Run for the Sun, Little One

Carly Mattox considers recent critiques of imperialist nostalgia via Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later” and Adam Curtis’s “Shifty.”

By Carly MattoxDecember 10, 2025

• Film

• Television

NEAR THE START of Danny Boyle’s most recent film, 28 Years Later (2025), we meet Spike (Alfie Williams), a 12-year-old boy who lives on a secluded island tethered to the coast of North East England by a causeway accessible only at low tide. Spike’s father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has decided that his son is old enough for a venture over that narrow strip of rocks and onto the zombie-infested mainland. A parade of locals escorts father and son to the causeway; the hardened, tight-knit community has developed a familiarity with this ritual, with what has become their village’s regular rite of passage. They pass the guard tower and the town walls, and, finally, they step together across the causeway’s threshold.

It’s here that “Boots”—the 1903 poem originally written by Rudyard Kipling, recited by American actor Taylor Holmes in a 1915 recording—is cued in the film. The effect of the poem’s chanting is not unlike hearing a remix of Kipling’s text, underscored by low, booming synths and waves of ambient noise. Visually, the sequence splices archival footage between more functional scenes of narrative. Audiences see images of World War I soldiers in trenches juxtaposed with shots from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944). Boots—an arrow releases from its bow—boots—a grainy soldier fires his gun—boots—King Henry in all his regalia—boots—movin’ up and down again! These images typically evoke a heralded English past, the country’s greatest exports, its empire and fabled heroes. But edited into such a chaotic rhythm, the result is raw, unsettling urgency; these images flash on-screen suddenly, displaced from any traditional context that might have emphasized a more triumphant sentiment.

If the words to “Boots” sound familiar, it’s probably because the poem was initially used in the film’s nerve-shredding, viral trailer. Better known as one of the country’s most prolific and popular poets, Kipling helped sketch the broad contours of a modern English mythos through his writing. “The Way Through the Woods,” for example, celebrates the rural countryside, that idealized Albion, while “If—” valorizes hard-earned English endurance. Margaret Thatcher, in a 1996 lecture, herself quoted Kipling’s poem “The Reeds of Runnymede,” focusing on a few sparse lines that signal her own belief in an isolated England: “You mustn’t sell, delay, deny, / A freeman’s right or liberty,” Thatcher recited in her careful Received Pronunciation. “It wakes the stubborn Englishry / We saw ’em roused at Runnymede!” Kipling, too, used literature as a platform to justify his country’s imperialism, on sinister display in the now infamous “The White Man’s Burden.” The poem imagines England as a kind of divine ax, slashing righteously through the thicket of colonized land. Kipling characterizes the Indigenous Filipino population as “new-caught sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child,” who must be civilized.

“Boots,” however, is something entirely different. Written after the Second Boer War, the poem’s more severe subject matter might account for its lack of popularity, presenting a rare crack in the edifice of national narrative. It’s a delirious recounting of a military march: em dashes break lines into the rhythm of a mantra; the haunting refrain—“there’s no discharge in the war!—echoes something primal, spiritual, ritualistic. Immortalized by Holmes’s recording, the poem as archival audio turned out to be an inspired introduction to the world of 28 Years Later. Each staccato syllable serves as a percussive beat for frantic cuts, each image a precision strike: Taylor-Johnson, ruggedly handsome, tearing across the impossibly green English countryside; Ralph Fiennes, splattered with blood, lurching through a valley of bones. The voice trembles against crackling static, desperation mounting until its crescendo: “Oh—my—God—keep—me from goin’ lunatic!”

In the context of 28 Years Later, the poem signals another shift—not just in Kipling’s body of work but in director Danny Boyle’s own as well. More than 30 years after his feature film debut, 28 Years Later is Boyle’s penance for his populist career, as much a critique of England’s nostalgia for the past as it is a rendering of zombie dystopia. The film is something of a stylistic departure for Boyle; 28 Years Later was shot with a 2.76:1 aspect ratio—proportionally much wider than most contemporary theatrical releases—but the camera remains in close, claustrophobic proximity to the subjects. Boyle also utilized a massive rig of iPhone cameras in certain moments of intense action; we witness, in agonizing bullet time, as an arrow slowly punctures the turgid flesh of an undead assailant’s leg. The film’s aesthetics deliver a distinct ideological message: this is a more brutal and unfamiliar England than the one on display in Boyle’s earlier films such as Yesterday (2019) and the miniseries Pistol (2022), both of which relied on lush color schemes and sentimental needle drops to deliver a more stereotypical vision of Britain. By contrast, the montage introducing us to the island world of 28 Years Later begins with the image of a tattered English flag.

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Boyle’s late-career use of audiovisual collage parallels the work of another contemporary British filmmaker better known for his juxtaposition of disparate elements and reappropriation of archival material: Adam Curtis. If archival footage is a standard tool in the arsenal of any documentary filmmaker, Curtis’s most recent work, Shifty: Living in Britain at the End of the Twentieth Century—a five-part series that aired on the BBC earlier this year—makes the archive itself subject to critique. Like 28 Years Later, the series repurposes cultural iconography in order to deconstruct the country’s national myths. The result is two projects united in their iconoclasm, both crafted by British filmmakers at the height of their prestige.

On paper, Boyle’s and Curtis’s lives and careers have taken parallel trajectories. Born a year apart, in working-class Lancashire and well-off Kent, respectively, both men began their careers with perfunctory roles at the BBC during the 1980s, later breaking through to wider audiences in the early 1990s. Boyle’s Shallow Grave (1994) and Curtis’s Pandora’s Box (1992) both garnered their directors their first BAFTA nominations, though here their paths diverged. Boyle’s next film was Trainspotting (1996), the kind of zeitgeist lightning strike that had the power to ignite the careers of Ewan McGregor and Kelly Macdonald as well as Boyle’s own. Within the next decade, his career had culminated in the commercial success of Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which won eight Oscars. In 2012, he served as artistic director of the opening ceremonies for the London Olympics, a role that suggested Boyle had become as emblematic of the country’s talent as the Beatles, James Bond, and Mr. Bean.

Curtis never achieved quite the same level of fame as his peer, but it’s just as likely that he wouldn’t have wanted to. After Pandora’s Box, he continued to develop complicated, philosophical projects for the BBC that occupied a similarly precarious space between film and television. Curtis has always been interested in interrogating power. Technology, psychoanalysis, conspiracy, modernity—these are the sweeping themes that structure Curtis’s archival assemblages. Typically, his films feature uncanny moments in pop culture that demonstrate the circular relationship of the past and present. So distinctive is Curtis’s approach that fans created the social media account Future Adam Curtis B-Roll, an homage to his signature aesthetic.

With his earlier series, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone (2022), Curtis narrowed his previously global scope to focus on a single country, and on the historical events that led to the rise of Vladimir Putin. Shifty redirects this focus to a similar era in Curtis’s native United Kingdom, with the first episode ending with the pop song “The Land of Make Believe,” performed by the band Bucks Fizz (a hit that charted across Europe but remains relatively unknown in the United States). The song chronicles the story of a child escaping from reality: “Stars in your eyes, little one / Where do you go to dream,” the first verse begins. “To a place we all know / The land of make believe.” When Curtis appeared on the British podcast The Rest Is Entertainment, the hosts chuckled at the song’s inclusion in the program, as if Bucks Fizz is a kind of punch line. Curtis offered a clear rationale for his choice to conclude the first installment with this music cue: “Pete Sinfield, who wrote it, claimed—and actually, if you look at the lyrics—that it’s an attack on Mrs. Thatcher, for summoning up the ghosts of the past.”

Through this oblique reference to Thatcher, Curtis evokes the romanticized England she stood for: a nonexistent fantasy, the stuff of “make believe.” Throughout this same episode, Curtis carefully threads the narrative of a World War II–era fighter pilot whose Hawker Hurricane had crashed into the English countryside. The wreckage was recovered in 1979, the same year that Thatcher first took office as prime minister; at the time, the press scrambled to fit a hero’s narrative to the story. After all, one of England’s most foundational myths is their bravery and resilience during the Battle of Britain. In the end, Curtis reveals that the remains were identified as pilot Hugh Beresford, who had frequently complained about the incompetence and indecision of his own squadron leader; as a result, dozens of pilots, including Beresford himself, died needlessly. Curtis includes an archival interview with a former pilot, who explains: “A sort of bogus romantic cult has been built up about fighter pilots.” In actuality, the pilot says, his job was about “backstabbing”: “[I]f you could creep up on your enemy without him knowing anything about it and stab him right in the back, that was the most efficacious thing to do.”

Such is the nature of nostalgia: nothing was ever as great as we might remember it to be. This is the central thesis of Shifty, a film about how this warped conception of England’s mythic past—one that Thatcher so deliberately perpetuated—has paralyzed the politics of the present. It’s a phenomenon that scholar Andrew Higson has written about extensively, especially in the context of British cinema: the commodification of heritage as a cultural export during Thatcher’s reign. Citing Fredric Jameson, Higson describes the process by which nostalgia renders the past as a collection of images. “In this version of history,” Higson explains, “a fascination with style displaces the material dimensions of historical context.”

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“Heritage,” as it exists today, is as much a marketing term as it is a cultural phenomenon. In 2023, English Heritage—the formal charity that maintains historically or culturally significant sites in the country—reported that a record number of families had visited their properties, a 50 percent increase over the last decade. Castles performed particularly well, the report notes, and Stonehenge saw its greatest increase in attendance. Tudor sites such as Eltham Palace, Henry VIII’s childhood home, have been particularly popular. It’s no coincidence, then, that cultural theorists have noted the connection between the booming nostalgia economy and the global rise in reactionary politics. Philosopher Judith Butler, for one, recently described the “restoration fantasy at play in many right-wing movements,” which in the United States has led to what Butler calls “a nostalgic fury for an impossible past.”

In other words, there is a certain comfort to be taken in familiarity, a way to displace the responsibility of racism, or xenophobia, or other prejudices. This is a phenomenon that Curtis has built his entire career critiquing. And if it’s rare for a filmmaker of Boyle’s stature to turn against the very culture that has validated his work for so long, the mainstream success of a film like 28 Years Later—which has both received critical acclaim and brought in worldwide grosses that outpace its predecessors, 28 Days Later (2002) and 28 Weeks Later (2007)—offers evidence of another kind of trend that has been simmering in the more radical and experimental spaces of British cinema. Which is to say, Boyle and Curtis are far from the only contemporary British filmmakers using the past as a site of reckoning—possibly just the most prominent. In her film a so-called archive (2020), for instance, artist-filmmaker Onyeka Igwe creates her own archive in place of one that no longer exists—or rather, an archive that never could have existed. We see the textured details of labeled boxes coated in dust, rusting reels of celluloid; Igwe’s focus is slow and exact, revealing the rot and decay of a colonial presence in a building long since abandoned. Footsteps echo through the empty spaces; light filters through clouded windows.

Igwe is both British and Nigerian, and filmed the piece at least partially at the Nigerian Film Unit building in Lagos; much of the historical footage, improperly stored there, is no longer able to be viewed. With a so-called archive, Igwe drives these themes of memory, of nostalgia, of fantasy, past any exercise in reckoning or reconciliation, the practices of a previous generation once complicit in perpetuating them. She instead interrogates those forces behind the archive, the figures of colonial power who decide what belongs and what does not. The archive, in her conception, must feature some component of creation. This idea is of particular interest in Igwe; her contemporaneous film, No Archive Can Restore You (2020), borrows its name from the book by Julietta Singh; both works contend with the necessity of archives, especially if those archives are incomplete. In practice, Igwe is tying together these nebulous ideas born of personal experience while interrogating the importance of systemic and selective memory-keeping.

Neither Curtis nor Boyle is quite as radical in his approach, perhaps owing to either the directors’ high-profile positioning or their status as aging white men; however, their work is certainly preoccupied with a similar kind of skepticism toward the cultural archive they inherited. Both 28 Years Later and Shifty use archival imagery to undermine rather than promote nostalgia. And despite their different approaches, both films insist that cultural memory is inherently flawed: that we are not necessarily correct in the ways that we remember, and even invoke, our own history. It’s significant, in 28 Years Later, that it is Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who offers the characters emotional catharsis. “Memento mori […] Remember you must die,” Kelson gently reminds Spike when he learns of the imminent death of his mother Isla (Jodie Comer). “Memento amoris. Remember you must love,” he adds, just before Spike must place Isla’s skull in the doctor’s temple of bones. Kelson performs his own personal ritual, one that might be inadequate in capturing the cultural memory of a society so fearful of his methods.

Perhaps most telling is the almost identical point at which Shifty begins and 28 Years Later ends: a reckoning with the legacy of English media personality Jimmy Savile. A beloved radio DJ and BBC television host, Savile was later revealed to have been investigated for hundreds of sexual abuse allegations. The facts only fully came to light in 2012, after his death, when no justice could be served. In the chilling first shot of Shifty, which sets the tone for the series, we see Savile knock on a wide wooden door, his blond bowl cut gleaming under fluorescent light. He’s surrounded by a gaggle of small children; there’s an expression of mock surprise on his face as Margaret Thatcher opens the door. We experience a sudden emotional whiplash as Savile, at the height of his cultural influence, leads a chain of children into Thatcher’s office. There’s no score, no narration; the moment simply hovers there.

It feels significant, then, that 28 Years Later is largely told from the perspective of 12-year-old Spike, embarking on his own hero’s journey to adulthood: it is a film bookended by scenes of children in danger. In the opening prologue, a group of kids sit huddled around a TV set watching Teletubbies (1997–2001); the scene juxtaposes their guileless faces and the TV’s bright colors with screams that are distant and off-screen (until they’re not). By the time we reach the film’s more polarizing coda, young Spike is living on his own in England’s rugged wilderness, having left his secluded island behind. Chased down by the infected, Spike is saved by a group of hooligans who don familiar jumpsuits and sport raggedy blond hair—all of whom seemingly answer to “Jimmy.” The sight raises, if obliquely, a possibility even more frightening than that of zombie hordes: an alternate universe where Jimmy Savile’s crimes were never uncovered, one in which nostalgia for the past precludes its necessary and continuous reappraisal.