28 Weeks Later: How Nostalgia Kills

In the second film of the 28 franchise, 28 Weeks Later, we’re six months out from the first film. Britain has fallen completely, with her entire population wiped out, as the rest of the world waited while the infected British starved to death. Months later, when there was certainty about the infected having all perished, a US-led military and aid mission started repatriating 15,000 British citizens, who had been traveled or had escaped during the crisis, back to England, to begin the rebuilding process.

Among them are two children, a 12-year-old boy named Andy and his teenaged sister Tam. They rejoin their father, Don (Robert Carlyle), only to learn that their mother, Alice (Catherine McCormack) got bitten by an infected during the initial outbreak, and was lost. The father strongly implies that she died, and says he couldn’t save her, although we know, from an earlier scene, that he actually abandoned her to be eaten by the infected, in order to save himself. He watched her be overwhelmed by the infected in a house, and heard her screaming his name, while he ran to safety, alone. The children know none of this.

Bereft at the loss of his mother, Andy begins to be terrified that he will forget her face. So, eager to do something kind for her agonized brother, and going against all the mandatory safety protocols of the US-led mission, Tam takes Andy out of the safe zone and out into the countryside. They hope they can return to their childhood home to retrieve a picture of their mother. They do this believing—correctly—that all of the infected monsters have starved and died; they do not encounter any infected attackers, anywhere, nor any evidence that any remain. Back at their old home, Andy retrieves a beautiful photograph of his mother, just before discovering that she is still alive—miraculously—in a papered-over attic hideout. She is also severely traumatized.

The US-led soldiers quickly pick up Tam, Andy, and Alice, and Alice is subjected to harrowing, dehumanizing quarantining procedures, including being manhandled by masked me while being hosed down, naked, in sanitary showers. She is screaming the entire time, and in obvious pain. But once she’s settled down enough for the head scientist Scarlett (Rose Byrne) to examine, we learn that Alice was indeed bitten and infected with the virus, but that she is somehow unaffected by it. She appears to have some kind of natural, genetic immunity to Rage Virus. (Alice, it’s worth noting, is also the name of the heroine of the Resident Evil films—another series about raging, cannibalistic monsters caused by a viral leak from a military science lab.)

Don learns that Alice is still alive, and he uses his all-access pass in the safe zone facilities (he’s a site manager) to gain access to her after hours. He apologizes, crying, and tells her that he loves her. She, to my great surprise every time I see the film, says, “I love you, Don.” He runs to her, unaware that she is harboring live virus in her body, and kisses her full on the mouth. As soon as their saliva mixes, he’s infected. Within a half minute, he’s become a rage zombie, and he rips her limb from limb, while she remains strapped to a medical bed. So, if you’re keeping track, this guy has effectively killed her twice. But this time, she’s really gone. And Don triggers the rapid-fire reignition of the rage epidemic.

Because all the repatriated survivors and soldiers are in such close quarters in the “safe” zone, the disease spreads with savage efficiency. Even so, Scarlett manages to save Andy and Tam, believing that they may well have inherited their mother’s immunity, so that their lives, and their blood, are invaluable to the world’s efforts to understand this plague and stop it from destroying other countries.

I want to pause here to highlight what really went wrong in the effort to stop the Rage Virus after it ravaged Britain. What really went wrong was that too many people indulged in nostalgia and sentimentality. Andy needed that photograph; his sister needed to indulge him. Don, overcome by guilt, needed to kiss his wife, right away, without any thought for the possibility of safety protocols. And she, even though she had to have known she was exposed—she had a huge infected bite mark on her arm—was so eager to accept Don’s apology that she kissed him back. Nostalgia is the most dangerous thing in this post-Rage world. Sentimentality kills.

This is an important variant on the art of the undead. In most cases, one of the central philosophical points of zombie cinema is that, if we fail to remember the past, if we fail to recognize that the past is rolled up into the present and constitutive of it, we run the risk of creating a situation in which humanity itself is suddenly in peril. Here, in this film, the notion is instead that you have to treat your personal past as if it is over and done with, if you want the world to come back into alignment with what it used to be in the past. If Andy had accepted that he might forget his mother’s face, the world would never have seen another outbreak of Rage, and Britain would have gone back to normal. If Don had been able to tolerate his abandonment of Alice, and waited until the doctors came back before touching her, he would have been protected from the infection. If Alice hadn’t said, “I love you, Don,” but instead, “I need some time, Don,” the world would have been safe. Our individual memories (the photograph) and our individual desire (the kiss) must be subordinated to our awareness that any possibility of a future for humanity hinges on our ability to put sentiment aside, and to recognize that the Rage Virus has permanently altered the present, and it will be with us in some way, forever. We forget that—instead fetishizing a past that was happier, cleaner, safer, more secure, or easier—only at our greatest peril.

Indeed, in order to survive and save her brother, Tam winds up having to execute zombie-Don, her own father, before he kills her and Andy. Tam has to draw the line between their familial past and the new, real present, forever conditioned by the presence of rage. After that Andy panics that, because he’s been exposed to infected blood, he’s now “one of them.” Tam looks into her brother’s eyes and sees the telltale sign—their mother had had it to, in her eyes—of someone who’s infected, but asymptomatic. She looks at him, and says, “No, no you’re not.” She has learned the lesson that 28 Weeks wants to teach: if we can be in this terrifying new world without nostalgia and without sentimentality, but with love and a broader definition of what qualifies as humanity, we may yet have hope for collective salvation. (Though this specific hope will only really bear fruit in the last film of the franchise.) Tam and Andy, amazingly enough, wind up being picked up in a US military helicopter and whisked away to safety.

Although…

Even with that note of hope, the film ends very, very darkly. We move forward a month from the prior shot of Andy and Tam in the escape helicopter. The camera pans over what appears to be the wrecked cab of a helicopter. It’s the helicopter that Andy and Tam were whisked away in. We know, because two nostalgia articles belonging to the pilot are still visible, left behind. We hear a French voice transmitting over the helicopter radio, a voice asking for help, asking if anyone is out there, if anyone can hear. Before we even see the rage-infected, we know that France is under siege. We know that the helicopter was abandoned there. We don’t know if Andy or Tam has survived, maybe having run away with the pilot, who may have learned the lesson that his nostalgic photo of his wife and his son’s drawing don’t matter now, not in this raging world. That, of course, is the most optimistic reading possible to put on this scene.

And the film does try to tamp it down, leaving us much less room for hope. We cut to an image of dozens of infecteds racing through the chunnel from the UK to France, and up into the dawn light in Paris. The film’s final shot is of a group of them, raging, growling, screaming, and racing up toward the iconic Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower, a symbol of French liberal democracy, Enlightenment, culture, and technological prowess, looks frail, vulnerable, and weirdly out of place with all those infected racing toward it. From this final shot—which could just as easily have featured the Washington monument in the background, or the Statue of Liberty—we’re meant to understand that the Rage Infection has now gone global, and that getting it under control is a whole different level of impossible now.

All because a little boy was afraid of forgetting his mother’s face.

Now, that’s a harsh note to land on, and it feels, like, really bad to blame a global zombocalypse on a completely understandable childhood human emotion. A need for connection with the mother one remembers. But the film’s point, I think, is that that mother—nice, fun-loving Alice—really is gone. The woman who remained was a terribly traumatized, broken, infected person. You can’t go back to some idealized, lionized, perfect moment in the past. It’s gone. The array of possible worlds, for Andy and everyone else along with him, is smaller now. They all have to accept that the world they knew and loved, and all the people in it, have been permanently affected by the cataclysmic overreach of the scientists and activists in the first film who engineered and unleashed the virus. You can’t just skip over one part of the past—the rage outbreak—and selectively choose only those past moments you like. It’s all one big sprawling mess. And if you forget that, or fail to understand it, like Andy and Tam did, you just invite the mess to come sprawling back at you to remind you.