Review: 28 Years Later

In my opinion the best scene of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later is about two thirds of the way through, when Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up alone in the countryside. His companions, around whom he had fallen asleep the night before, have vanished without explanation. The field, a bucolic paradise in any other scenario, yawns before him in alien vacancy like a sea, and he screams for his people in panic and sorrow before waking up again, safe at camp, not alone at all.

Crucially, the people whose loss Jim subconsciously fears so much in this scene are such recent additions to his life that they barely even count as friends. One has made it clear that she will kill him if she must and feel nothing about it. The word Jim shouts into the green void in his nightmare (“Hello??”) is one of the most prominent aesthetic motifs in the movie: after Jim wakes up alone in a hospital, he wanders to a church and ignorantly utters “hello” to a room full of the dead and infected, his first encounter with the reality of the new world he’s arisen to. In the last shot of the movie, we see Jim and his remaining companions unfurl a giant banner toward a passing plane in the sky: “HELLO.” In this desperate situation, the word is boiled down to its most basic meaning, perhaps the most fundamental statement of the living, shared by most if not all vertebrates from lost kittens to lonely whales: “I am here. Someone find me.”

The fast zombie 28 Days Later is often credited with popularizing is fast because of the social pathology it’s meant to represent. In short: slow zombies are full of appetite, fast zombies are full of hate. I’m so sorry for the film bro pedantry but it really is a misnomer to call the infected “zombies.” They aren’t physically dead. In fact, the fury that overwhelms them is kind of the opposite of death. It’s an efflorescence of life, if anything—it’s how people behave when they perceive an intolerable injustice against themselves. In the paranoiac days of the early 2000s that began the particular course of isolation and atomization we’ve followed over the past generation, this focus on human beings’ core need for the presence of other humans and how that need can be perverted into a vector for contagious malevolence has turned out to be prescient in the way really good art tends to be. Open Twitter right now and I guarantee that within a minute you will find someone as frothy and incoherent with blind rage as any of the infected in 28 Days Later.

You do get used to them, though. It’s startling how fast we can adjust to something that 20 years before seemed like it would be the final boss of reality. Current events have us juggling a few of those final bosses right now. To ground my analogy here a little, Twitter trolls obviously won’t physically tear you apart like the infected. But their biggest threat– ruining your life over some perceived social transgression Justine Sacco-style– is increasingly just not a concern. In a world where the president of the United States can routinely insult his predecessor up to and including amplifying a conspiracy theory that he’s long dead and the person we’re looking at is his clone, who honestly gives a shit if you proudly act like a monster in public, whether it’s meant as a joke or not? That’s just part of the environment right now. Whatever.

Fitting, then, that the infected in 28 Years Later have been incorporated into the daily routine of human life. Effectively retconning the disappointment that was 28 Weeks Later, 28 Years takes place in the quarantined UK, where a boy named Spike is introduced to a world he’s too young to think of as broken. Leaving Spike’s island community and killing one’s first infected is now a rite of passage. The world has been made newly expansive, as one imagines it might have seemed to people living in the same area some 2000 years ago. Life in those kinds of conditions takes on a defensive quality, most things and most places harbor some kind of threat. But, as 28 Years Later demonstrates, defensiveness is not as synonymous with individuality as characters in the same situation 28 years ago may have assumed. Spike’s world is one in which one’s own life relies on the abilities of everybody else—over the years, the kind of skill and bravery demonstrated by this coming-of-age ritual has acquired a social and cultural function as well as a practical one.

Functional though this system is, however, it can’t help but be haunted by modernity’s absence. Possibly the most inspired aesthetic choice of this movie was the inclusion of Taylor Holmes’ 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s wartime poem “Boots,” which made the trailer for 28 Years Later one of the most memorable of the year. It’s a freaky recording. Decontextualized, its repetition of meaningless numbers and words made semi-intelligible under the static fuzz evokes both an endless perpetuation of the same “people killing people” violence the first movie was concerned with, and a disconnection with other people’s experience of that violence, like it’s trying to tell you something important you just don’t know enough to be able to really comprehend. Spike’s eventual journey to find a lonesome, crazed doctor in the wilderness to heal his mysteriously sick mother is similarly haunted by the audience’s familiarity with an advanced medical infrastructure we've come to rely upon that Spike doesn’t even know exists.

Ultimately, though, 28 Years Later asks us exactly how much that infrastructure really serves to do much but mollify certain realities about life we’d rather were not true. The crazy bone monument that appears in the trailer is the life’s work of said doctor (Ralph Fiennes), who has built it as an offering and improvised ritual to both his own mortality and the mortality of the many, many dead he has encountered. On the one hand, the movie says, it’s terrifying to see so many individuals reduced to our identical, skinned, bleached, depersonalized scaffolding. On the other hand, here is where we will eventually all be, all of us together, however good or evil or sick or well we all happened to be in life or not. In many ways our impulse is to hate the dead for what they remind us of. Maybe there are kinder, more helpful ways we might regard them.

Zombies are probably our most potent expression of our fear of someday becoming a corpse, an eventuality that (as I talked about in the video I posted last week about Final Destination) modern consumer culture is largely built to offer some kind of delusional distance from. A certain proximity to dead bodies used to be more standard than it is now, and with rising diseases and war and catastrophes, that proximity seems to encroach closer again every day. In that Final Destination video, I talk about this sudden resurgence of modern fixations on death in terms of how we might be dissociating from it in an unhealthy way—that rather than taking it seriously, we’re poised to treat death, our own and others’, as a joke. I worry sometimes that right now we might be creatures too domesticated to see disaster coming and have the wherewithal to step out of the way. 28 Years Later is the best counterpoint to this concern of mine that I’ve seen so far.

28 Days Later presaged a time where we would have to re-learn our ability to greet each other as fellow human beings and find the company we crave so naturally, a process that becomes more and more a matter of courage as the people around us succumb to a reflexive hatred without any apparent cure. Even hell has a floor, though. With nothing left to attack, rage eventually always starves itself and becomes grief, or death. The survivors of such a situation, those who have managed to dodge whatever malice makes people turn on one another and instead spent their lives trying to find each other, see each other, love each other, must encounter the knowledge of every acquired relationship’s eventual loss as newly devastating. The will to survive and keep what we’ve found in this life can inspire its own kind of fury if we let it. 28 Years Later envisions a time where the instinct to live becomes dominant enough that we must remember how to die, which strikes me as a level of cultural maturity the “developed world” has lacked pretty much since we started organizing the validity of cultures based on how much stuff they have. After decades of relearning how to say hello to each other, we might soon graduate to the even more profound experience of learning to say goodbye.