the power of myth + zombies

danny boyle and alex garland deliver the 21st-century fantasy we need, deserve, and maybe even want

My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release and to feature seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got incoherent thoughts on Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s triumphantly incoherent 28 Years Later. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday, which lets be honest is pretty much always going to mean Friday.

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One of thousands of rich frames in Danny Boyle’s insane masterpiece? 28 Years Later (in theaters everywhere now).

I’ve been traveling and doing some other life-based things, so I don't have the wherewithal to put my thoughts about 28 Years Later into a coherent statement. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland have gifted us with a spectacular mess that watches like a disaster but somehow sings in a way that I haven’t heard since . . . maybe ever. It's hard to call it an unqualified success, but I have to give Boyle and Garland credit for doing a whole lot of something that most people would never touch. This movie swings (sometimes quite literally, in more ways than one), and even when it misses you have to applaud its form.

Is this the most important film of 2025? With no real organization or conclusive takes, here’s where I’m at 2.8 days later.

WHAT ARE ZOMBIES?

I started researching this topic and realized that I don’t care enough to make a dent in the literature. People have *a lot* to say about zombies: where they came from, why we like them, what they mean, how to kill them. A better question is: what are the zombies in the 28 [Units] Later franchise? 28 Days Later introduced us to the “rage virus,” a disease that instantly takes over a person’s brain and gives them the all-consuming desire to run around and bite non-infected people to death. I am positive that there are subreddits devoted to the pathogenic specifics of this ailment, and if that's your thing, then go read them. I don’t care. This is not a series that strives for hyper-realism; it comes from the guys who brought you a movie about nuking the sun to make it hotter. What matters isn’t the lore but the material we have to work with: a frightening scenario in which a majority of the populace is consumed by an all-encompassing drive to kill each other as animalistically as possible, witnessed by a resilient minority who have to figure out what to do next.

28 Days Later is a fairly traditional horror film with a political edge - a great topic for edgy undergrad essays or more successful Substacks.¹ 28 Years Later is something else entirely. For starters, Boyle makes it clear from the get-go that we aren’t dealing with international relations. The virus has been successfully quarantined to Great Britain; the British people have no contact with the outside world. Almost three decades in from patient zero, the infected of the Northumberland countryside have ceased to resemble humans - some are slug-like, overgrown babies, some are Gorilla-esque Alphas with comically large wieners. Our audience-surrogate survivors live on the island of Lindisfarne, connected to the mainland by a frequently flooded causeway. They exist in a future-medieval society last attempted in Reign of Fire, the 2002 post-apocalyptic dragon movie that should have been one of my all-time favorites but unfortunately kind of sucks. Like Reign of Fire, much of Years focuses on combat between thick-accented, dirt-smeared Northerners and near-mythic monsters, all conducted through medieval weaponry scrapped together from the refuse of early 21st-century technology.²

This is, first and foremost, pretty cool. But it’s not particularly serious, which is a big pivot from the stark grit of the original film. Honestly, I’m all in. I think my ideal existence is an island structured around an anarcho-communalist guild economy - especially one where everyone wears Stone Roses parkas and has a marginal understanding of electricity. The introductory scenes of the Lindisfarne community are warm and loose: sunshine, quaint industry, smiling school children, and a very cute original song by Young Fathers. They aren’t particularly haunted, and they aren’t especially at risk. But peace gets boring, and adventure awaits young lads ready to cross the causeway. Our hero, 13 year old Spike (Alfie Williams) embarks on this instant-bildungsroman with his father, veteran archer Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), leaving behind their mother and wife Isla (Jodie Comer) not to scrounge for resources (the only thing they bring back is a frisbee) but to kill zombies. You expect them to discover something awful - some sort of mutation, some sort of advancement in post-apocalyptic horror - but instead the plot motivation comes when Spike gets it into his head that the cure for his mother’s mysterious illness must exist just beyond the Northumberland horizon. Headstrong and heartbroken, he decides to set off alone to find it.

You can dig for all sorts of politics in this - English nationalism, manosphere crusaderism, back-to-nature eco-fascism, healthcare infrastructure vs. whatever British people call MAHA - but it’s not worth the back strain. This is a classic hero's-journey story. The village is safe, the forest is dark and full of horrors. There's a problem that the villagers can’t solve, and there's a wizard on the other side of the forest who can help. The virus is contained to Britain because world-building is easier when you introduce hard boundaries. Boyle and Garland set their story in a near future that looks like 12th-century x Y2K England because that sounds awesome, especially if you’re a Gen-X British dude. They indulge in a magical world that incorporates all the richness that the 28 mythos, late 20th-century British culture, and the Anglican fantasy tradition have to offer. Good for them - it's fun! But it’s not very complicated: zombies are monsters that live in the woods that young boys have to kill to become men. That’s it.

The Hero’s Call to Adventure.

WHAT IS DANNY BOYLE?

I have been wondering this for years. I’ve seen almost everything Danny Boyle has made and I still have no idea what to make of him. He started his career with the nihilist crime thriller Shallow Grave and then broke through with Trainspotting, a film that continues to be one of the coolest movies ever made. His career fizzled out in the latter half of the ‘90s, hitting it’s critical nadir with The Beach.³ He returned in 2002 with 28 Days Later, a film unlike anything he’d made and has ever made since. His follow-ups Millions and Sunshine were commercially unsuccessful pivots in completely opposite directions, but then he got it together to win an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. In the 2010s he made 127 Hours, Steve Jobs, Trance, T2, and Yesterday, five films that couldn’t possibly be less similar to one another. I'd say that the only throughline in this filmography is an unrepentant belief in redemption pared with Britpop aesthetics, but Shallow Grave is a completely misanthropic film and 28 Days Later is filmed Dogme-95-style on a handheld camcorder.

Despite all that, 28 Years Later strikes me as the most Danny Boyle film ever made. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a film with more intentional disregard for visual or tonal consistency. Boyle hits on deeply corny emotionalism, outrageous gore, hopeful universalism, parochial Britishness, extraordinary goofiness, and extraordinary coolness. I don't think there's a living director with a less consistent career, and all 30 years of it have been shoved into the microcosm of this artifact. Why is an enormous wiener, shot from between the legs of a blood-caked zombie as it lurches through the Northumberland forest, the most Boyle thing ever filmed? For the same reason that a child lovingly placing a skull at the pinnacle of a tower of bones, lit by treacly sunset and backed by a gooey string score, is the most Boyle thing ever filmed. The only other person this insane is George Miller. God bless both of them.

WHAT IS THIS CAMERA?

28 Years Later was shot by Anthony Dod Mantle, a frequent Boyle collaborator who also shot the original 28 Days Later. It’s always fun when the camera shooting the movie makes a diagetic appearance: in 28 Years Later, that’s the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Normally “shot on an iPhone” means a D.P. showing off how straightforward and pluralistic he can be, but Mantle is a great cinematographer and seems to be onto something.

The oddness of the iPhone is that it beautifully captures color but still manages to look like a handheld piece of shit. The lens has a myopic focus on the center that leaves the margins blurred, which imitates the actual experience of looking at something much better than 28 Days Later’s camcorder. Mantle's camera is never passive or observational - instead it actively occupies the experience of the character whose sight line it analogues. That means violent and thrashy for a very sick Isla, squinty and preoccupied for Spike, stately and somewhat dreamy for the glorious third-act appearance of Ralph Fiennes. The result feels like whiplash in the moment but builds to a highly memorable set of visual experiences that distinguish themselves from one another unlike anything I've ever seen. I think I can say that genuinely. This movie looks like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

Probably the most remarkable sequences in Years are the "poor man's bullet time" shots filmed by a semicircular rig of 20 iPhones that take simultaneous shots to isolate a moment of action. Mantle uses this contraption to capture gory zombie deaths, rather exactly imitating the slo-mo 360 kill shots you see in video games. The jarring gamer aesthetic harkens back to one of my favorite Boyle sequences, the N64-style trip scene in The Beach. The gamified sequences advance the adventure narrative and simultaneously expose the director’s (and character’s?) self-awareness of the construct. The Hero's journey is sort of a mythological video game where the horrors of the wood are nothing but soulless entities killed for sport. There is no humanity in the infected, and no one spends any time pretending that there ever could be. The video game silliness is exacerbated by the film's bizarre coda that seems to set up the next film as a ninja film based around cancelled British television personalities. What is the point of Spike’s adventure other than that it’s an adventure? And does that self-reflexivity undercut the value of the adventure, or celebrate it?

Over and over, the video game shots remind us of the profound unseriousness of this movie - or, if that’s unfair, it’s un-realism, it’s total grounding in quest-for-quest’s-sake and prefigured narrative. But that gamification is also surrounded by Mantle’s highly personalized handheld cinematography . . . which creates a visual dialectic that will require a few more watches to nail down. The more I write this, the more I am convincing myself that this is the most important film of 2025. Is that crazy? I don’t know, just look at how they filmed this shit:

A real thing that people did to make this movie.

WHAT ARE RAVENS?

Zombies have a symbiotic relationship with ravens in this film, which I thought was pretty neat. It reflects the real-life relationship between ravens and wolves, in which ravens form an attachment to a pack, fly ahead to spot sick or dying prey, lead the wolves to the kill, and then eat up the remains. At one point in 28 Years Later there's a Saruman-esque shot of an Alpha zombie who looks like he's controlling a flock of ravens, but it's likely the other way around; the ravens swarm ahead across the causeway, and the Alpha and his pack run behind. This suggests the development of an ecosystem in which the ravens test out tidal patterns until they can goad the zombies safely across the shallows in order to massacre the survivors and leave behind a great lunch. I'm not advocating for this and will root for the watchtower team to do their job, but ravens are cool and I was thrilled to see them featured in such a respectful light.

WHAT IS THIS TRILOGY?

28 Years Later isn’t really a sequel at all - it’s part one of a new trilogy, all apparently set in an alternate 2030 England that features medieval technology, killer zombies, amoral ravens, and bone temples. We’ve left the political realism of Days entered an episodic saga rooted in Joseph Campbell narrative, set in an interesting fantasy world that incorporates contemporary aesthetics and perspectives at the exclusion of the impossible-to-answer questions posed by globalism and the internet. Boyle and Garland have taken a zombie set-up that most people would make into an anxious modern parable and instead given us a deeply idiosyncratic adventure tale told in the most classical mode possible, recreated in a visual and temporal setting that they're able to comprehend.

As looney tunes as it is, 28 Years Later is a deeply conservative film. Not in a pejorative or a party-political sense, but a literal one: it’s a traditional story about a traditional set of problems that resolve around the traditional values that have guided and limited us for however many millennia of global humanity. Maybe Bone Temple is going to zag in a completely different direction, but it seems that we're set up for a 21st-century answer to the Lord of the Rings, grand-scale narrative with a not-so-subtle touch of self-aware postmodernism.⁴

That makes me, oddly, happy. Narrative is insidious when we pretend it doesn't exist. But when we lay it out there for what it is, and we tell it in bizarre and novel ways, we get a whiff of what’s summoned in Sam’s cheesy speech at the end of The Two Towers. It feels weird writing that a film that regularly features people’s spines getting ripped out of their backs is the most comforting film of the year, but I walked out of this film feeling like a human. Right now, as much as ever, we need that.

If this isn’t cinema then I don’t want movies.

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Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, pledging me money (thanks!), or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I am turning on payments today, I swear! Thanks for your patience. We’ll be back next week with an attempt at thoughts about F1 and some clickbaity midyear “best of” content.

1. I haven’t seen 28 Weeks Later (not a Boyle/Garland project), so I won’t talk about it.

2. Is there a “-punk” word for this? Trashpunk? Shitpunk? Goatpunk? I’ve searched Reddit but fear the answer might require plumbing Tumblr and I’m not willing to go there.

3. For the record, I think The Beach is a post-structuralist masterpiece, and someday I will prove it.

4. After I prove that The Beach is a post-structuralist masterpiece, I will prove that The Lord of the Rings is a proto-post-structuralist masterpiece.