First impressions of 28 Years Later

Danny Boyle returns to direct the third episode of the series he began in 2002. This one features the best performances in the series so far, but in service of what? What does this movie love?

I interviewed Danny Boyle in 2005, eager to ask him questions about his joyous coming-of-age comedy Millions, my favorite film of that year.¹ It seemed like quite a change-up, that he’d made a movie families could enjoy so soon after the relentlessly violent 2002 zombie-apocalypse film 28 Days Later.

Now, 20 years later, I’m watching a new Danny Boyle movie, which happens to be called 28 Years Later. It’s the third installment in the horror franchise, and it has me flashing back to 2002… and to 2005. That’s right: There are aspects of this dystopian nightmare that remind me of that endearing little Christmas movie. I’ll explain.

In Millions, an 8-year-old named Damian and his older brother Anthony discover a suitcase full of money, and they disagree about what to do with it. Anthony wants to spend it on himself and pursue popularity. Damian is a boy gifted with a powerful conscience; he wants to use the money to help others who are suffering. But Damian’s inspiring innocence clashes with a world in which grownups have made it very difficult to do the right thing. And the boy is determined to do the right thing: He sees a need, and he finds a way to meet it. He sees an injustice, and he blazes a trail for mercy.

“When you look back at what you were like at Damian's age,” Boyle told me in ’05, “it was that simple. And that's not a bad thing.” He’s not wrong. When I was 8 years old, my faith was quite similar to Damian’s—I spoke aloud to God a lot, I became furious over injustices, and right and wrong seemed so simple. “That's still us,” he said, “even though we've moved on into the venal world of survival and competition.”

28 Years Later is also a story of a boy—12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams)—who discovers that the world can make it so difficult to do the right thing. There’s corruption everywhere, even among those whom children should be able to trust. Spike struggles to hold on to his innocence and his hope, even as he is forced to contend with “the venal world of survival and competition.”

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