Zombie film about toxic masculinity premieres on HBO Max

Available since Friday (2) on the streaming platform HBO Max, Extermination: The Evolution (28 Years Later2025) illustrates two things. One is negative; the other, positive.

The first, most obvious, is the seemingly endless tendency for film studios to only bet on what has already workedgiving up creativity and originality to invest in franchises or nostalgia, by revisiting stories told 20, 30, 40 years ago. Se by 2024 Hollywood has released more than 30 sequels, prologues, remakes and derivativesthe current season also has dozens of titles like this.

Extermination: The Evolution and direct sequence of Extermination (2002)with the same director, Danny BoyleOscar winner for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (2008), and the same screenwriter, Alex Garlandfilmmaker Civil war (2024). The filmmakers ignored the events of Extermination 2 (2007), by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, and it has been said that the current film, set 28 years after the first, opens a trilogy. The next chapter, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Extermination: The Temple of Bonesin free translation), is directed by Nia DaCosta, who signed Candyman (2021) e As Marvels (2023), and is scheduled to premiere in January 2026.

Starring Cillian Murphythe first Extermination became a classic of the zombie subgenre while at the same time innovating it. Instead of slow, decaying undead, Boyle and Garland presented living, swift creatures, driven by insatiable hunger and uncontrollable fury awakened by a virus that was being developed in the laboratory. The film influenced works such as The Walking Deadcomic book created in 2003 by Robert Kirkman and Terry Moore that would later give rise to the eponymous and popular TV series, and World War Za novel published in 2006 by Max Brooks that later received a film adaptation directed by Marc Forster and Brad Pitt in the lead role.

The second thing that Extermination: The Evolution illustrates is the seemingly inexhaustible zombies’ ability to lend themselves to metaphors about the time in which they were born.

Just look at the career of the master of this horror subgenre, George A. Romero (1940-2017). Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a political allegory about minorities who are victims of intolerance and prejudice in the United States. In The Awakening of the Dead (1978), the director criticized consumerism, and in Day of the Dead (1985), the militarism of the Reagan Era. Land of the Dead (2005), in turn, alluded to social inequality, both within cities and in global geopolitics.

Filmmakers from Southeast Asia also stand out on this beach. In Zombie Invasion (2016), by South Korean Yeon Sang-hothe creatures that multiply on a train to Busan remind us: at any time, the circumstances (political, economic, health, etc.) can make people around us unrecognizable. The social and emotional ties that give us identity and security are always in question.

Another film from South Korea, #Alive (2020), from Cho Il-hyungaddressed, in full pandemic of covid-19themes such as the fear of being infected, isolation, protecting loved ones, the ethics of survival strategies, the power of social networks, the need for cooperation, what keeps us clinging to existence and the hope for a cure.

In Taiwan, the director Rob Jabbaz also reflected the world’s climate under the sign of coronavirus in The Sadness (2021). But this violent odyssey goes beyond the allegory, asking: What would a polarized society be like if we only responded to the impulses of the id? What civilization would be possible if there were no mediating and repressive bodies of the ego and superego? And at what speed can all social constructions collapse, resulting in a contagious and unstoppable bloodbath?

Em Extermination: The EvolutionDanny Boyle and Alex Garland advance a theme that had emerged in Extermination: a toxic masculinityon which Garland, in the dual role of director and screenwriter, focused on the underrated horror Men: Faces do Medo (2022). It’s a subject that spawned the deconstructive Western Attack of the Dogs (2021) and which also yields comedic approaches, as in the Spanish series Alpha Maleswhich debuted in 2022 and already has three seasons.

In the first film, the characters played by Naomie Harris and Megan Burns are threatened with rape by military personnel who see no problem in using violence to produce children that guarantee human survival. In the new film, even though women can hold positions of power, the world seems contaminated by a typically masculine hostility.

The initial setting is a community that, isolated on an island, remains safe from the rabid creatures that have infested the rest of the United Kingdom. The only connection to this vast wilderness is a dirt road that only appears during low tide.

In this place, there are practically no professions that do not involve brute force. The protagonist, Spike (Alfie Williams), is a 12-year-old boy about to face an aggressive rite of passage: in the company of his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), you must cross over to kill your first zombie.

It is no longer a fight to stay alive, but a hunt for social status: Killing means, well, becoming a man. Not surprisingly, the weapon used is an arrow, a notorious phallic symbol.

Later on, Spike will have to make a new crossing, now in the company of his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who is very ill. It is not virility that guides the boy, but love. To help her, she wants to find a doctor who, according to rumors, continued living on the “continent”: Kelson, the role of Ralph Fienneswhich lends dignity to any character, no matter how exotic it may be.

On both crossings, the great danger is an evolved zombieall naked, messy, ultra-violent, faster and with a large penis that dangles as he runs (obviously, it’s a prosthetic). Appropriately, creatures of this type are called Alpha.

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