28 Years Later: Danny Boyle has probably made Shashi Tharoor's favourite film; a thriller that punishes the British for all their plundering and pillaging

Indian Express

a day ago

While promoting his new film, 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle expressed retrospective reservations about Slumdog Millionaire. By far his most successful movie, it delivered the box office performance of a Marvel blockbuster and won him the prestigious Best Director Oscar. Boyle was already famous thanks to his boundary-pushing past work, but he wasn't Bollywood famous. And yet, while reflecting on Slumdog a decade-and-a-half later, he declared that he would never make something like it again; instead, he said, he would appoint a young Indian director at the helm. It seems like Boyle, who also spearheaded the opening ceremony for the London Olympics, has developed an acute case of 'white guilt'. This guilt can be felt in every frame of 28 Years Later.
In addition to being a thrilling achievement in genre filmmaking, and a surprisingly emotional coming-of-age tale, 28 Years Later is stark indictment of the British Empire — a stronger one, mind you, than both RRR and Kesari Chapter 2 combined. Set in a world that has outcast the British entirely, 28 Years Later punishes them for all their plundering and pillaging. The only foreign character to set eyes on the British in over two decades views them with a mixture of curiosity and pity. They don't even know what the internet is; they've never laid hands on a mobile phone. The majority of them are brain-eating zombies; some even crawl around in the muck, slurping on worms. Forget handing out reparations, they've forgotten the very concept of money. It's as if Shashi Tharoor himself wrote the screenplay.
Also read – Sinners: Ryan Coogler drives a stake through Marvel's heart in one of the year's best movies
The story unfolds nearly three decades after a virus broke out and turned the majority of Britain's population into the undead. The island was quarantined, with nations of the world deploying soldiers across its perimeter to keep people from sneaking out. Anybody from the outside who dared set foot on 'Great' Britain would have to bid their old life goodbye. Nobody gets to leave. But those who survived the outbreak, and, presumably, the events of 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, created tiny communities scattered across the country, protecting themselves from the zombies with rudimentary weapons.
It is in one of these isolated communities that our hero, a young boy named Spike, lives with his brawny father and bed-ridden mother. For no fault of his own, Spike inherited an irreparable world, infected by the trauma caused by generations past. All he wants is to live up to the expectations of his peers, and to not disappoint his dad. As a rite of passage, kids of Spike's age are taken out of the village, across the causeway that connects it to the country, and made to experience the zombie-infested wilderness for themselves. Over the sounds of a rallying cry expertly weaved into the background score by the Scottish trio Young Fathers, Spike and his dad make the trek into the mainland, or, what remains of it. 'There's no discharge in the war,' the voice in the background says, reciting the imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling's 'Boots'.
A tattered flag of England waves atop a rusty pole. Boyle's camera cuts occasionally to propaganda posters, perhaps designed to motivate the populace during a past war — a war that the 'living' likely lost. The village that Spike lives in is a symbol of resilience, yes, but it is also a reminder of battered pride. We're told that Spike's village has no communication with others scattered across Britain; it's isolationism within isolationism. The colonisers have cornered themselves.
Electrifying, unwavering, and yet, deeply sentimental, Boyle's new film is a near-perfect example of what can be done with the zombie genre. 28 Days Later was a mediation on post-9/11 paranoia. In Sean of the Dead, Boyle's fellow British filmmaker Edgar Wright used the undead to comment on the mundanity of middle-class existence; the Cuban film Juan of the Dead used zombies as a metaphor for mass-migration. Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead offered a critique of American consumerism, containing the entire plot inside a shopping mall. In 28 Years Later, Boyle and his writer, the great Alex Garland, are drawn to the idea of a nation reduced to a shadow of its former self. It is almost as if the British deserved it.
Read more – Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning: Tom Cruise deserved better than a goofy Abbas-Mustan movie that chooses spoon-feeding over spectacle
The indications were there from the very first scene; the movie opens with a flashback to zero day. A young child named Jimmy watches his mother being eaten to death by a horde of zombies. He makes a dash to the church, where his father, the vicar, is in some sort of trance. Spreading his arms out wide, Jimmy's father spouts some nonsense about the Day of Judgement. We're being punished for our sins, he screams with a mad glee on his face, as he's overwhelmed by zombies. A song called 'Promised Land' plays in the background; the angelic voices underscoring the apocalypse. The tone is set immediately. This is a movie about karma. It makes sense, because the last thing that Garland did was Warfare, another film that dared to point fingers at Western imperialism, but via the Iraq War.
28 Days Later ends on a rather wild note, with the sudden introduction of a cult who've modelled themselves on the (possibly un-outed) convicted sex offender Jimmy Savile — a perverse symbol of national pride if there ever was one. Britain's sins are haunting its youth. That's why Spike was forsaken; to suffer and survive with a stiff upper lip.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there's always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.