28 Years Later, is Danny Boyle finding humanity in a dystopian world?

It has often been said about the 21st century, that we are living through unprecedented times, so much so that the statement has become a meme. But as director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the apocalyptic Britain he created at the turn of the century, all that feels different also feels incredibly similar. Even in a zombie infected nation, the crimes people are capable of have been committed many times before.

Just off the coast of Northumberland on the Holy Island, one community has survived thanks to their watery degree of separation from mainland Britain. Here Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his sick mother Isla (Jodie Comer) and his tough father Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson), more like a drill sergeant than a dad. Fighting the infected is a part of every child’s education on the Holy Island, but Jamie’s desperate search for glory means that Spike will be initiated with his first kills years before his classmates. Heading onto the mainland, with his father, at just 12 years old, Spike is forced to hunt the infected he has been taught to fear his whole life.

As the pair head out across the tidal walkway, a recital of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Boots plays over old film footage of soldiers (including a company of archers from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V), serving as a reminder that there is nothing new in human history, the violence of mankind never ends. At their core, 28 Days Later and its successor 28 Weeks Later (directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo), are criticisms of the military industrial complex, from the lab that leaked the virus attempting to turn rage into a weapon to the United States army whose inhumane procedure controls the spread. 28 Years Later returns once again to this criticism from a fresh perspective. Through Jamie’s aggressive form of parenting, we see the roots of militarised indoctrination. 28 years on from the infection, fear has become a foundation for humanity's survival.

But it’s on this bloody pilgrimage that Spike discovers something even more human. The news of a doctor living on the mainland gives him hope and he soon returns with Isla to get her medical attention. Everyone needs a purpose. No one in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later is above this distinctly human need. Jamie searches for purpose by teaching Spike to kill mercilessly, Spike hopes to cure Isla’s illness and the Swedish soldier Erik (Edvin Ryding), who Spike and Isla meet along the way, confesses he had only joined the navy in an attempt to give his life meaning. The existential dread that drives us all is never in question but the resulting actions, such as Jamie’s executioner philosophy and the evidence of other human’s crimes found on the mainland, are silently judged.

Alongside misguided habitual cruelty there can be found moments of kindness. And it is here where Boyle and Garland reveal a flicker of optimism for humanity. Jamie may be a brute but Spike and Isla have not totally hardened under his patriarchal rule. Isla reminds her son of his capacity for empathy even when it comes to the infected and Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is the only one to treat humans and infected alike with the same bedside manner. Inspiring Spike not to lose his humanity even as those around them do. 28 Years Later it may be, but in returning to this dystopian vision of Britain once again it feels as if Boyle never left this often barbaric world behind. And while continuing a brutal critique of the militarised mind, Boyle has not forgotten that there are those that choose kindness.

28 Years Later is on show at cinemas now