Four Riffs on Alex Garland and 28 Years Later (spoiler-free)

or, what happens when a film makes too much happen in my head: notes for four essays I’d like to write

One:

The first time I ever heard of Alex Garland, it was as the author of a book called The Beach, a zeitgeisty nineties novel about Gen X backpackers literally and figuratively lost in Thailand. The aimless protagonist, Richard, drifts through the world in a state of detachment, a remove created in part by the cinematic fantasies always playing in his head, Apocalypse Now in particular, but also by the ennui of having been everywhere and seen everything and failing to connect with any of it. The nineties version of dating apps, if you will, where instead of an endless selection of choice in romantic partners driving him to apathy and numbness, Richard's been driven to apathy and numbness by the endless selection of choice in everything.

I fell in love with the book and was insanely jealous of Garland at the same time, who'd been a mere 26 years old when the novel was published. It felt like an idea I should have had and a book I should have written despite the fact that in my early and mid-twenties I couldn't write one-tenth as well as Garland did in The Beach. Within a few years of the book’s release he'd made the leap to film, arguably the medium his talents are best suited for. His partnership with director Danny Boyle began inauspiciously with the dreadful adaptation of The Beach (for which Garland penned the screenplay); all was forgiven (by me) with their second collaboration, the savage and wistful 28 Days Later, which gave us fast zombies powered by the “rage virus” across an elegiacly ruined London, and ever since, Garland's name on a film as a writer or director will always get me in front of it, with or without Boyle. He, and sometimes they, don't always succeed entirely, but I am an ardent defender of the glorious mess that was the almost-transcendent Sunshine and I genuinely loved the feminist folk horror madhouse of Men, a film about which “it divided audiences” catastrophically understates how people reacted to it judging from some of the apoplectically angry and/or frustrated posts I saw on social media about it. (I am not being dismissive of this type of reaction! I, too, have been driven to apoplectic anger by a film I felt was bafflingly overpraised. Art should arouse passionate emotions!)

We are back to full circle now with Garland: with 28 Years Later, he has once again produced a work that makes me say Why didn't I write something like this?

Two:

28 Years Later would make a terrific companion piece to its fellow 70's-British-folk-horror-and-children's-TV-feeling In the Earth. But director Ben Wheatley made In the Earth as a low-budget pandemic passion project. I cannot work out how such a resolutely weird-in-a-British-way film as 28 Years Later got financed, least of all by a major studio. Certainly Alex Garland’s acknowledging the influence of Ken Loach’s British miserabilist classic Kes would not have been a part of those meetings.

28 Years Later is relentlessly British—or perhaps even very specifically English (although as an American I’m not sure how qualified I am to split these hairs too finely). You could almost argue (well I would anyway) that it reimagines the Matter of Britain (that is, the legends of King Arthur) in contemporary terms. Here, instead of the lost glory of Camelot, it’s the lost glory of a kind of Blitz-era grit and a rural way of life that’s evoked by the survivors—cut off from the Continent by permanent quarantine, echoes of Brexit unmistakeable. It’s also not, I suspect, just for the storytelling convenience of the causeway that they’re holed up on history-heavy Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, with a community hall that still hangs a portrait of the young Queen nearly three decades after the zombie apocalypse has gutted the mainland, where children learn from line drawings that illustrate “roles in the community”: farmer, hunter, fisherman. There’s modern myth piled upon modern myth (and I won’t explicate them all—spoilers!) but I will mention the intercutting of scenes from Henry V and the haunting nightmare repetition of the Rudyard Kipling poem “Boots” as voiced by Taylor Holmes in 1915. There’s no discharge in the war.

[If you haven’t seen the film—or even if you have—listen to the devastating recitation in full below.]

I love that 28 Years Later is so uncompromisingly unconcerned about how it will play for the American audience juggernaut. Bravo, lads.

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Three:

28 Years Later would make a terrific companion piece to Alex Garland's own (written and directed by) 2024 film, Civil War, a much-praised and much-misunderstood movie that also asks, among other things, similar questions about how we live in a world where violence and war are inevitable, and if it is ever possible or desirable to seek a different path. (Garland has another film out this year that also looks at war—it's literally called Warfare—that I am now especially eager to see as this all seems to comprise a kind of Trilogy of War.) At least half of Civil War’s audience missed the point entirely as they tried to dissect which “side” was which and how Texas and California could be allies but while Garland wasn’t interested in telling that kind of story, Civil War is as conscious of its uniquely American setting and psyches as 28 Years Later is of its uniquely British setting and psyches.

In 28 Years Later in particular we encounter two different ways of being in a world where warfare has become unrelenting: the Holy Island, mingling a nostalgic rural past-that-never-was with mythic Blitz spirit, and that of Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who has embraced and adapted to the new world he inhabits, a kind of pacifist holy fool. Civil War also has a community locked in the past albeit in a distinctly American way (“we just don’t like to think about all that” is essentially what the clothing store clerks tell the filthy, exhausted, and thoroughly nonplussed war correspondents who have stumbled in). No one in 28 Years Later can be accused of having opted out as this town has, though one suspects this option won’t be available to them either for much longer. What kind of an American are you? snarls a terrifying, unhinged, uncredited Jesse Plemons as you’ve never seen him before and never will forget, in a different scene of the film. What kind indeed.

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Four:

28 Years Later offers a memento mori so visceral and so gorgeous that I found myself fighting back tears in the cinema thinking of the death of my mother, of the brutal weakness of our human flesh yet at the same time how muscle and sinew and bone—especially bone—the stuff of horror movie gore, is all that’s left of us in the end, is beautiful, is at the same time holy as it is profane. Memento amori: Remember love.

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