Emerald City Video

“Time didn’t heal anything” is the tagline used in a marketing email for 28 Years Later, the long-awaited sequel to Danny Boyle’s beloved zombie reinvention 28 Days Later.

For one reason or another, that tagline really hit home with me. Specifically, it made me appreciate what Robert Kirkman did with The Walking Dead.

In 28 Years Later, more than two decades after a viral outbreak that transformed its victims into crazed cannibal killers, the United Kingdom is still a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Obviously, we have seen fairly little of the movie through trailers and promotional content, but it certainly appears the United Kingdom is still without power, constantly overrun by zombies, and there is no hope.

In the film, the world has given up, surrendering the UK to the zombies, and the zombies have begun to evolve in ways to make them even more dangerous.

Speaking with the incredible Brandon Davis recently (see above), 28 Years Later filmmaker Danny Boyle drew explicit parallels between the world of 28 Days Later and the COVID-19 pandemic, and offered some kernel of hope because COVID-19 has not been as catastrophic as some first supposed it might be.

The movie, though, wasn’t like that. Very much as the ads suggested, the United Kingdom is living in a post-apocalyptic scenario, with heroes using bows and arrows to fend off an increasingly desperate and always-mutating zombie hordes.

There may be more to it than that. Certainly, a stinger in the credits suggests that the next movie in Boyle’s planned trilogy will be tonally fry different from Years Later. Still, from what we have seen, it seems as though the world elected to sacrifice the U.K. to the zombies, and for the most part, the U.K. just kinda…went with it.

Contrast that with The Walking Dead. Granted, that may not be fair, since The Walking Dead (at least the comics) are already concluded, while Boyle’s series is very much in its middle stages…but still, something Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard did was choose to restore civilization by the end of the series. It still isn’t quite where it was before the walkers came along, but it ended on an optimistic note: humanity can be saved, we aren’t all monsters…we are not The Walking Dead.

In 28 Years Later, even the “good” characters — see Ralph Fiennes’s deranged former doctor — are pretty broken. The world around them isn’t actually much different than the colonies that Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors establish toward the end of The Walking Dead…but by that point, it felt like Grimes and company were on their way out of the darkness. Instead, with 28 Years Later, we see a population resigned to their fate, content to be abandoned and forsaken.

In 28 Years Later, Boyle returns to the world he made famous, bringing even more prosumer tech with him in the form of much-hyped iPhones that helped film some of the movie’s sequences. You can see a review of the film on the Emerald City Video Podcast below.