The ending of 28 Years Later flips the entire movie on its head. After almost two hours of dread and pain, the film ends on a high-energy, seemingly out-of-left-field action sequence that leaves almost every audience member scratching their head. What the hell was that? What is the point? Well, clearly, you can interpret it however you’d like, but director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland do have some thoughts on the matter.
In the film, the main character Spike leaves his protected home to fend for himself on the mainland. Quickly, he’s almost run over by zombies, only to be saved by a group of jumpsuit-wearing killers led by Jimmy, the grown-up kid from the opening of the movie, played by Jack O’Connell. Jimmy, as you may remember, is a character we first meet watching TV shows like Teletubbies in the early 2000s when the Rage Virus took over the UK. He watched his family die and has had to survive on his own ever since.
The timing there is crucial because 28 Years Later Jimmy is a purposeful reference to Jimmy Savile, one of the most notorious pedophiles in British history. Savile was a super popular media personality for decades, working with children on the make-a-wish-esque series Jim’ll Fix It. But then, after his death in 2011, it was revealed that he was a horrific sex offender, assaulting hundreds of minors and adults over the course of his career. In the world of 28 Years Later, though, that public revelation never would have happened—28 Years‘ opening is set in 2002, Savile’s crimes were public exposed in 2012—and so the film is commenting on history and perception in a very specific, very British way.
“He’s as much to do with pop culture as he is to do with sportswear, to do with cricket, to do with the honors system,” Boyle told Business Insider. “It’s all kind of twisting in this partial remembrance, clinging onto things and then recreating them as an image for followers.”
“He’s a kaleidoscope, isn’t he, in a funny way,” Garland added. “A sort of trippy, fucked up kaleidoscope.”
So, in the movie, Jimmy of the film is presented as someone who was a fan of Savile, based his entire look on the person, but never learned the truth about him. Which is exactly the twisted point.
“The whole film, and if we ever get to make it, the whole trilogy, is in some ways about looking back and looking forwards,” Garland said. “And the relationship between looking forward to better worlds or attempting to make better worlds, or trying to construct the world that you’re in on the basis of old worlds, so there’s sort of contrast or conflict between the two. And the thing about looking back is how selective memory is and that it cherry picks and it has amnesia, and crucially it also misremembers—and we are living in a time right now which is absolutely dominated by a misremembered past. And so it’s that.”
And so, history in this universe misremembered Jimmy Savile, which sets the stage for what’s to come. “[The ending] is about reintroducing evil into what has been a compassionate environment,” Boyle explained to the Independent. “I asked Alex right at the beginning [of the writing process] to tell me the nature of each of the films. He said that the first film is about the nature of family. The second film is about the nature of evil.”
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