Warning, today's episode contains spoilers for twenty eight years later, the latest edition in Danny Boyle's Fast Zombie Infected Saga. Hello, my name is Jason Cooncepcion Mersey Night, and welcome back to X ray Vision, the podcast where we dive deep. It's your favorite shows, movies, comics and pop culture. Company over by our podcast where we'll bring to you three episodes a week.
Hub plus news. In today's episode, we're jumping into the quarantine zone where I should already be because apparently all English people are in the quarantine zone and we are recapping twenty eight years later. Bomp, bomp.
Let's talk about it, Rosie. The first thing I want to ask you is what kind of English accents are these? They feel kind of a little Liverpudlian.
Well, okay, so it is. I think I believe from what we see at the beginning, they are somewhere in Scotland, so I think you're getting like northern accents, Northern Scottish, some Scottish. I was impressed by Aaron Taylor Johnson specifically, I felt like he was doing a great accent. It feels like the kid's accent was was definitely like his own accent. He was doing a great job. The kid who played Spike. And then obviously Jodi Comer is a famous liver Pudley and I believe so I think that
her accent was also a correct accent. I'm I'm very interested about the choice to tell the story in this isolated little ta I have been so much interesting stuff. Okay, what do you want to do? You want to off the dome recap it together? And then they go off about Okay, not that much, but there's a lot to talk about, like psychologically, and.
Yeah, well we'll we'll plot it out and then we'll do a quick off the dom recap and then we
will we'll really kind of dig in. So okay, we open on a cold open of the spreading infection that is now spreading to this part of the UK, which, as you mentioned, appears to be in northern England, somewhere towards the border of Scotland, and we watch as a family home where a bunch of it seems like either an extended family or a lot of different families from the community have been sheltering and we watch this house get overrun. We watch this young boy escape the house.
He runs to a nearby church where his dad is the pre east and he says, Dad, what's going on? Like, what's going on? His dad says, well, it's judgment day. It's it's awesome, this is great.
Here take a day to be judged, a.
Beautiful day to be judged. Here, take my cross. He takes off the golden cross necklace, hands it to his son. His son hides in this like little cell, like under a grate under the floor. The infected Russian. They overwhelm his father, who turns into an affected as well, and then we flash forward to twenty eight years later. Done
this dun dun duh. This community that lives on a small, very very small maybe maybe three mile square or something like that island that is I don't know, three hundred yards off the coast and connected by a very very small narrow causeway that is only available for like four hours,
five hours a day when the tide is low. This community is completely self sufficient, and in this community lives Jamie Aaron Taylor Johnson, a strapping father of young Spike played by Alfie Williams, who is twelve and today is getting ready for his first journey onto the Mainland for really no reason. They're not going They're just going to like get kills on Mike a kill, yeah, which is our first hint.
First inkling Aaron Taylor Johnson is maybe not a good dad.
In fact, I will argue later spoiler that he is the true villain of this day.
He is the true villain of this movie. And I think that's actually a major plot point of this trilogy as oh well, out of this duology and now new entry into the franchise, we should say. Yeah. I also think that something that was so interesting to me. I don't really know if America has those kind of causeway can in the same way, but when you are in England.
In some places, but not to that extent.
Yeah, in England it is really common. I have been on many holidays with family, friends and stuff where there is a part of the It's never usually to an entire like functioning island, but there will be like a little beautiful green island where you can go and see certain kinds of birds, but you gotta go across the causeway. So I thought that was a very interesting, unique kind
of spin. I feel like maybe these are supposed to be like the Hebrides or Shetland or Orkney or something like that, which are the kind of islands off the
coast of Scotland. But I thought the Causeway thing was a very specific like that is something that you've experienced if you've gone on like an English holiday, and I thought that was like a really good culturally specific nod and also very unique fun twist for a kind of zombie monster movie where there is and this will also lead to It's it's our hands.
It's in a sense an island on the island England. It's a it's a microcosm of England itself, and then the culture of this place speaks to that.
And very interestingly, And I do think I'm very intrigued to see what the second movie is because I think that this film actually offers up a lot of questions about the community that we are on with Spike and his father and his mom.
The last five minutes of the movie takes an insane left turn, which po will discuss. Okay, so Jamie is going to take Spike to the mainland, not to forge, not to gather supplies, but literally just to.
Kill something that no one else would do until they would.
Play he's three years younger. He's three years younger than normally they would do it, but apparently Jamie is convinced them that now is the time. His Jamie's wife, Spike's mother Isila, is very very ill and not quite sure what's going on all the time, and when she learns that Jamie is taking Spike on the mainland, she freaks out naturally, and so they have to Jamie then has to lie to her and says, oh, no, no, where, He's just going to school. Okay. They head out, They
go through the town. The town is very excited. They're going, yeah, go get them Spike. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yah yeah yeah. So they go out. They're walking around and they eventually come to a point in the woods, past the beach, past the hill, kind of skirting around the edge of the town. They come to a place in the woods where we meet our new zombie species, which is like, I forget what they called them, slow mos, I think.
And look, I have to say, this is a classic.
This is the George Romero style, but it's a classic Alex Goland, like Alex golland Danny Boyle, like these are the fat zombies that crawl on the floor.
Guinea zombies get to live within community and run around together, but the fat zombies they have to crawl around on the floor eating worms. So you had lots of weird internalized fat phobia there, but great creature design.
And also incredible creature drive.
Giving If you saw the Alex Garland movie Men, this sequence is very giving like Men. It's very like they crawl on the ground. The mushrooms are kind of part of them. They almost seem like they're part of the ecological maker.
Yeah, there's a crow like riding on the back of this SloMo as it moves around.
Very nature focused and connected to kind of the land and the ground.
Yeah, yes, very annihilation like, yes, the reclaiming of the land by nature. So Jamie's like, perfect, Spike here, you go kill him. You gotta hit him right in the neck and then they die. So Spike takes a shot, kills the SloMo, and then they get surprised by like the slomo's partner and other SloMo who was there. Jamie rises up, he kills this one, and then they see the slow most child, which is our hint that this
is how the infected of replenishing their ranks. They are breeding out here, and he's about to kill the child, but then it runs off, okay, so they keep going. They keep going. They come to like an abandoned house on the edge of town, and in there they see that some one of the human communities in there has taken a person, maybe a criminal or for whatever reason and strung them up with a bag over their head from the ceiling so that they can be infected by
the infected. And this person is now infected. And Jamie's like, Spike camere, you gotta see this. I really like, this is sick. You gotta this. You gotta to learn about this. Now you're twelve and it's time to learn about what a terrible place.
And Spike is like puking, like he doesn't want to see. That's also the body has uh as coughed into it, which I think we're gonna be kind of learning more about what this is in the follow up movie. I think also I'm gonna pose a question here. I think that the layout of this house looks identical to the house at the beginning where the kids were watching Tellytubbies and they all got eaten, because they very specifically show that like the door is on the left and there's
stairs up there. So I'm interested to know if that could be that house thirty years later, because the implication is they're probably somewhere on the mainland. But yeah, very creepy stuff. And you get some really good infected action in this sequence because the infected do kind of break in and Jamie and Spike have to kind of crawl up to the attic and hide in the attic, which is a really great chaotic scene.
It's very wonderful suspense here we.
Get to see life on the island is very calm. The first thing I was thinking, and we'll talk about this on our roundtable and we do it on Friday, but I was like, we've got to compare Jackson Hole to the weird little Scottish island, like who's.
The Like, what's going on in Jackson Hall? There's no question? Yeah, well okay, so so we should add that one of the things we learned about this community is that they have a rule, and that's you can leave and you can come back, but if you disappear, no one's coming to look for you, because the people they learned the hard way, because people don't come back. And I guess they've had problems with infected or you're bringing back infected there,
so no one's coming to look for you. So they have to spend the night up in this attic, and that's when we learn more about the lore of twenty eight years later, that being that, guess what the rest of the world is fucking fine. Europe is fine. It is England in the UK that is completely cordoned off a la Jurassic Park from the mainland, and a kind
of joint European military task force is constantly patrolling. And so like Jamie says this, like, look, there's a there's a boat out there patrolling the waters to keep the quarantine. Must be the French.
That must be the French.
And this is this is a thing about this this community on the island is it's very much steeped in the I don't know why I'm telling you this, but to me as an American classic culture and iconography of like conservative oh yeah, you know, God saves the Queen England even even you know, even up to and including this kind of historic antipathy towards the French, because they just assume that it's the French.
That something that's extremely specific that they do in this movie, and they focus on quite a lot, is the Saint George's flag, which is the white flag with the red cross in England. If you live in England, if you especially I grew up in London, if somebody's flying that flag, they're a racist. That's basically your read is like, don't go in that part. If they have that flag up, it's a level of nationalism that in the eighties led to the National Front and other neo fascists and neo
Nazi organizations. So the fact that they fly that on the island is a big tell. And there is so interestingly some strange kind of we see some strange like religious iconography on the island. They call it the Holy Island that it's very vague, but there are odd trappings.
There are many paintings of the Queen. There's this huge tapestry that says, you know, fail, we might fail, we might, but go on most us. Yeah, this kind of like England goes it alone, kind of classic English insanity. Yes, so okay, So they spend the night there and then important thing is Jamie.
Sees a fire and asks his dad fires nothing, don't worry about.
It, and it's very clear that his dad knows what it is but doesn't want to talk, like he says, I said, I don't know, you know, or something to
that effect. And it's really burning out there. So then Spike goes to sleep and he has troubling dreams, including you know, about the anxiety is feeling about his mom and and enlarge and what they've seen to the chase that they had being pursued by the infected, and also the fact that now he is increasingly concerned that his dad is lying to him and the community is not telling them a complete truth. He's very concerned about his mother's health and he's thinking all the time about like,
isn't there anything we could do to help her? And there seems to be nothing. Again, this very like NHS coded, Well there's no doctor and we just have to go on. You can't you can't dream of anything else. Don't even think about wishing that there was medical help here. We must sold.
Strange because obviously the NHS is like a founding principle of what is great about England, even though it's only been around for you know, just like under one hundred years. But it is very interesting that on this island. There's just no doctor and soldiers. Very specific and again probably to do with whatever the weird cult aspects are that
we don't kind of fully learn about. But yeah, this idea that there's no doctor and essentially that while the rest of the island lives kind of in like a cozy you know, this kind of feudal ideal of like a past England, which is what I think they're kind of playing on here. She lives in like a very dirty, gross room where her sheets are likely filthy, yes, Isler, and even downstairs, where Jamie and Spike seem to live,
is better. So there is a hint to Jamie Isler is just like a burden, and it's very clear that that's how he feels. I'm kind of get into that even more so.
Spike's having bad dreams. But then he's awoken because the house is just collapsing. It's a very old house and it's been through a lot and it's partially wrecked anyway. So they rush out of the house, but then they're pursued by the infected, who were drawn by the sound. And this is our first encounter with what they call the alphas, which are like the biggest. They're like the Boss infected. They're huge, they take like multiple arrows to
break down. In fact, it's only really like one of the metal harpoons that they have back at that island that can that are you know, like anchored into the ground, that can really take one down. So they're pursued by this, and they run all the way back to the shore, back to the causeway, and it's very early and so there's still water over the causeway.
But seeing the kind of the northern lights again, Yes, they're in Scotland and they run across and they're being pursued by what they call in this movie the Alpha. And the idea here is like the Alpha is a zombie that kind of well or an infected that in experience is more understanding that waited for them, didn't just run away there is.
It's a leader of It's a leader of some sort.
I will say, I do think that this leans into one of in my opinion, Alex Garland less so Danny boyle biggest issues, which is like, this is one of the only brown characters in the movie, and talk about this, Actually you think it fits into the space I actually fits.
I actually I think it actually fits into the not even the subtext nationalists like yes, because to me, we'll talk about this more in depth after. But to me, twenty eight days later is about terrorism nine to eleven and though it was you know, created obviously, while you know nine.
Haven't happened while it was made.
Yeah, twenty eight weeks is about the Iraq occupation and twenty eight years is about Brexit and nationalism in England. So I think it actually I think it actually fits, and we'll talk about that later. Okay, let's go to break in.
We'll be up.
We're at Okay, So they run down the causeway. The defenders are roused. They are you know, the defenders managed to load that big crossbow and take down the Alpha, and Jamie's pounding on the gate like let us say, let us in, but they have to check their eyes to make sure, you know, and like wait thirty seconds.
And they're both so stressed that you can't tell whether it's very driver or so or not, you know, you understand, and and they have to waste to be the logical leader makes them kind of wait. It's a great tense moment, and yeah, it's it's very interesting. Also should note has come and just pulled up. They're on the house that they hide in. Somebody just scrawled the word Jimmy on it.
And because we've got Jamie as the dad, you kind of think, well, maybe the reason he knows how to go there is he is Jimmy the kid from the beginning. So there's lots of interesting twists there. How does Aaron Taylor Johnson's character know this area so well? But then they end up back on the island and there's a
huge party for them. They've already kind of started partying, which is very funny, I think because again leans into this kind of nationalistic idea of like, well, you know what, even if they don't come back, we're still celebrating because we're still like keeping on. You know, they don't really care whether they come back or not, because it's quite clear at this point they missed low Tide. Originally they might not come back. But the party is going strong.
Everybody's wasted, and it's very chaotically filmed.
There's a lot of very much Yeah, it's very much like the party is very much like you know, west Ham just won the f A Cup.
Yes, very much like that. Also like very much in very much giving like a slaughtered lamb from the American wealth in London, and you know, and and and they did, so we'd mentioned Boyle and Alex scland. But the other big thing here is that Anthony DoD Mantle, who's the cinematographer of the original movie, is back for this one. And I think they do really interesting stuff with the editing to make you feel structurally like you're in the.
In there's so much inter cutting. Yes, let's talk about that in a second. So okay, the We're at the party and Jamie is recounting Spike's kill to the Gathered community, and he's he's embellishing to the point of lying about what's saying.
He didn't just kill the one zombie. He doesn't tell them that he missed any because once the fast zombie started coming, Spike just couldn't keep up because he's literally a baby, and Jamie doesn't care. He's calling him the giant Killer. He's telling these stories and it's finally settling in that his suspicions about his dad being a liar are true. Spike is realizing his dad is a liar, and.
He's very troubled.
Her uncomfortable and then we get the kind of big reveal about Jamie, which is we there was a woman who when they were leaving, smiling at him, and then we see that he's fucking a school teacher, and as me and Joel were celebrating in our seats last night, he happily eats out that teacher just on the street, like in front of his child. By the way, he's gone to the dark away, but come on that. It's like, come on, and Spike sees them. He's very upset. He
goes back to his mum. Yeah, just going to notice that's the second horror movie of the summer. Al he's seen a woman get eating out on screen. Sinnas and twenty eight Years like this go to celebrate.
And both both spoiler featuring Jack O'Connell. Anyway, So so Spike goes home and there's an older member of the community there and he was asleep, you know, kind of like say, I'm watching the house, and Spike questions him about he saw this fire and Sam is like, oh, yeah, that's doctor doctor Kelson. And Spike's like, wait, there's a doctor and he's like, yeah, yeah, there's a doctor out there. He's probably gone crazy. By now nobody's seen him in a long time, but like it's probably him, and so
now Spike really trouble. He crawls into bed with his mom. They go to sleep. There's this wonderful more editing of like Isla is like asking Spike who she thinks is her dad, like to go to the store or something, and we see like this wonderful.
Like uh.
Shot of the village on the mainland before and then now, and then Spike wakes up. He goes down to breakfast, and he confronts Jamie about the doctor. What was this about the doctor? You didn't tell me there's a fucking doctor. And Jamie is like's not a doctor, and he's like, yes, there is, like Sam told me, and so Jamie is pissed, but he tells him and he tells him like a
scary story. He's like, well, you know, when I was younger, we creeped over there and we saw doctor Kelson with all these bodies lined up like head to toe, very very neatly, and he saw us looking at him from the hill and he waved at us very casually, like come on down, guys, have a spot of tea, and we ran away okay, and so that's.
The story to say something. First of all, yeah, Jimmy, Jamie, why your name is Aaron Taylor Johnson. I'm bad.
I love that we're just shitting on Jami.
I'm a Jamie hey, honestly, but he's very hateable. He's very hateable, and Amaron Taylor Johnson does a great job. But I think this is really interesting too because I think this shows the kind of classic horror nature of like lack of communication. Because my first thought, and look, is doctor Kelson at least slightly crazy? Yes, but my first thought was he is a doctor and he's just burning all the infected like that seems kind of smart
to me. And it was interesting that in that moment and in that tribalism, they saw this thing that was obviously completely terrifying and he's dressed in like a doctor's thing with a mask on, and they ran away. But it's also like, Jamie, that guy is a doctor, like your wife is clearly severely ill.
Again, I think when you kind of like dig under the surface, it's like this anti science, anti immigrant, anti the main absolutely knowing anything else about anything. It's this very insular like again breaks it like.
Oh, very brexit, very co to.
Dedication to separation from everything, from every influence and making everything seem like it's fucking great by lying about the bravery that you're displaying when you're taking like twelve year old boys out into the woods to get chased by zombies. Yes, exactly.
Oh also yes, just quickly to note it's I was just googling.
It's slow lows slow lows okay, slow los okay. So Spite decides, you know what, I'm taking Mom to the doctor. So he sets a fire to kind of like create a distraction, gets mom up, gets his arrows, he gets his stuff, He gets a big bag of apples, and they set off, and he.
Loves apples, like Kawi Lennard, loving apples.
You loveing these apple full of apples, full of apples. So they go out. They spend the night in a church, in this beautiful like stone church that I believe we are meant to think is the church from the cold open.
Yes, I do think that we are supposed to see that. I think that they are very close to that part of the mainland.
And I agree, and.
It's clear by church.
Yes, he's clearly what happens at the end that we are in the in the same area as the cold over it. So they spend the night and Spike is supposed to keep the watch, but he falls asleep, and when he falls asleep, one of these slolos crawls up and is about to bite them. But then next thing, you know, like a dream, he wakes up in the morning and the slolo is dead with a shirt or something over its head so that it can be so they could be killed without the blood splattering everywhere. And
we realized that it was his mother. Yeah, also doesn't remember doing it, ilad did it.
She kind of has like a flashback protectiveness.
Yeah.
And also I thought this was really interesting too because I thought that was kind of an implication head before she got sick, she was probably like a.
Badass too, And I got that as well.
It fits Jamie's kind of old school version of life, this kind of looking back at history where men are the leaders and men are the ones who do everything. It kind of suits him to have her trapped in the house, you know.
I think that I think that's that's I think that's the correct read. In fact, I think that to your point, Jamie was probably now we're reading into it. But I agree with where you're going. I believe that Jamie probably felt like my wife's more badass than me.
What is exactly, I think it's a threat. I think she was a threat to him.
So they wake up in the morning, they set off again. Now there's a quick cut to eight soldiers from this
European task force. They're running. They're running along like a sluiceway along the coast, and they're being chased by zombies and they're getting wiped out one by one and eventually, like an Alpha kills all but one of them by tearing the head straight off the body so that the spine is attached to We should add that the alphas to your point about having more intellect, they also have an They also seem to understand symbolism, because they will take the heads that they pull off of deer or
whatever and they'll hang them in the trees as a court of sort of street sign.
Yeah. Yeah, because the thing that's interesting, and I do think we're going to learn more about this is there was a great quote recently from Alex Garland where he was essentially like, what you've got to understand is these are actually not zombies. They have never gone, they've never died and come back to life. Yeah, they are just people who are extremely sick with the rage virus. So this is essentially the movie begins to imagine what would
a society look like for those people. Now, it's very loose and we don't get to see a lot of it, but it's an interesting kind of trail of this tribalism and also why raises the question of why does Jamie need to go to the mainland to kill zombies. He says multiple times they don't need anything from the mainland. They don't need anything that they don't already have on the village. The village is idyllicy, kind of leaning into that notion of socialism, like Jackson Hall, you can take
what you need, don't take too much. But they don't need to go there. So he's choosing to go to another space which is now inhabited by different kind of people and just kill them for fun, which is.
Very I agree. And this also I think, you know, we've talked about our criticism of The Walking Dead, which at a certain point I felt the show anyway became a story about how Americans are obsessed with guns and want to use them neighbors, and Jamie is very much that, but in the English way.
And it's really interesting because because of gun laws in England post the Tragedy of Thumb, English people, even in rural countries like and rural areas, they don't they don't get to have guns in the same way as Americans. They don't get to and it is a conversation that has always been going on about, you know, people trying to take people's guns, just like it is here. So I think there is an interesting idea of for Jamie, what freedom is is like being able to just go
and kill somebody even when you don't need to. It's really scary stuff. And I think that the more you dig into this movie, I think it's a pretty deep and amazing movie. Honestly, I thought I had some issues, but I think they kind of. I think a lot of what they do here is actually very intentional and.
The SAME's I'm eager to dig into it because I had the same takeaway that it's a tremendously deep and angry zombie film that is like worth thinking about. Okay, so the last surviving Swedish named Eric, who's this wonderful comic relief.
He's so funny.
It's so funny. He saves Spike and Isla from a zombie attack at a shell gas station. The s has fallen off, so which assists Hell and it's like which is a joke from twenty eight Days.
Also, by the way, also as well, a great kind of real English experience here, which is a side of the road kind of restaurants. We don't even really call them din as. They always have funny names like Happy Eta and Little Chef, and that's kind of where they end up here. It's Benzi and has kind of come up from the ground of the shell you for years,
and it's full of gas. Eric manages to basically blow the place up save them and then kind of realizes he's stuck in this unusual situation where currently Eiler is disassociating and thinks that Spike is her dad, and it's really really they do a great job making this situation that is quite heartbreaking, very funny just because of Eric's reactions, and there's some great moments like Eric carries Eyler a long way and then she kind of comes back to
herself and walks, and he goes, wait, she can walk and everyone in the cinema was like cracking up a very fat and they and they make their way to get yes.
So Eric. From Eric, we learned that essentially life on the European continent and presumably in the rest of the world has gone on as normal without it.
They have mobile phones, they.
Have the society has gone on. Nobody seems to miss England that much. Eric the Internet. They have the Internet, they have cell phones. Spiker's like, what is that? What's the Internet? What's he doesn't under He's like Captain America who just got woken up? None of the references. And Eric shows like a picture of his fiance and what is one of the most like just a hilarious moment, like in any that. So and so they go on. Eventually they they come to this train and Isla hears
these sounds from inside the train. She goes in. She kind of breaks away from from everybody and goes inside. And there we see and infected a pregnant effect in giving birth. And we had seen this infected woman kind of wandering around previously, and in this moment of true humanity, Isla like reaches out and helps brace this infected woman so that she can properly give birth and also have this like kind of connection with another woman to support her in this moment, like woman's woman and.
She's so scared and she's in so much pain, and.
There's this real, it's a real moment of like connectedness where the infected nature of this person fades just enough to allow her like essential womanhood and humanity to come through a turn with another woman.
Yeah, and also as well, just another thing I thought was really interesting here is I wonder this also hinted to me that another reason why maybe they were happy to allow Eila to just kind of rot in her bed when she was clearly very ill, is I wonder if there is a contingent of people on the island or in the community who have maybe raised the idea
that the infected are not just mindless zombies. Because she reaches out to that woman in just instantly, like it isstantly, almost kind of natural to her, She slowly reaches out, she helps the infected woman give birth, and then the infected woman kind of turns back to her feral nature when she sees Eric with a gun and Eric kills her.
Eric Eric kills her.
So it turns out the baby.
The baby's fine. Apparently the placenta a mother's womb is an effective filter for infection. More on that later. And now Ila and Spike go running away from the alpha partner of this woman who has come raging through the train and is now chasing them, chasing them across the field, and just when he's about to get his paws on them, a dart. And this, by the way, this alpha is the blown uh person of color. As far as there might have been others in the.
Crowd of people on the island, but.
They don't I think one of Asian.
All of the definitely Asian. So we do see. But generally this is the predominant costing yeah, passion that we have in the movie.
So so gets hit with like a sleep dart. And now we meet doctor Kelson Ray Fines, Ralph Fines. He's covered in iodine in order to stop like infected, to kill in the infection within blood that splatters on him. And he apologizes like I'm so sorry for my appearance, and then he is like this alpha is and I forget what he had named to Samson. This is Samson.
He's been in the area for about three years or so, and It's clear that Kelson has this very interesting almost this relationship with the infected where he views them still as people and part of the natural world. He's unwilling to kill Samson.
And he's been living essentially like a side by side with him simply through this still like medication. But I think it's very interesting because again it presents a different way of living and thinking about things correct.
So they they retire to doctor Kelson's what they call the Bone Church, what I'm calling Bone Henge, which is this massive stonehenge of bones, which is what doctor Kelson has been working on. He tells them, you know, they're just people who are very ill, and I wanted to create I was worried that I would live the rest of my life and die without explaining what this is to somebody. This is my memorial to everyone who has
died in the area. To make sure that people, whatever happens in the coming years, that people will see this and understand that these are all the human beings who had thoughts and loved ones and emotions and they all perished. And that includes the infected, whose bodies he gathers up and burns and then places their skulls and bones in these huge towers. So Spike's like, well, we've been looking for a you're a doctor, can you examine my mom?
He doesn't. He realizes that Isla has cancer and it's very far along.
Yeah, And it was always like if you've ever, you know, watched a movie or a TV show, which, by the way, some of the men on that island have they have memories that are older than that. Because it's only twenty eight years after this, it's very clear she has brain cancer. Like just from the way she's behaving, there's obviously a brain tumor. She's having nosebleeds, she's having disassociative kind of moments, and it has missed because she's been in that bedroom
however long. It's metastasized and it's gone to the rest of her body. And she kind of reveals at this point that she sort of knew that was the case, but she just wanted someone else to be the one to tell her son. She didn't want to have to deal with that and upset.
So Spikers obviously shattered that there's nothing that can be done. And while he Ala is like holding him and trying to comfort him, this kind of understanding passes between her and the doctor that okay, go ahead and hit him with a little bit of that tranquilizer.
She shit him a little bit of that morphine.
A little so he could do what comes next. So he trank darts him, and then trank darts the mom who and then they go off and she allows herself to be euthanized. It's her choice, and he renders her body into bones and returns with the skull. And when Spike kind of is coming to he says to Spike, you know, remember I told you this phrase and he told her earlier Memento Morian's Latin, and remember you must die,
and you know remember that you are. It will give your life, meaning it gives all of our lives, meaning that there will come this moment when we're no more and death comes for us all. And there's a lot of bad ways you can go, but there are good ways too, and the good ways are where you're with your loved ones. You pass peacefully. And you know he's trying to say that your mother decided, she took agency, decided.
Now I'm with my son, I'm with a doctor, I'm with someone who values life, and now is the time that I want to go not alone in this room while my husband is out fucking the school teacher exactly.
And he passes the he passes the skull to Spike, and interestingly, here Spike has actually already placed a skull because they had Eric's head and the doctor decided he was gonna render all the fout of that, give him the skull and let Spike place it. And now he says, he gives him his mum's skull, and he says, you know,
place it in the very best place. And so he climbs to the top of this huge mountain of kind of probably like thirty foot tall mountain of skulls, and he places his mom's head on the top and he watches the sunrise and then.
It's it's really moving. So it is an incredibly movies. This sequence is we haven't even really timely gone.
Is like the cinematography in this is amazing and it's gonna blow people's minds because guess what, as they have talked about, but this has now been confirmed in a recent La Times piece with the three major players, Garland Boil and DoD Mantle, the cinematographer. In a chat with Mark Olson, they confirmed that seventy five to eighty percent of this movie was shot entirely on iPhones. I mean,
it looks and the cinematography is unbelievable. There are these really beautiful shots of England and this kind of idyllic, huge rural spaces. It's really quite fantastic to look at. And that sequence leads to kind of our final moments of the movie where Spike he takes the baby in a little shopping basket which I loved, and he goes back to that. He makes it back to the island, and I thought that he was going to keep the baby,
but instead he goes across the causeway. He hangs the baby up outside, leaves a note in it, and decides that. We see twenty six days later he has left and he is living on his own and he doesn't want to return to his father understandable, who by the way we see hit him earlier in the movie, who he know kind of his mom sequested away like that, and he decides he's just going to go it alone. His dad is very mad about it. He wants to have
something to control. He kind of screams his way into the center of the ocean, and you think you're like, oh, this is like an emotionally raw place to end the movie. No, because Danny Boyle has a trick off his sleeve, absolutely deranged and on him insane. The moment where I felt like, Okay, I'm totally in this was actually the thing I think.
I was in before this, but when this Okay, So Spike is on his travels. He's on a kind of lonely road, this one lane, twisty road heading up it seems north, and he stopped to have a fish that he had caught and he's eating it, but then the infect had come, and so he takes a couple out, but then there's more and he starts running. He comes to a part of the road where it's been blocked off by all these stones, and now the infected are
really racing. Enemy takes one down and then but there's more coming up behind him, and then he hears the voice and it's our friend Jack O'Connell from Sinners.
The Irish Empire, from Sinners Irish Skins.
Who was the who was the boy who survived from Open.
Not we assumed The film wants you to think that it's Aaron Taylor Johnson because his name is Jamie, and his name was Jimmy. But we see here that this character who is wearing a full personal scribe with a long blonde wig with a crown like a little tiara, and he's on round his neck. He has the chain that his father gave him, but he's wearing the cross upside down and he's like, oh, hello, like, do you need any help? May we step in? And suddenly he's got like four.
The way, who I.
Learned are also all called Jimmy in this world, and one of them is our favorite, Aaron Kellyman. We love her. She's one of the Jimmy's from the fame.
Of Solo and Solo.
Yes, Brave Winter Soldier, Falcon and the Winter Soldier. She's great and so yes, we end up in a situation where these kids jump in or wearing different colored tracksuits and doing some insane like gymnastics style fighting with golf clubs and just take out the infected. And it's one of the wildest left turns because.
Not only not only do they take them out, but they take them out with this almost martial arts flips like somersaults.
And they each have different moves kind of chopping off the zombie heads. So this is my theory. When we first meet Jimmy, him and the kids are in that room, he sees them get killed. They're watching Tellytubbies on VHS. I think we're going to find out that Jimmy and his friends like taught themselves via watching like martial arts
movies on VHS. I think there's a big in here with like reused footage, b roll kind of notions of like what stories have impacted these kids who are fighting, impact these kind of patriotic visions of like English people shooting these arrows to warring countries, and and I think that leads into this. But it's absolutely unhinged. And if you don't, if it doesn't hit for you, I think it could make you really dislike the movie. But I
loved it because what it implies. One it ties together cold open clothes, but also it is very much about You're starting to understand that the way that Spike and his family lived is just one way that people are living in this space in this apocalypse. And we're clearly gonna learn more about people like Dr Kelson, about like Jimmy's who I believe his name is, like sir Jimmy Crystal is the full name, so like, I'm so excited
to see where that goes. And Jack O'Connell the last movie, he kind of the last thing he says to him is he's like, let's be pals and you kind of end. So you imagine that Spike is gonna be with these characters. Jay said before we end, give us your read on this movie, because I think it's correct.
Well, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back. Okay, we're back. Okay, here here's my reactions. Is me. First of all, I really feel like, listen, it is notable that there are so few characters color and none on the island zero And I think.
I think there's a couple, maybe a kidney, but you don't. They're not major play as. You don't see them a lot.
And I think it's very I think that's done very consciously because I think this is essentially again, I believe it's the Brexit slash nationalism twenty eight later entrant in the franchise, and I think it's about how it's about this reality in which England has separated itself or been
separated from the rest of the world. In europe Brexit, and that the rest of the world has gone on as normal, while in England they have been reduced to this almost medieval regret type of reality where they're living
behind walls. And this is hammered home by these constant snippets that are edited in of like John Gilgood movies where you know where you're seeing classic scene classic movies, scenes from classic English movies of you know, archers on the on the hillside taking out like armies of cavalry
and sieges being undertaken against castles. And to me, it's the movie very consciously is placing this film in a continuum of an ideal English culture, even to the point of there's like a Canterbury Tales type feel to the story.
Oh very much, with the with the way that different characters coming.
In, like Eric coming in with these like absurd in these kind of like absurd setups within a larger journey to somewhere right. And the hero of the film is not a Jamie who is this again insular kind of dunderheaded, ignores his wife, kind of classic football hoodlum of a guy. It's the son who is like all of this is lies, All of this we go it alone is lies. My dad is lying to me. All the stuff around me in this town appears to be propaganda. I want to
know what the rest of the world is about. And the other hero of this story is the doctor, right, the man of sciences, humanity, who says, these are people. Samson, again one of the few characters of color in the story. In an indifferent zombie movie, they'd slaughter him, but doctor Kelson is just like, no, no, we're not gonna We're gonna put him to sleep, and then we're gonna go away and we're gonna let the natural world take its course.
And that character is never killed, We never see you know that he is, in fact just like living side by side in a type of community amongst these these people. And so I think that to me, this is this is a story about the dangers of insolarity, of nativism and disconnection from the rest of the world, of of a antipathy towards learning and towards community. And in that sense, I think it's a very deep and moving film and
a tremendously angry film. Also because it's also saying like, look at what when we decide to do this, look at what happens. Look at what we become. Look at the way we're just letting this person die alone, and we're so ashamed by it that we pretend that everything is that these characters are pretending everything's actually a brain. That my wife is dying like alone with no doctor, And shouldn't we want more? Shouldn't we think where is the doctor?
But no, the that's right, And I think you touch on something really good. And in the in that New alle Times article, they basically say that this is what Boyle says. We had the idea of looking back and valuing of these supposed English virtues of this heroic defiance. You know, we few, we band of brothers, says Boyle,
quoting Shakespeare. And they talk about the sound that has become like a viral TikTok sound, which was the extended teaser trailer from last year, which had the really intense nineteen fifteen recording of the Rudyard Kipling poem Boots read by the actor Taylor Holmes, with its hypnotically repeated line of boots, boots, boots moving up and down again, and they kind of talk about how originally they were going to use the speech from Henry the fifth the Saint
Crispin's Day speech, but it was too much. And I think that it is really a movie about thinking about legacy, what gets left behind, the ways that you kind of stop this stuff unintentionally or intentionally. And yeah, I just it's very interesting. I think it's going to be a
very interesting film to look back at. And I'm very excited because the next movie, which is actually was made by Nia da Costa, has already been filmed back to back with this, and that is twenty eight years later Bone Church, So it will be very interesting to see what happens.
An incredible, incredible film where they haven't been able to I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, and I can't wait for the next one to come out. Really fascinating movie.
Yeah, totally way more than I was expecting to chop up. And it's going to be really fun to talk about this on our round table. Oh I can't, Joelle, I am common.
Yes. So on the next episode of X ray Vision, We've got news in a special interview with Sam Bailey, director of Ironheart on Disney Plus episodes one through three or directed by Sam. So check that out. That's for this episode. Thanks for listening. Bye Vision is hosted by Jason Concepcion and Rosie Knight and is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
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