28 Years Later

Some Spoilers Wow. I went into the theatre expecting a well crafted, entertaining apocalypse/zombie/virus movie and ended up watching an incredibly poignant examination of life - both of what it means for a human’s existence to end, and for the existence of a culture to end. I guess I should’ve expected as much with Garland involved. The rest of the world moves on, and in its own wake, the uk regresses to its medieval phase. A glorified castle, attached to the mainland via an exaggeratedly long mote, houses a civilization that echos the era of knights - much in the same way monte python did; in jest. The townspeople send their men and young boys out to the mainland to gather supplies, having built a culture that glorifies it, instilling it within the youth as a means of achieving honor. Our main character, Spike, ventures out on his first journey with his father, and encounters incredible violence. They do nothing but hide, fight, and run from a plethora of what might best be described as the devil’s worst creations. What little scavenging they do end up doing produces nothing more than a frisbee. When they return, how are they received? In jubilation. Great, embellished stories of their feats are told to a crowd of drunk townspeople as they gluttonously indulge in vices. The father throws the frisbee into the crowd. Throughout the first 30 minutes, we’re constantly given flashes of medieval archers and warriors, reminding us that all of this is an exploration of the way we have treated war in the past, and how we do now - Garland and Boyle clearly emphasizing its futility.  The movie opens with a young boy, Jimmy, watching teletubbies as his family is massacred. His father welcomes death and hands him a cross pendant. At the very end of the movie, Spike, having decided to live on the mainland, runs into adult Jimmy. He’s gathered a squadron of almost-clones, mimicking the Teletubbies in vibrant colorful suits, that take pleasure in maiming the infected. Spike is shown to possess a power ranger figurine early on in the movie, and after encountering Jimmy and his goons, is drawn to their TV-like allure and accepts their invitation to join along.  The movie is all over the place, tonally. Speeding up, slowing down, changing vibes, flashbacks, flash forwards, dream sequences, etc. But it all works. It serves, in my opinion, as a meta symbol of the disjointedness that stems from a loss of a culture - of a society. (And an homage to the first movie in the series, of course.) Throughout the film, Jimmy and his “powertubbies” pervade over the script. Graffiti warns of their imminent presence and Spike and his father run into one of their victims. JIMMY is carved into his torso. He/they are an analogy for the occult, for propaganda. Like a rat, it remains unextinguished, even in the empty shell of a nation.  28 years later, in the midst of a rage virus, what is our main character still trying, unknowingly, to literally find a cure to? Cancer. The movie is chock-fill of symbolism that I haven’t touched on here - from the sheltered Swedish soldiers to the birth of a baby from an infected womb, and I can’t wait to watch it again to dissect further. How do we grieve life? How do we grieve culture? God, arguably the first tool we tried to use to answer these kinds of questions, hangs in shiny gold around Jimmy’s neck. Upside down. 5/5.