Compromise and Conceit

I took time out of my busy weekend bludging schedule to go and see 28 Years Later, the third in the series of rage-zombie movies that started with 28 Days Later. I’m a big fan of the concept and previous releases, and I think the first in the series is a standout issue in the zombie genre. The origin of the virus, the scenes of post-apocalypse Britain, the shocking violence necessary to survive, and the final showdown that turns the movie into a tale about the evil that men do – it’s perfection in almost every way. The second movie, 28 Weeks Later, is a healthy follow-up that mixes a not-overblown meditation on trauma and betrayal with a solid story about the failure of state institutions, and introduces only a single additional detail, the concept of latent carriers of the virus[1].

This one, however, not so much: 28 Years Later is a mediocre movie, with a moderately gripping first third, a boring middle with trite philosophy, and an absolutely, stunningly shit ending. Having just emerged traumatized from the Vaudeville switch at the end of The Substance, you can imagine my disgust at being subjected to the exact same tawdry trick at the end of this movie. Is it the rule in Big Cinema this year that horror movies must end with some shitty transition to a completely different cinematic style, aesthetic and pace? WTF.

Overall, I don’t recommend wasting your time on this movie. It isn’t that exciting in its good parts, it adds material to the setting that is unnecessary and distracting, it has a very boring and frankly stupid middle part that attempts to philosophize in a way that is completely at odds with the basic principles of post-apocalyptic zombie survival, and the ending is a disaster. Apparently the ending presages a second movie in the same series, which – unless it’s set 28 hours after the ending of this one – is going to completely betray the basic structure of the entire series. What a fucking disaster! If, however, you’re like me and you need to see every movie in a series just to find out what they’re doing to it (as I regret doing with Star Wars), then sure, go and see it, but don’t expect anything good. And don’t read the rest of this review, because it’s going to be full of spoilers.

Britain 28 years later

The movie opens in a small community on an island off Scotland, separated from the mainland by a causeway that is flooded and protected by a strong current at all times except during low tide. They have built walls around their island and established systems of defense and survival, so it’s all going relatively well. The island is quarantined, and at night you can see the quarantine ships patrolling beyond the coast, making sure nobody escapes. The main characters, Spike and his dad (who is a dickhead) are introduced along with Spike’s sick mother Isla, and then Spike and his dad travel to the mainland, which seems to be a rite of passage for the boys of the island.

At this point the soundtrack becomes the “Boots, boots, boots” poem, which is played over the trailer you would have seen, and which was awesome in the trailer but strangely out of place in the actual movie. I wondered if they were going to pull it off, and I think they failed. This is interspersed with strange visions of war from old movies, and scenes of zombies filmed with darkvision that seem to suggest that Spike (a 12 year old boy who is the main character of this movie) has some connection with the zombies (this is the first of many misdirections). We see Britain 28 years after the virus outbreak, learn that there are not many zombies left and they seem to be easier to avoid. Some have become these kind of slug-like humans that crawl along the ground eating worms and carrion, easily killed. We see abandoned villages and learn that nobody, basically, is left alive on the mainland, it’s a dangerous place and very few people have survived 28 years of wandering rage zombies. The zombies are now a kind of wild phenomenon, like an animal, that lives on the huge herds of deer and other animals that have returned to a re-wilded Britain. This vision of post-apocalyptic Britain is cool!

Then we run into the first big problem with this movie: The Alpha.

The many distractions and modifications

Obviously every new addition to the series is going to introduce some new ideas and modifications to the rage virus, but this movie introduces two that are absolutely disastrous: the Alpha and his breeding harem. Spike and his stupid dad stumble on such an Alpha near the beginning of the movie and have to flee back to the island, barely escaping with their lives. The Alpha is a new type of zombie, bigger and faster and tougher than the others and also smarter: Spike’s dad realizes that they’re dealing with an Alpha when Spike notices a dear’s head high up on a tree like a trophy or a warning, and they immediately flee. Nobody understands how Alphas happen, but they exist and they’re rare.

Later on we meet a second Alpha, called Samson (not by itself) and here the distractions really start to multiply because it seems pretty obvious that Samson has a harem of female zombies around itself, one of which is pregnant and gives birth to a healthy baby while Spike and his mother watch. In this one scene we introduce three insane additions to the series:

• Zombies can breed (which kind of makes sense, since they’re not dead), and their babies are uninfected because of “the miracle of the placenta”[2], which is kind of hard to believe because if you get one drop of blood in your eye this virus infects you and seconds later you’re eating your own children, but somehow you can be born open-eyed and not get infected by a drop of your mother’s various fluids! It would make much more sense if you were born a carrier, like the adult woman in the second movie. Also, apparently this baby needs milk, so none of these infants would ever survive, right? Now we can imagine a story where the Alpha keeps some human communities alive and hands over the babies to the communities to raise, then takes them back as adults – like a kind of horror version of the fey. That would lead to some really cool horror, where communities in mainland Britain survive through horrible compacts with the creatures in the forest. But no, our writers are too stupid to draw such a long bow.
• Alphas maintain harems, and defend them and support them. They’ve kind of evolved in a couple of generations to be kind of like apes, with a single superior leader-figure that maintains bands of the other infected, which it kind of organizes. Alphas are still not very smart, and their primary defining trait is that they’re huge and violent, but they have begun to establish a rudimentary community structure in the zombies. This would make for interesting stories! But our writers are too stupid and useless to bother with this
• Isla (Spike’s mother) can commune with these creatures. They stumble on one of the Alpha’s harem having her baby in an abandoned train[3], and Isla is able to calm it down and kind of form a bond with it, helping it to have the baby and not getting harmed immediately afterwards. This is a huge hint that Isla is a carrier of the rage virus (like the woman in the second movie). It doesn’t make any sense otherwise, does it? But then the moment passes and the zombie mother attacks her.

This last point, where Isla seems like she might be an infected carrier, is hinted at earlier too, when Spike leaves his sick mother some bacon and when he comes back there is a camera angle that suggests she ate it violently. This concept of a carrier was introduced in movie 2, and it would also explain why Spike has some vague visions of Zombies – maybe he, like Isla, can somehow commune or empathize with Zombies but since he was born to a woman who is a carrier his communing power is weaker or something. But instead, we just find out she has brain cancer and the entire thing is fucked off down the river and introduces us to the boring middle of the movie.

Subsequently other distractions we learn about are that a mixture of Iodine and something else, smeared on the skin, repels zombies; and that a mixture of two commonly-available drugs can be used to put them to sleep. But at the end, when Spike is traveling by himself, he doesn’t have any of these strategies on hand. Why not? Because this movie is interested in bamboozling you with stuff, but not exploring any of it.

These distractions really annoy me. I don’t mind having new concepts added to the rage virus, and I like it when people try to explore the implications, but in this movie they throw all these things in without purpose, and in some cases undermine them immediately after introducing them. Is it meant to keep us guessing, so we aren’t sure how it’s going to end? Is it all setups for future movies? Or is it just that the writers threw everything they could at the wall, and hoped to see what would stick? I think the latter. So that just complicates the movie unnecessarily.

The philosophy of death

We learn more about Alphas and their babies in the middle of the movie, when Spike runs away from his community with his sick mother Isla to find a guy called Dr. Kelson, who he has heard about from his grandfather/uncle/random old dude, and decides might be able to cure her even though he’s been warned Kelson is a freak. Kelson is played by Ralph Fiennes, who seemed to be phoning it in to me but who some reviewers said offered a stellar performance (never trust reviewers!). Kelson is building a huge garden of bones, a memento mori, which he hopes will survive the epidemic and stand witness to all the people who died. He introduces Spike to this garden of bones, his tools to protect himself from zombies and Alphas (the iodine sunscreen and the drug respectively), and then does a basic diagnosis of Isla: she has brain cancer, which either metastized to her breasts or came from them, and is going to die soon. This leads to the central theme of the middle part of the movie: Spike has to learn to reconcile himself to death, through the euthanasia of his mother and then Kelson rendering her down to her skull, that Spike can add to Kelson’s garden of bones.

You read that right, folks: This zombie movie wants you to meditate on the inevitability of death, and learn to accept it. Every other moment of every other zombie movie in history is filled with the desperate struggle of the few survivors against death, the certain knowledge that death is not the end because the dead come back to eat you, and the spiritual dread of knowing that you don’t go to heaven or hell, but if you die in the wrong way you will spend eternity shuffling around feasting on raw brains. The few people left do everything they can to stave off death, and take enormous risks to save a single life, because every life is rare and precious.

But in the middle of all that, this movie wants you to think about how you need to accept death.

Fuck off.

The awful ending

That stuff was all mostly forgivable in the circumstances, until the last five minutes where Spike is traveling to find himself (yeah kids do that on the zombie-infested mainland now!) when he is attacked by some zombies and runs away, gets caught against a barrier, and thinks he is going to die until a bunch of weird, healthy-looking young people appear, all wearing perfectly clean velour sports suits, and offer to clean up his zombie problem for him. They then fight the zombies using various fancy weapons in a highly-stylized way, with weird music, that is something like a homage to A Clockwork Orange combined with the over-the-top slapstick combat style and gory bloodfest of Kingsman. It is absolutely, completely out of place. The aesthetic is different because up until now everything has been grimy browns and greens, the kind of clothes survivors would wear after 28 years of grim clinging-on, but these guys are all in shiny primary colour velour sportsuits. The filming style itself is different, much more like splatter-gore than the rapid shifting first-person panic style we are used to in this series. And the theme is different, the breathless desperate survivor-horror replaced with a kind of Vaudevillian over-the-top, highly colorized extravagant action movie fun. It’s like if Jackie Chan walked into Day of the Dead wearing WWE spandex and started beating up zombies with a rainbow-coloured golf club. It just doesn’t work.

Worse still, I learn from the internet that the main character leading this team, Jimmy, has styled them all on Jimmy Saville, Britain’s most prolific child sex abuser, who was still a national hero in the time that the rage virus originally broke out (his crimes were uncovered about 10 years after the release of the first movie). I didn’t realize this at the time, but I think it’s in extremely poor taste. It makes sense! The people in this alternative history Britain don’t know that Jimmy Savile was a pedo and a necrophile. But it wasn’t necessary! Especially since introducing his luscious style completely changes the aesthetic of the movie!

This really ruined the ending of the movie for me. It just didn’t work. It’s one of those moments when the writers are basically just saying to their audience: Fuck you, we know you’ll pay us anyway and we don’t have to even try, and we certainly aren’t going to respect your fucking genres or the history of these movies you love or you as consumers of culture. Fuck you, they are saying, you are stupid and worthless pigs who consume our slop whether you like it or not and if we want to squeeze three movies into one because making three separate movies on three different topics is too much effort for us we will and you will like it or you will fuck off, because the reviewers won’t warn you that we’ve fucked something you love, will they, because they’re on our side, and what else are you going to do? We control this industry and we make these movies to show how cool and special we are, not because we owe any artistic or cultural duty to you, you fucking filthy plebeians.

Every time they do this to one of these series, that’s what they’re telling you. This movie was written by Alex Garland and produced and directed by Danny Boyle, the guys who made the original. They have chosen to undermine and trash their own cultural work for no more reason than that they’re lazy, sloppy wankers who don’t respect their own cultural contributions. It’s shit, and I hate it when they do this.

So fuck them.

A side note on race and sex in this movie

There are only three women who have more than a bare second of screen time in this movie:

• Isla, Spike’s mother, who is weak and sick and confused and so useless that she needs to be protected by her 12 year old son (except for one moment when she kills a zombie and then forgets she did it), and whose primary purpose in this movie is to die and teach Spike something (though it’s not clear what)
• Rosie, a friend of Spike’s parents, whose sole contribution to the movie is to fuck Spike’s dad (Isla’s husband) while Isla is sick in bed
• A zombie woman, who despite being infected with a rage virus is able to commune with Isla through the holy bond of motherhood, which helps her to give birth to a baby, before she gets brutally gunned down by a Swedish man[4]

So, sluts, madonnas and breeding vessels, and all the breeding vessels die.

Every actor in this movie is white, except Chi Lewis-Parry, a mixed-race man who plays Samson, the zombie Alpha that is superhumanly strong with a huge cock and a harem of white zombie women, some of whom are pregnant.

It’s perfectly possible that Spike could have been cast as a girl, so that the journey to the doctor was a mother-daughter bonding story. It’s possible Spike’s dad could have been the sick one, his mother the untrustworthy gatherer who fucks around with other men from the community, so that the journey to the doctor becomes a father-son bonding story. It’s possible that the community could have been much more mixed race, accepting any survivors no matter what because of the desperation of clinging to life in the islands. It’s possible that the zombie Alpha could have been the same race as the majority of the British community that was originally infected with the virus in the original movie. It’s possible that Spike’s dad didn’t have to cheat on his wife, or that the only other woman with more than five seconds of screen time wasn’t there just to be sexy in a summer dress.

All of these decisions could have been made, in 2025, in the modern world. But by some incredible coincidence they weren’t, and by amazing happenstance we are subjected to another movie where the black character is a terrifying embodiment of primeval masculinity with a huge cock, and the women are all sluts, madonnas or breeding vessels. Who could imagine such ill fortune would plague an experienced movie writing, directing and producing team in 2025?

Conclusion

Don’t waste your time on this movie, and if you do decide to stick it out to see what’s happening in this series, don’t expect anything good from this or the next one. Don’t expect a coherent progression in the basic laws of the world, or any adherence to the principles and frameworks of the previous installments. Don’t expect any deviation from the sexism and racism of the 1980s where the director and producer were raised. Perhaps you can hope for some shitty philosophy that is inconsistent with the setting. Maybe the next installment will be a musical! We can but hope! If we’re really, impossibly lucky, maybe the team who made this one will figure out what they’re trying to do, and instead of subjecting us to three completely incompatible movies in one they’ll decide on a thematic principle and stick to it. But they certainly haven’t done that yet!

I traveled to Roppongi to watch this movie, on a 32C day in pre-summer Tokyo[5], when I could have stayed home and snoozed or played computer games or watched some shitty anime on a streaming service. When I got to the cinema a crow was standing on the bench area outside the cinema entry, tearing the guts out of a pigeon it had just killed. It nonchalantly ignored thousands of passing Tokyo-ites who all stopped to stare in disgust at it, and eventually a second crow joined to wait for its portion of the delicacy. It was kind of funny that this crow was doing this just before I went in to watch a zombie movie (even funnier when I discovered that the Alpha kills people in a very similar manner to the way the crow was eating its pigeon). I probably should have taken it as an omen and just turned around and gone home. Instead I went inside, and sat in a quite warm and very packed theatre, endured some very tedious advertising, and parted with ¥2000 (twice my monthly Apple music subscription!) to watch this ordinary and vaguely insulting contribution to modern culture. I don’t think that the people who made this movie did so with much concern for any of these decisions that I and millions of other people around the world made. I don’t think they respect us at all, in fact. I’m sure they’re bemoaning the decline of cinema and blaming it on streaming, computer games or TikTok or something, but the simple reality is that if they want me to leave my house and shlepp across town in the heat, past the cannibal crow, and pay a chunk of money to sit in a crowded theatre with a bunch of strangers, they need to try a little harder. We all know what they’re capable of, because we saw it when they made the original movie and Trainspotting. Is it possible Boyle has lost his touch in his old age? Yes, I guess it is. But more likely is that he’s lost his respect for us his viewers, and thinks that we should thank him for whatever shit he decides to squeeze out for us, and complains that we’re easily distracted if we decide not. Easily distracted, from this shit? You bet!

He’s not alone in this. The people who made The Substance did the same thing to us, as did the people who made every woeful installment of the Star Wars sequels, and who insult us with year after year of degraded schlock from various useless superhero franchises. They just don’t respect us, they don’t respect cinema as a medium of artistic expression (no matter how much they bleat about its decline) and they definitely don’t respect any of the genres they work in. So we should stop respecting them, and we should show it by not paying them.

So, don’t waste your time and money on this movie.

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fn1: I’m going on memory here so don’t quote me.

fn2: Which is weird because lots of viruses cross the placenta – here’s a list. How convenient that this one doesn’t!

fn3: The abandoned train was great, a very nice piece of urban ruin

fn4: This Swedish soldier is funny because he is marooned on the island and trying to explain 2030 European life to Spike, an 11 year old boy who grew up on zombie-wasteland Britain. This Swede doesn’t last long, despite his advanced gear, which is also great

fn5: People from “hotter” places may not understand what those words mean. People who live here do!