Stories at the End of the World

A few words about '28 Years Later'

“28 Years Later,” dir. Danny Boyle

Brother, sister
I won't have it
I'm a man with a gun in hand
I'm saving fifty men
I'm treading, sinking still
I hope there's hope for me
Don't follow me - “Promised Land,” by Young Fathers

In the opening scenes of Laurance Olivier’s 1944 adaptation of Henry V, actors take the stage at the Globe Theatre in 1600 to act out William Shakespeare’s story of a great English king and his victorious battle at Agincourt. Eventually, the action breaks the bounds of the stage, heading back in time to 1415 for a recreation of the battle, as though the act of storytelling has created in its wake a new reality. These narrativized figures and events from history are made flesh and blood as arrows fly and soldiers die. Produced at the behest of Winston Churchill for propaganda purposes—the British forces and the public needed a morale boost—the film latches onto Shakespeare’s mythologizing and turns it into something even more actionable. The play’s ambiguities, and its hero’s faults, were sanded over by Olivier to produce an uncomplicated vision of British leadership and nationalistic strength for a people facing an existential threat from across the Channel.

Footage from Olivier’s Henry V is woven into sequences throughout Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, which arrives in a moment where the UK’s relationship to threats from across the Channel is vastly different. Shots of Henry ordering arrows loosed upon the French are mixed with archival footage of young boys marching and soldiers going to war, all while glimpsing life in the post-apocalyptic world of the film. Though it’s incorrect to say the world is post-apocalyptic in 28 Years Later. The UK is alone in its civilizational reset, the virus that quickly infected most of the population having apparently been beaten back from the European continent, with the British Isles strictly quarantined. Left over are the people who’ve managed to stave off infection and form a life in the ruins—the bleakness of their situation, and their isolation, requiring of them news ways of looking at the world.

Out on the island of Lindisfarne—known as Holy Island—off England’s North Eastern coast in Northumberland, a community has formed. These are stalwarts, surrounded on the island by a guarded wall, with one road to the mainland impassable during high tide. Here, people live seemingly peacefully, protected from the infected so long as they stay confined to their home. This is impossible. The island is not entirely self-sustaining, and foragers must periodically venture out to the mainland to scavenge for goods and food while fending off the infected, who have undergone their own processes of evolution in the intervening years. These outings have become ritualized: young boys are trained for the wilderness and in the art of killing the infected, and their first adventures are a rite of passage. Other rituals and practices are hinted at, most notably in the ominous ghostly, bloody masks with an arrow through the forehead, worn in ceremonial fashion. 28 years after the downfall of British society, a new mythology has arisen in this corner of the country. A new story.

28 Years Later centres on 12-year-old Spike, played by Alfie Williams, who is taken by his father on his first trek out to the mainland. As Alfie has come to understand it, the mainland is a purely alien place, populated by nothing but danger. The infected, but also other non-infected. It is Holy Island’s antithesis, and it is on this great journey into the heart of darkness that Boyle splices in the archival footage and shots from Henry V, set to Young Father’s incredible score and Taylor Holmes’s 1915 recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s haunting war poem “Boots,” about soldiers’ driven to insanity in unending combat. Each stream of images and sound is in conflict, each telling a different story.

Alex Garland, who wrote the original 28 Days Later and has now written this new trilogy, has long been fascinated by the ways community forms around shared narrative. It was there in The Beach, his classic Gen X novel, which was later adapted by Boyle. It’s there, too, in his recent directorial outings, Civil War and Warfare, which use different lenses through which to view our societal relationship with violence, in reality and in how we choose to perceive it. 28 Years Later continues that tradition, building out a Brexit allegory by examining the stories people and communities tell themselves, each other, and the world.

On Holy Island, theirs is a story of strength and nobility in the face of threat. Fear of the world’s destruction has been staved off by a spirit of communal commitment within their borders, and a go-it-alone, action hero mentality heading out into the mainland. After all, if you get into trouble out there, nobody from home is allowed to go rescue you. It might only lead to more lost souls. Alfie, led by his father Jamie, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, takes the ritualized risk, though a few years earlier than usual. The section of the movie that follows feels, to put it bluntly, like a video game. Jamie takes his son across the vast landscape, over cliffs, through wooded areas, all the while giving him lessons and instruction, delivered in militaristic fashion, but sounding like a sergeant in a Call of Duty tutorial level. In the forest, they come across one of the infected, a heavy-set man crawling along the ground, sucking up worms for sustenance. He’s called a “Slow Low,” like a video game baddie. This man, even infected by Rage, doesn’t even seem to notice the boy and his father, who excitedly instructs Spike on his first kill. “Don’t feel bad about it.” The utility of the action is unclear beyond training. Killing for killing’s sake, and even Spike seems to feel the oddity of it, if not questionable morality. Later, Spike and his dad will have to fend off an “Alpha,” a kind of roided up version of an infected, who attacks with an army of drone infecteds, and chases them down the causeway across the water to Holy Island in one of the film’s most visually splendorous sequences.

Back at home on the island, Alfie is immediately celebrated, his father telling stories of his valiant kills. “The Giant Killer,” Jamie calls him. That’s not how Alfie sees it, having taken down an infected man who was not even attacking, and later, a man who was left hanging in a building to be infected. “Dad’s making it out like I’m something I’m not,” Alfie says. When he and his father were finally attacked, he managed not a single kill. The dissonance between reality and the tales his father tells begins to trigger something deeper in the boy. After the celebration, he witnesses his dad getting frisky with another woman, all while his wife lies sick at home. Alfie begins seeing lies everywhere. Lies about courage and bravery, lies about the outside world, lies about familial and communal harmony. Maybe he also picks up on how twisted it is to hear his community cheering on the killing of infected like it’s nothing more than sport. Things get worse when he learns there’s a doctor out on the mainland, not too far from them. Someone who might be able to help his mother, and whose existence has remained a taboo. This is a community anchored by a tightly constructed story of pride, order, and a purely nihilistic view of the outside world.

Standing as a counterpoint to this narrative is Dr. Kelson, played by Ralph Fiennes, who Alfie encounters later in the film, after having gotten fed up with the lies. He has taken his mother, who appears sick and confused and maybe dying, out to the mainland in order to find Dr. Kelson, to heal her. This man, who he only knows from a frightening story his father told, turns out to be a kind, generous man. Kelson, finding some manner of refuge and equilibrium in this fallen world, has dedicated himself to constructing a temple made out of the bones of the deceased, infected and non-infected alike. When Alfie asks what this temple is all about, Dr. Kelson evinces incredible relief. Finally, after so many years, someone has finally asked him. Now he can share his story. It is one of human beings, all of whom are destined eventually to die. “Memento mori,” Kelson says, explaining that it means, “Remember you must die.” In death, we are all the same, and in those bones we can see lives, we can see people, who walked and talked and ate and loved. It is, for Alfie, an entirely new way of seeing the world.

Angel of the North, by Barly., CC BY 2.0

This is the film’s most elegiac section, in which Alfie and his mother, Isla, played by the terrific Jodie Comer, learn that she has terminal brain cancer. This might have been obvious to viewers as the film went on, but the big reveal is that it was obvious to Isla and everyone on Holy Island, too. “I needed someone else to tell you, but no one did,” Isla tells her son. Here, Alfie must confront mortality in a human way, outside his father’s video game conception. On the road out to Dr. Kelson, Isla stops to marvel at the Angel of the North, a real statue in North East England. In a semi-confused state, she recalls seeing the statue as a child, before the Rage virus destroyed her world. Her father had once told her that the statue was built to stand there forever, and thus to look upon it is to look into the future, that one might fall into it. “How many hundreds of years have we fallen this time?” she asks her dad’s ghostly apparition. This monument is contrasted by Dr. Kelson’s Bone Temple, which he explains is designed on a solid foundation, but built to wear down naturally over time. The bones themselves are not precious, merely their meaning, and their meaning can last forever, passed from one person to another in the stories they tell, birthing a beautiful new philosophy into a bleak world. It’ll have to do, since seemingly even Shakespeare’s work has started to be forgotten in his decimated homeland.

“I don’t understand.” “I do. I want you to always remember that. I understand.”

Accepting her own death, Isla leaves her son with another story. In all her cancer-induced confusion, she still sees her mortality clearly. What she leaves behind is love. “Memento amoris,” Dr. Kelson tells Alfie. “Remember you must love.” This is the new (old) gospel the iodine-slathered doctor wants to spread across the land. It is the philosophy he lives by, even among the infected, from whom he keeps a safe distance, though preferring to sedate them rather than kill them when they attack.

Another gospel is taking hold, though. The strung up man seen earlier in the film was a victim of a group, a cult worshiping a figure named Jimmy. All over the mainland, graffiti and other markings indicate this group’s growing influence. At the end of the film, his mother gone, Alfie sets out on his own to forge a new path for himself, away from his community’s lies and obfuscations. On the road, he encounters the Jimmies, a colourful bunch of Jimmy Saville and Teletubby-inspired ninjas led by THE Jimmy, a cultist wearing an upside down cross. This Jimmy is the boy from the film’s prologue, who sees his sisters and his mother massacred in their home by the infected, escaping out to the church where his father is vicar. There, he finds his father in a mad state, welcoming the oncoming apocalypse. “This is a glorious day. The day of judgement. Son, keep this with you always,” he says, giving his son the cross. “Have faith.” This small story, too, has travelled, now wreaking havoc on the landscape.

Narrative is the way human beings make sense of the world, and in a world without material nourishment, stories are often the only thing we have left. But stories are what we make of them, whether it’s justifying bloodlust as utilitarian, necessary violence, or a view of humanity that sees through the physical and into the soul. Before reaching Dr. Kelson, Alfie and his mother find themselves in the company of a Swedish soldier whose patrol boat sank off the coast. His stories of life in the outside world, where things are basically back to normal, are totally unintelligible to Alfie. He has no context for understanding. Eventually, they come across a train, in which Isla hears a woman screaming. She is an infected, pregnant and in labour. In a stunning scene, Isla makes a connection with this woman, the Rage overcome by the pain and power of childbirth, delivering an uninfected baby into the world. “Please, be kind to her,” Alfie implores his father in a letter, left with the baby in a basket at the gates of Holy Island. “Her name is Isla.” In this child is yet another story. To see her, like the Angel of the North, is to see into the future. Hundreds, maybe thousands of years, to a better world.

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