The apocalypse will be televised

The apocalyptic free-based-Zombie movie has been marketed with a chilling rendition of Boots by Rudyard Kipling (quoted above) and equally brings to mind Albert Einstein’s warning: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” The release of 28 Years Later is of course a reminder that films that imagine the end of the world are not new in 2025, the claim here is that they are becoming more precinct, more fact than fiction. This film is a warning, as was the first. The warning is yet to be headed. It is a warning that needs repeating. 

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland shattered the conventions of the zombie genre by introducing the concept of the rage virus, where humans were not resurrected from the dead to shuffle across the landscape but were instead infected, turning into rapid and rapacious human-seeking predators. The film also shattered convention by being more self-conscious of its analogies. The rage virus begins in a lab, as humans perform tests on animals for military purposes. Money has no currency. 

The story also turns on the fact that in the moment of apocalypse we can expect the worst from people, and the best from people. The challenge is deciphering who will help, and who will deliberately hinder. This is what gives horror its power, and its pathos. The military are assumed to be our protectors, but of course history tells us that they are usually the tormentors. If civilization breaks down, how will soldiers treat civilians? The question follows Garland to his later films.  

Community

The distinction between the behaviour of the human and the infected-human begins to break down. We might need to find the rage inside of us, in order to protect ourselves from such threats. 28 Days Later is therefore a zombie film infected with some traditionally progressive concerns: animal welfare, distrust of state violence, the sexual predation of women. The opening film developed a cult fanbase. It seemed uncannily prescient with the outbreak of the covid virus, with its portents of social collapse and apocalypse. 

The first sequel, 28 Weeks Later, has been somewhat buried by Boyle and Garland, who were not involved in its making. Nonetheless, the weaker 28 Weeks Later film does sit neatly between the days and the years. 

The opposite of rage – love – leads the characters to put family first, taking risks and breaking rules that result in the escalation of violence and horror. Here, the military is the protector but again the distinction between human and infected breaks down with the adoption first of shoot to kill and then of the policy of scorched earth. 

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How will humans adapt to the apocalypse? This is the preoccupation of 28 Years Later. Spike (Alfie Williams) was born more than a decade after the rage outbreak. His mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is suffering night sweats and delusions as she battles a mystery illness. Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), his father, is keen for his son to take his literal rights of passage with a hunting trip on the mainland. 

The family are part of a small community clinging to survival on Lindisfarne in the North West. The film somewhat rigidly follows the archetypal hero’s journey, as described by Joseph Conrad, with the call to adventure, the transgression of the home boundary, the confrontation with the feared adversary, and even the return home with treasure and the feeling of alienation the hero then feels among his former community. 

Rehearsals

The very fact that an apocalyptic event has taken place, and the benefits of modern society have been permanently lost serves as a warning about climate breakdown, and about war. Indeed, this film equally serves as a prequel to the film Threads, released by the BBC in 1984. A nuclear bomb is dropped on Sheffield, and the story ends with a horrifying childbirth scene. The film inoculated millions of British youngsters against the delusions of a ‘nuclear deterrence’. 

This zombie horror also serves as a sequel to The End We Start From (2023). In this realist film, Jodie Comer plays Woman, a protagonist so universal that she does not need a name, who has to contend with some heavy rain, which becomes a flood, which becomes a climate catastrophe, which becomes the end of civilization, at least for England. 

This film is one of the few apocalyptic dramas that actually imagines what the end will look like. People die for very practical, almost mundane reasons. Finding food and water is a preoccupation. 

In The End We Start From we see some people go full survivalist. Neighbour turns on neighbour. But in this rendition of apocalypse it is the reconstruction of institutions, of community, that ensures survival. It is not a coincidence that the film is directed by a woman (Mahalia Belo), written by a woman (Alice Birch) and and based on a novel by a woman (Megan Hunter). Woman briefly finds refuge on an island off the coast of Scotland, an island that could very well over the years become Spike’s island. 

28 Years Later is unusual in being set so long after the initiating catastrophe. It is a study of time, and of survival. There is something darkly quaint about Hope Island (filmed at Lindisfarne, Northumbria), the community hall filled to the girders with storytelling, song, and stolen kisses. The rage infection is confined to Britain. Here capitalism gives way, community and barter takes its place. We are cleverly reminded, though, that capitalism continues everywhere else. 

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There are echoes in 28 Years Later of the successful survivors’ commune in The Last of Us where the character Maria from the series states, “This is a commune. We’re communists.” Garland confirms the story from the game influenced him to some extent. Here in England the community holds together, but appears to have no shared purpose, other than clinging on.

Humanitarianism

The future is firmly in the past, and they default to nostalgia and nationalism to develop a collective identity. They survive on poaching and patriarchy. We are lost at sea, but there is no horizon. The message is stark. Climate breakdown and nuclear war promise to degrade human existence not by decades, but by centuries. 

The parallels with reality are left unstated. Nonetheless, the insular island life clearly echoes the fantasy post-Brexit Britain. It echoes Adam Curtis’s latest documentarian masterpiece, Shifty (2025), which is also about political nostalgia and the loss of any progressive vision for the future. 

There is no new culture, only rehearsals and half-memories of all that has been lost. Shakespeare imagined Henry V rallying his troops. “From this day to the ending of the world / But we in it shall be rememberèd / We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” 

Zombie films speak to moral panic, and the threat of the horde or the mass. People go mad or are driven mad. Everyone is out for themselves. The heroes of the story are forced to become hyper self-reliant. 28 Years Later is different. The first film – there are three planned – shows how survival requires community. 

The rage-infected lose all sense of their humanity, and the humanity of others. Rage as emotion is part of the human condition, and human history is replete with examples of its destructive effects. But rage should not determine our future. Dr Ian Kelson is the most articulate in extending humanitarianism to the infected.

MICKEY 17 (2025)

Witty Mickey 17 is a superb sci-fi comedy. We don’t actually get to learn much about the fate of planet Earth, so this does obviously fit within the genre of apocalypse. However, the eponymous protagonist Mickey is living through dystopia as only a capitalist system could produce.

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