28 Years Later: This flag is my longbow loicense

This contains spoilers that are likely to significantly reduce your enjoyment of the film. A lot of the time “spoilers” are irrelevant because the twist is not the point of the movie. This is the rare case where the main twist is a punchline that ties the whole thing together. If you intend on watching it conditional on a positive review, stop reading now and watch this film, it is recommended.

Bloody deliveroo driver said he was right out here

I had a surreal experience listening to NPR discuss this movie and have a good chuckle about fast zombies, man, I remember when those were invented, but really it’s about motherhood, right Danny? I was confused, because I just watched a two hour specifically English (not even “British”) movie wherein zoomers are exhorted to bury their parents’ mistakes of tolerance and moral compromise with them, and take up the longbow to cleanse England of swarthoids.

We’re set in a real place, a post apocalyptic Hobbit island with picturesque town rituals that happen to be oriented around zombie defense. One of those is the protagonist Spike’s coming-of-age quest, where he goes with his father to the mainland, longbow in hand, to kill a zombie and come back.

You can kind of tell what film we’re in when you realize that all of this is intercut (ie, not a mere visual allusion, these are explicitly parallel) with footage from the 1944 “Henry V” (Shakespeare’s most nationalistic play) of English longbowmen in battle. This isn’t some private story - this is the story of a people, an identifiable people, a specifically English sub-people, with the boy as their protector and representative.

The boy does well - convention demands he has a moment of weakness under stress, but he does what he ultimately has to. He and his father barely make it home alive, but they do survive. We discover everything is not right in Hobbiton - his mother is sick, something affecting her brain. Spike’s father evidently still loves her, but is fooling around with one of the girls from the village.

In other words, his father is compromised. He is more concerned with social standing, puffing up his boy and himself by proxy, than telling the truth about their circumstances. This is dangerous. Spike probably is a bit too young for what he is thrust into, and in practical terms, a twelve year old boy represents peak locked-in resources by the village. Losing your sub adolescents can easily lead to disaster when they’re just about to potentially start generating a serious resource surplus in a community that is teetering on a knife’s edge. Dishonestly about what you are actually capable of will cause someone to rely on something they shouldn’t - they are not safe enough for such luxuries.

His father also neglects to inform him of important facts about the world, like that there is a doctor in the mainland forests who might be able to treat Spike’s mother. When Spike pries this out of his father, he is upset enough to sneak out with his mother to find the doctor. This is our plot - straight to the point.

One of the things that makes this film so interesting is that it is so direct. There is not really a “twist” besides the final punchline, which we will get to in due time. When the mother is having brain issues including sudden rages and nosebleeds, the natural suspicion is that we’re going to add to the Lore and make her some new kind of infected, death comes for us all, let’s do a heckin spooky nihilism. Nope! She’s got brain cancer. They find a baby, and the assumption is ah, zombie baby, some ironic death for Spike’s motherly instincts. Nope! Just a cute little baby, it’s fine. When they find the doctor, smeared in red with a substantial bone collection, obviously we’re going to do the Colonel Kurz bit, he’s the final boss the boy needs to defeat, maybe we’re the real zombies, man. Nope! He’s a kindly doctor, he’s perfectly sane, it’s iodine to reduce chances of infection, just determined that burying everyone takes way too long and would rather cremate and monumentalize their bones in the tradition of a memento mori (he’s into Latin).

It’s downright refreshing that in the context of a whole generation who has now grown up with their contemporary media having essentially only inverted tropes (wow, the princess needs to rescue the warrior?) and ironic nihilism, someone has finally realized that you can play it straight.

But back to our protagonist. Recall that our archer boy is the avatar of a young English nationalism, ponder that his dad is thrusting too much responsibility for a completely impossible situation on his shoulders, too focused on his own ego, and too willing to indulge himself instead of fully upholding his responsibilities. Consider that his mother is incompetent and starts referring to her son as “dad”, inverting the role of responsibility and throwing yet another mantle upon him. Remember that the situation he is dealing with is that England is overrun with a mix of useless crawling eating savages living in filth, and a few tribal super-predator savages who have now started breeding rather than being imported from overseas.

I’m not joking about the “tribal super predators”, by the way. I was under the impression the British made it some kind of practical requirement that if you make a film on their godforsaken island you need a certain portion of Africans and Pakistanis playing the various Regency-era dukes and whatnot. Maybe this explains why the film was in production hell for nearly twenty years. But as far as I can tell, the sole Role of Color in the film is a six foot nine maybe-part-black-maybe-pakistani rapist (can zombies consent? Get Thomas Massie on the horn!) cannibal who keeps being tranquilized and inexplicably released to go about his business by the kindly doctor / social worker (said doctor hides in his fortified apartment whenever the locals get too rambunctious).

“His business” entails knocking up the feral English lady zombies that encounter his tribe / gang, generating a new, savage population purportedly native to Britain, although of course completely divorced from the kind of historical continuity we’re meant to infer for the village. When one of these grooming gang victims goes into labor in a ruined train, Spike’s mother’s first instinct is to show compassion to this monster and help deliver her spawn. It’s heavily implied the baby is salvageable, at least in the context of a strong community, but the zombified mother immediately turns on Spike’s mother, showing no gratitude or “shared bonds of motherhood and humanity”. At a certain point, she can only be put down.

Now let’s get to the bow on this package. Spike must ultimately say goodbye to his mother on account of her incurable cancer, she allows herself to be put down so as not to put her son in danger - although she could survive for a few weeks longer, her intermittent inability to even comprehend the situation they are in would doom them. He drops off the baby at the village gate, and unwilling to live with his father’s hyprocrisy, heads out into the woods of infected England to find his fortune, and encounters some trouble.

The twist is when the fookin chavs show up to rescue him.

A horde of CHAV NINJAS in tracksuits and gold chains descends from the hills and helpfully demonstrates that the whole bow thing, which has been ridiculously impractical the whole movie (imagine doing CQB with a 60lb draw longbow that requires four feet of clearance to maneuver), is entirely unnecessary - instead of clinging to tradition you need to actually think about how to enact Total Zombie Death, specifically with weapons you can use indoors, which don’t have limited ammunition, don’t require tons of expensive practice to be accurate with, give you reasonable stand-off, etc. They efficiently dismantle the group of zombies chasing Spike, something they’ve clearly done hundreds of times, and adopt him into their fraternity.

American audiences are going to be very confused about this - the group next to me after the film referred to them as “Russian gangsters” and complained about it being “random”. The existence of chav culture, specifically as the loose British analogue to the American wigger, a hybridized strain of working class whites influenced by the global brown mono-multiculture, is quite literally foreign to them. The fact that Danny Boyle is drawing an explicit line from English longbowmen in chainmail to English yoofs in tracksuits is going to go completely over their heads.

These specific yoofs overlap with the children seen in the trailer and opening scene, just, you know, 28 years later. In one sense, downwardly mobile from their Barratt homes (again, these are memes no American can or should waste time on - quasi suburban tract housing with complicated class connotations), in another, highly adapted to their actual contemporary society.

There is an implication they are in some kind of “Jimmy Saville cult” - he was one of those notorious “of course everyone knew he was diddling kids but something something MI5 spook aristo paedos protecting like Epstein something” English incidents that again lack an American cultural currency. The contours of this are not explored - given Saville was a children’s entertainer who only became generally known as a pedophile in 2012 and the kids’ last cultural awareness presumably dates from when they were like 10, it’s likely they are unaware of the implications. I assume we will get more depth in the sequel.

The implications of all this are pretty obvious, I think. It is possible that in a brilliant 5D chess maneuver, Danny Boyle was able to play on the ignorance of his mostly American funders and all the “England stuff” went completely over their heads. Coming from a turbolib, an anti-monarchist no less, perhaps it didn’t occur to anyone that all the “England stuff” could be interpreted in that way. The actual writer was Alex Garland - maybe he’s the one responsible and Boyle just rolled with it.

Regardless, there is one sequel already filmed, written by Garland with Boyle merely one of many producers, and another in development. It will be interesting to see if they decide to deconstruct their own mythos in the sequels, but at least this effort stands as a statement on its own.