This will contain spoilers for the 2025 Alex Garland movie 28 Years Later. Also, these are rough thoughts written right after viewing, apologies if it sucks.
28 Years Later was a fine movie. I say this in the sense that it wasn’t something I’d watch again, but it was largely inoffensive.
I remember a section at the beginning of the film where our protagonist, an 11 year old Scottish boy named Spike, and his father — whose name I will have to Google because I couldn’t recall it if I tried — are leaving their island-on-an-island home. The scene features a conversation between father and son, the former quizzing the latter about what this journey across the causeway means. Throughout the quizzing is a dramatic reading of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Boots, written to evoke the repetitive thoughts of a solider marching among the British Army in Africa. The reading was performed by Kipling himself which I believe added a certain earnestness to the pathos the poem was trying to evoke.
I remember the first time I heard this reading of Boots, which I found incredibly scintillating in a darkly depressive way. It was in an advertisement for the film that had popped up several times on my TikTok For You Page. Something about the haunting nature of the poem’s performance was inherently compelling. It fed an appetite that I don’t often acknowledge for a certain macabre form of media. I was not alone in this fascination, in fact, the same compulsion seemed to be felt by many others online.
The reading of Boots became a semi-viral TikTok audio, often accompanying the platform’s own twist on the phenomena of Creepypastas — a mutation of a meme. It metastasized across my algorithm, invading every nook and cranny of my feed until it was something I had just learned to live with, to tune out. The compelling nature of Kipling’s reading was diminished through overexposure, and when the scene rolled across the screen at my local theatre I felt nothing at all.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I felt bored. I don’t think this was Garland’s intention when writing 28 Years Later. I feel as though I was dissecting the scene as it played out more than I was actively experiencing it. Interwoven within the shots of Spike and his father leaving via the causeway were others featuring the town making preparations to preserve its isolation, local boys doing archery drills spliced with clips of various ancient armies drilling for battle. What I surmised from the scene was an intention to show us how, othered by the tides and tradition, the lives of these survivors are monotonously dire.
I didn’t feel that intended monotony because Kipling’s reading had already been drummed so thoroughly into me that any visceral reaction I might experience had already been evoked.
Oh, by the way, the dad’s name is Jamie.