world where Britain has been cut off from the rest of the planet. These movies couldn’t exist in any century other than the twenty-first, even if there is a scene in the newest one where a child doesn’t know what an iPhone is.
But there’s a more ancient thread running through the film that is impossible to ignore once you’ve noticed it. Most crucially, it celebrates two of Britain’s greatest contributions to entertainment: Boyle’s franchise, which recontextualized the zombie movie for the modern age; and medieval fantasy in the style of King Arthur and The Lord of the Rings, which provide the blueprint for all the fantasy stories that came after them.
Perhaps this is humanity’s natural habitat, the default assumed in times of extreme crisis. In a land ravaged by disease, death, and worse, those who survive turn to the mystical, the mythical, in order to make sense of it all.
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