Zombie Brexit: 28 Years Later
There's no discharge in the war
(More riff than detailed plot summary below but spoilers too.)
Films don’t have to be good, only better than you expect. I find this not to be true of books, perhaps because a book doesn’t work in the medium of spectacle. Then again, books don’t have to be good either. Nothing has to be good.
I really did not expect to enjoy Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Years Later as much as I did. The film is unusually mythic and emotionally rich for a gruesome bit of pop: ambitious, messy, and full. It puts a tuning fork to certain archetypal characters (madwoman, father-teacher, wise man, questing son) and gets an oddly resonant tone: Mother-(De/A)scending to the Underworld, the Virtuous Father-Betrayer, the Soul Mechanic Dark Wizard, and Telemachus-as-Odysseus. Aside from these characters and plots, the film achieves its sentimental power not despite but because of a few things that don’t seem like they should work:
a familiar high/low mix of Wagner and pop music
purposely unreal visual landscapes (see its night sky of stars over a thin causeway between island and mainland, with a strong whiff of CGI to achieve the uncanny effect)
almost hyperactive editing, which feels touchingly old-fashioned and almost quaint to me, like 90s music videos
Boyle’s volume and mix of shots in particular feel powerful. The profusion of clips from old films (often featuring archers) as well as archival footage all feels calculated to rivet the audience’s attention but at the same time express contradictory feelings, like exhaustion and triumphant energy. It’s as if the film is in part a documentary of a specific post-Brexit English psyche. Legally I’m not allowed to say that, since I’m so thoroughly American, but Alex Garland made the enjoyably inscrutable American nightmare Civil War so I feel permitted to do some reciprocal trans-Atlantic mythification. The sentiments of 28 Years Later are simultaneously Leave and Remain. Taking place in a United Kingdom Brexited from the world at large by a native infestation of rage, the film doesn’t escape to the European mainland from a small Scottish island at all. Instead it embraces the mother-island Albion for its intact reservoir of mythological power.
The inclusion in the film’s trailer and the film itself of a 1915 recording of actor Taylor Holmes reading Rudyard’s Kipling’s poem “Boots” likewise implies that 28 Years Later mourns and reinvigorates a fantasy of dignified strength and questing empire. Kipling’s poem is ironic, however, and in the end hysterical. “Boots” documents the rhythmic madness of marching. Visions of millions of boots, marching up and down, make a hell out of walking for the grunt in a colonial war. The old order of imperial adventure suggested by military discipline thus cultivates a psychedelic insanity—the film really makes good on this reading of the poem—that becomes a myth of visionary impotence or constipation. As the poem’s refrain has it, “there’s no discharge in the war.” There’s only the marching, leading the colonial soldier ever-inward to the psychosis of military force.
Boyle and Garland seem to know that the plucky survivors on their further island, protected from mainland/island Britain by a causeway only usable at low tide, live out a fantasy of persistence. It may be the real deal compared to the sexually assaultive soldier-colony in 28 Days Later, but it’s static, too. The island represents a permanent cosplay of archers and farmers, though it does seem to work as a cooperative community, complete with its own rites and rituals. As the film makes clear, however, everyone there is raised to adopt a specific social role. Here is a new feudalism, although no lord appears.
The original 28 Days suggested the irony of a new and vibrant community like the one in 28 Years. That first film hinged after all on the realization that the plague of people infected by “rage” was not global. The island nation of Britain was simply isolated, as evidenced by a jet Cillian Murphy’s Jim sees in the sky. 28 Years miniaturizes the island home to a small but fertile islet while also suggesting that there is a wider world with its own brave new future in progress. It’s just that this wider world is not really Europe, from which the powers that be enforce a quarantine of Britain with patrol boats of Scandinavian soldiers. The truly wider world, metaphorically speaking in this not-especially realistic movie, constitutes nothing less than the the zombie-infested mainland, Albion itself, where life may have its true destiny. (The only birth in the film happens there.) Staying on the island with his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who cares for the boy’s dying mother (Jodie Comer, particularly excellent) with an exhausted devotion that gives way to passion for another woman, the son Spike (Alfie Williams, also excellent) cannot help but imagine a different fate. He has to move on. His father thinks the burning fire they see on the mainland is the beacon light of an insane doctor, Dr. Kelson. The son believes that a doctor might actually be a doctor and can help his maddened mom. In other words, there’s no discharge in the (father’s) war, which is a hell of the Same: everyone booted up for their lot in life, holding on, marching forward.
Considering how it feels and the structure of its plot, 28 Years Later doesn’t strike me as essentially a zombie movie or a horror film or even an action movie, though it has elements of all three. It is instead a child’s heroic fantasy, almost like Labyrinth. There’s even a baby who must be delivered back to civilization. The quest begins of course on that isolated island separated from the Scottish coast by an isthmus that is underwater at high tide. Here Spike’s father takes him across to get his first kill as a rite of manhood, like a bar mitzvah but with well-endowed “alpha” zombies who pull the heads, spine intact, right off of living animals. They do the same to uninfected humans if they get the chance. Other large, slow zombies will eat earthworms or your shoelace—only to creep slowly towards your sleeping face. During a celebration after his successful hunt and escape, Spike sees his father in the proverbial throes of passion with another woman. The sight of this infidelity, coupled with his father’s frustrating refusal to imagine that a doctor on the mainland, however crazy, might be able to help his ailing mom, Spike departs with her into zombie world.
The film’s first segment depicting the father-son journey is the film’s most conventional and familiar, however tense and well executed. It makes you feel some of the social texture of the village and the life of island refuge in which Spike has been raised. When Spike takes his mother Isla (her island-meaning name implies she is already separate and apart) back across the causeway to see the mad doctor, played by Ralph Fiennes, who is covered head to toe in a pale, bloody-looking bodywash of iodine, the whole film moves into a much more metaphorical register. First of all, Isla is not crazy. As Fiennes’s Dr. Kelson says after welcoming mother and son into his bone temple with stacked skulls in commemoration of the dead, she likely has brain cancer that has spread throughout the rest of her body. Kelson says some deaths are better than others, however.
With Isla’s apparent consent and Spike’s grief-panicked understanding, Kelson euthanizes her and gives Spike her skull. Spike climbs atop a picturesque heap of bones and places his mother’s skull at the apex, pointing it toward the dawning sun. The son’s first invented ritual. While the journey to get his “first kill” with his father felt like a rite of passage to take part in a pre-established community, the journey with his mother feels even more a rite—and not only because Spike invented it. No, what’s important is that Spike ferries his mother to the underworld. Or, rather, he takes her to the edge of the river—Styx or Lethe or Cocytus, take your pick, there’s five total if memory serves—and Kelson plays the Charon who takes her across.
What I especially like about this scene is its almost explicit reimagining of the cheapest theme in zombie cinema: the agonized execution of your own brother, sister, mom, dad, wife, husband etc. once they go zombie. One tires of the fantasy of shooting your loved ones in the face cause they’ve turned into monsters. The bone temple may be a ridiculous extravagance, but the entire scene oddly restores some human dignity to the inevitable “letting them go” narrative that zombie films cling to. In fact, the film largely rejects the drama of turning into a zombie at all. The zombies here are less vectors for something awful, though of course they are, than aggressive predatory animals.
The film seems to be about living in the world as given, with a new and grave joy. Neither Spike nor his father can rescue Isla, really, but Spike at least embraces her passage into the next life. That’s a sort of rescuing, by dint of believing in meaningful rites, such as those indicated when Dr. Kelson says some deaths are better than others. Spike’s father can only cling to his wife’s addled misery and betray her, however upstanding he may be in the greater community. However great a father he may be, he can’t imagine the movement of the New.
So Spike sends his mom off into the underworld, where she’s been trying to go or was in the middle of going anyway, and turns her skull to greet the dawn. A monument to meaning, if nothing else. Spike realizes in these scenes his anger at his father, balanced perfectly between childish objection and mature rage. The tedious soldiers and would-be rapists of 28 Days Later have become here the male sexual prerogative of a man who feels there is no help for his wife and nothing to do. His son can’t stand to live in a place of such petty or timid desire.
Part of what makes the soul mechanical engineering of Dr. Kelson so appealing to Spike is that the man doesn’t try forcefully to father him. But fathers abound in the film. That’s why I liked the purposely silly last scene so much. In this short sequence Spike, alone but master of the archery skills his father taught him, encounters another father-figure to tempt our hero with rituals he’s designed to uphold in the new world. What’s more, the ludicrously bewigged kung fu gang that Spike meets here deliberately apes the appearance of Jimmy Savile, famous and famously horrific pedophilic British kids television host. More boots. There’s no discharge in the war.
For all it’s old-fashioned freneticism, 28 Years Later feels like the film of a younger director. Boyle is overexcited and worried to constantly recapture the attention of a distractible audience, but he and Alex Garland grabbed hold of something freshly mythic in the process. Not bad for a movie about being mad at your dad, which as Zeus and Cronos can tell you is one of the best ways to start a myth cycle anyway.