The Zombie Apocalypse: A Cinematic Exploration of British Society and Culture in the Post-Apocalyptic Era

In a world where the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse looms over the Northumbrian coast, Danny Boyle's latest film, 28 Years Later, finds a chilling and thought-provoking setting for its sequel to the 2002 classic 28 Days Later. The film takes place on the island of Lindisfarne, where the Rage virus has yet to reach, creating a utopia in the midst of hell's despair. The inhabitants of Lindisfarne live a simple life, with the men working with their hands, the children singing hymns at school, and the evenings filled with accordion-led songs and bitter ale. This little paradise is separated from the ghoul-infested mainland by a gated tidal causeway, which only the uninfected few are permitted to cross. The film's inhabitants have taken back control, but so has virus-free Europe, which has the entire UK under a militarily enforced lockdown. The original 28 Days Later, written by Alex Garland with a sociological eye, noted the civil unrest that had started to fester as the optimism of the early Blair years began to fade. This follow-up doesn't re-take the temperature of British society but instead vivisects its twitching remains. It's an unholy hybrid of A Canterbury Tale and Cannibal Holocaust, which Boyle was uniquely placed to pull off, and which stands as his finest film since 2008's Slumdog Millionaire. The plot centers on a 12-year-old lad called Spike (Alfie Williams), who illicitly leaves his island haven to search the mainland for a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who might be able to help his mother Isla (Jodie Comer) overcome an unknown disease. Spike's father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a seasoned stalker of the infected, among whom muscular "alphas" have begun to emerge. The cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle captures the precise moments of impact with a sickening, time-freezing jerk, as if the camera operator from The Matrix has just had his neck snapped. Mantle shot much of the film on (augmented) iPhone cameras, which give the regularly outrageous action a terrifyingly ordinary texture like Facebook photos from a walking holiday in Alnmouth. Garland employs a strain of peculiarly British pulp humour – very 2000 AD, very Warhammer 40,000 – to undercut the ambient dread. And flashes of Arthurian fantasies and wartime newsreel footage (as well as a pointed double cameo for the now-felled Sycamore Gap tree) serve as regular nudges in the ribs as he and Boyle toy with the notion of a 21st century British national myth. Perhaps more than any of the above, though, it's Fiennes's gently patrician, RP-accented doctor – whose bedside manner is impeccable even when stripped to the waist and slathered in iodine – which gives 28 Years Later its lingering, Kiplingian ache. A brief prologue and epilogue suggest that next January's sequel, titled The Bone Temple and directed by The Marvels' Nia DaCosta, will stir Scottish Presbyterianism into the mix. What British end of the world worth its salt would be without it?