June 24th, 2025

The smartest decision to make when expectations are churning around a series is often the most difficult one. Giving the fans what they want will surely lead to commercial success and is usually not so dissatisfying to critics that they’ll drag you through the mud too hard. But it’s never the more interesting choice. And Danny Boyle did whatever the opposite of fan service is when he teamed up once more with long time collaborator Alex Garland to work on the series they brought into the world in back in 2002. The two of them know that nostalgia is a dangerous drug, and leaning too hard into it is a sure fire way to lose yourself to a past that never really existed.

28 Years Later opens with nostalgia, as we see The Teletubbies in their prime as a group of children watch on. Taking us back to 2002 when the virus first began and the world was lost. When 28 Days Later first came out, the trauma in the film was regularly compared to the events of 9/11, the empty streets of London hearkening a New York that would never be the same. Now we have an actual pandemic to compare it to, as a family is turned inside out from a deadly contagion in the flashback opening of the picture. A young boy named Jimmy is all we have to go on.

28 Years Later we are introduced to Jamie (the kid grown up from the first scene perhaps?) and his son Spike, as they live their lives on an isle off the coast of Northern England. The only passage to the mainland being a causeway that comes and goes with the tide. It is at once a tale of British isolationism, a coming of age story, a cautionary tale about the fascist tendencies of the punk movement, all neatly packaged into the third movie of a franchise that Boyle and Garland launched. It’s the kind of picture every director dreams of making. Something that so thoroughly contains the inner workings of its visionary that the ridges of their thumbprint mesh flawlessly with the celluloids as they flicker across the screen.

The main plot beat of the film is that it’s time for Spike to go through a kind of ritualistic step of killing his first infected. So he and his father say farewell to Spike’s ailing mother (Jodie Comer) and traverse into and through the mainland to kill some zombies. But initially the undead we see are not the fast, wriggling, shrieking fiends that we’re used to. They’re bloated and slow, crawling on the ground, eating worms like vermin. They still pose some threat, if someone was asleep or injured perhaps, but the kill sequence is not what the audience was expecting for a zombie hunting mission. Nostalgia is a drug after all, and Boyle is going to withhold as much as he possibly can. There is later a chase scene, finally giving us some sort of fix, as Spike is running from our rotting, blood puking friends, but even this has a twist. There are also Alphas, massive infected that the pathogen has turned into muscular brutes. The world has changed in 28 years, and so have the diseased.

While there are scares the movie is barely a horror film, there’s gore undoubtably, but the main theme is a deeply layered coming of age story. There are things to be afraid of, but much like in the original, the shambling corpses are not necessarily the most threatening thing our characters encounter. As Spike enters the world that was broken by past generations he comes face to face with the fact that many of the rules he was taught are not true. When Spike figures out there may be a way to heal his sick mother, he goes against his father’s wishes and smuggles her off the isle onto the mainland. Bringing her to an odd and frightening looking doctor, Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). It’s these sequences where the film truly shines, as Dr. Kelson helps Spike have a better understanding of the dead, the infected, and the past. Showing Spike through the bone structures he has built in memorial to the world that once was.

So much of what this movie is touching on in it’s story are is the notion of masculinity. Spike looks up to his father, who is tall, strong, and handsome. Their quest to go kill a creature is a traditional male role. When Spike sees the pathetic creature he must kill he hesitates, seemingly not because he can’t shoot, but because it looks too easy, cruel almost. As Jamie gets to know his father, he starts to realize that maybe this isn’t the kind of man he wants to become. Later as he’s trying to bring his mother to Dr. Kelson he meets another man, a young soldier for the Swedish military, Erik (Edvin Ryding). Erik is brasher and ruder that his father was, full of the confidence of youth. The two do not get along. Eventually Spike gets a chance to talk to Dr. Kelson, and this calm, polite, albeit strange man feels like the most positive male role model that Spike has ever met. It’s a tour of the personalities we have to deal with today, from Jordan Peterson, to Donald Trump, to Mr. Rogers. The fact that I can’t think of a calm quiet male role model that’s alive is a telling one. Finding a calm polite man takes work, and the options presented to you without a desperate search are generally vile people.

The only real note I can give 28 Years Later is that it feels a little incomplete. The themes are largely wrapped up, but the film ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger, a “To Be
Continued” until part two. And while I am excited to see what Nia DeCosta, who is directing 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, has to show us, it was a little abrupt as the credits rolled. Still, the collection of all of Director Boyle’s themes into such a tidy little package is breathtaking. 28 Years Later is an unflinching look at the British Empire, and of trying to grow up to be a decent boy among so much toxicity available to young men in a world that feels a little more broken every day.

5/5