(Spoiler Warning For Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later)
Ruminations on death, politics and masculinity.
These might not be the sort of themes one might expect from a zombie film, but in 28 Years Later, which sees Danny Boyle affectionately returning to the famed franchise, all three of these themes are woven in to what could be considered the present trilogy’s most compelling and challenging entry yet.
Saying that these themes are unexpected is a bit misappropriated, as 28 Days was decidedly political while 28 Weeks was decidedly intimate. In both cases those films also deal with familial contexts, something 28 Years takes to a whole other level.
At its core is the journey of a young boy named Spike, played with a resilient and layered conviction by newcomer Alfie Williams, whom is caught between the weight of his father’s expectations and a love and concern for his sick mother. This tension is illuminated by the reality of this isolated village, cut off from the mainland and its threats/enemies, as the safety of this place, marked by the symbolic representation of raising up young zombie killers, is contrasted by the realization that a mysterious doctor who might be residing deep in the woods of the mainland could be the only one who can help his ailing mother.
There is admittedly a lot going on in this film. It has a lot on its mind, equally marked by numerous tonal shifts as it navigates all of these different elements. This is part of the risk Boyle takes by telling this story in such a heightened, emotional way. It is also part of its undeniable intrigue. It’s the kind of film, I have found, that lingers. The more distance I got from my initial viewing, the more I am thinking about it, an experience I’ve discovered a few others also share.
Part of that ruminating has been digging into think pieces and conversations to help parse out my feelings on this film, especailly on a thematic front. I found one such conversation to be especially helpful on the most recent episode of the Filmspotting podcast. Worth giving a listen (episode #1020). There were a couple of points brought up in that conversation that helped curate my own thoughts in a recognizable direction. Namely an observation about the way Boyle uses this concept of the zombies “evolving” in the film, and the way this single concept anchors the films overarching theme regarding what is essentially a coming of age story. A boy becomming a man in a world mired in chaos, confusion and contradiction.
When we first meet Spike, we see him as a product of this constructed society that he was born into. We encouter the shape of this social order, its expectations and rules. We are emeshed in everyday routines. Spike is surrounded by men. His father, who needs to shape his son into a visible and symbolic ideal. His grandfather, who cares for Spike even as he seems to carry the burden of holding certain secrets. The village, sustained by these new found traditions connecting a society cut off from modern technology and conveneiences with the allure of their old world Scottish allegiances (this is set in the Scottish Highlands) to the hero’s of old. All of this culminates in this rite of passage, the father taking the son to the mainland in order to get his first kill.
There are multiple layers to unpack here, even where the premise itself is relatively simple. The more time we spend with Spike, the more we come to understand that he is not what his father’s misplaced idealism wants him to be. He wants, or rather needs him to be a killer. In contrast, Spike hesitates to take the necessary shots. This becomes most potent when the sordid and almost desperate actions of his father, upon their return, see him presenting a false version of his son to the community, an action that isolates the son even more as the village raises him up to the level of a symbol. What’s fascinating about this, which is a point the hosts of filmspotting highlight, is that, taken in context, the actions of the father make sense. It makes sense for this community to feel under threat. It makes sense for them to formulate these tales of mighty hero’s and warriors out of a natural need and desire to survive. After all, they are isolated from the mainland because the rage virus has decimated humanity all around them. And yet, something that Boyle deftly manages is exploring a question of blurred lines. At what point does the appearance of safety in this isolated village betray the integrity of the community itself?
This is where the question of the evolution of the zombies comes into view. As the filmspotting hosts suggest, the evolution of the zombies into “alphas,” powerful and superior males with the capacity to rip heads straight out of their body with the spine attached, blurs the line between these idealized village warriors and the percieved beasts they are hunting. As the father says to Spike earlier on in the film, the key to killing is dehumanizing the opponent. The zombies can’t think, therefore they have no soul. Thus killing carries no moral obligation beyond the protection of ones own, this society they have built on supposedly “better” thinking persons. The tension thus arises over the course of the film in which we see the evolution of these zombies, the undead, encroaching on the very boundaries of life itself.
This is what the second half of the film, framed by Spike’s own journey back to the mainland over and against the idealization of his father, then becomes. Here Spike is seeking life, not death, setting out to find the infamous doctor, played by Ralph Fiennes, whom can offer him a different ideal- the promise of life.
Here Boyle is pushing this film to a whole other level, marked by several sequences which carry immense symbolic significance. There is the encounter with a peer, a young kid with his own familial context assuming the persona of the weathered militant. This plays Spike’s own village context into the politics of the larger world while infusing it with certain nuances and added layers. There is the birthing sequence, the undead breeding new life, an image that carries the balance of these blurred lines through the tangible face and image of an infant. And then there is the doctor, someone who has shaped his own isolation not through killing but through preservation. His art project, a mountain of skulls piled on top of each other, each with “their own special place,” further blurring the line between the thinking creature and the soulless beast. In this art project there is no distinction. Every skull coexists with the same observation about life and death.
And then there is the revelation that comes with Spike’s mother, finding out that what was thought to be curable is in its own process of dying. Here all of the vaunted themes playing out on this journey get narrowed in on the intimacy of this mother-son relationship. One of the hosts of filmspotting makes an interesting observation on this front- that to value life means we must value death. I think I get what he means. I also think I would pushback on this point. I would reword it in this way- to be able to name life we must be able to name death. One of the things I think Boyle does in paralleling the war waging within the mother between her desire for life and the rage virus we call cancer cells, with the war waging between the village occupants and the undead zombies, is he allows us to dig underneath the messiness of the construct, be it biological or social, to get at the real questions lying underneath. What is life? What is death? Do we justify the killing of the zombies as a threat to life in the same way we justify attacking the cancer cells? If so, how do we step out of that basic truism regarding “survival ” into the much more complicated picture of human function? If survival is about meeting the base needs of safety, meaning getting rid of the basic threats to life, where and how do we step into the conversation about actual “living”?
Or to make that question more specific: on what basis does Spike judge his father’s actions? On what basis do we distinguish between the thinking creature and the walking dead? On what basis do we distinghish between death as the natural course of life and it being a mutated distortion of it?
Here I think the host of filmspotting misses that crucial piece. To value death would be to undercut the entire foundation for Spike’s own formation and revelation. Life’s value doesn’t come from valuing death, it comes from being able to name life and death in opposition. Otherwise there is no distinction. Death is the problem that all of life faces. Coming to terms with the idea that all things die is not reclaiming some kind of romanticizied vision of life as “death,” it is the basis for our ability to note that death is antithetical to life. This is the only way, the only grounds Spike has for reimagining a different value than the one he left behind with his village and his father. His journey in this film is shaped around the need to name life. To do that, which is where the journey ultimately brings him, he needs to learn how to name death. Otherwise what we have is a vision of worm eating zombies growing into alphas. The very basis of the evolutionary portrait that drives this world. We can understand why Spikes father and the village they belong to act in the way they do in this sense. And yet we can also understand how this holds them captive and imprisoned to this system in the same way. Here we gain those political notes, playing out into a global society persistently set in conflict with nationalist interests, all revolving aorund the marriage of militant responses to the need for alpha’s, and the demonization of the other that follows as a form of the undead.
One of Boyle’s more interesting moves is his choice of bookends. He opens and closes the film with the brief story of a boy and his father whom then disappear from the body of this film. What seems apparent here, given that this bookend will be the story that drives the next film, is that Spike’s story is meant to give us a lens through which to see the other. There is a sense of clarity that rings through Spikes’s story, but one that has need of a fuller resolution. One that can perhaps find its way in this movement from this village out into the wider world. One that, perhaps, can find an answer in some kind of restoration that moves this world from death to life.
Given the religious symbolism of those bookends- perhaps a resolution anchored in the picture of necessary resurrection.
The Stories of my Life 