In addition to a host of ravenous zombies and a fractured Scottish family, 28 Years Later features one of the most famous public artworks in the UK: Antony Gormley‘s Angel of the North, a 1998 sculpture that towers above the A1 roadway near Gateshead.
The Cor-Ten steel sculpture takes the form of a figure who stands 66 feet tall and spreads its 177-foot-long wings. It’s thought to be seen by millions of people annually and has become a calling card for Gormley, a Turner Prize–winning sculptor due to receive his biggest US survey to date in the fall, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
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Angel of the North has rusted over since its debut, and its oxidized surface comes to take on a post-apocalyptic feel in 28 Years Later, where it appears in an overgrown field, having been abandoned amid failed attempts to curtail a rage-inducing virus that has run rampant in England.
Gormley’s sculpture rhymes with 28 Years Later’s fascination with spirituality—director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland set the opening set piece partly within a church—but it’s also enlisted by the filmmakers in their critique of conservative British politics. (Such a critique may appear oblique to some, but within the UK, few have missed the point. We won’t spoil the out-of-left-field ending, which makes explicit reference to a certain British celebrity who was posthumously accused of rape.)
On its face, Angel of the North does not seem so scandalous. Gormley said he intended the work as a tribute to the miners who once worked in the area where the sculpture is now sited. “When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site,” he once said, “there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now, in the light, there is a celebration of this industry.”
But in a 2019 New York Times interview, Gormley said that the work was actually a rebuttal of the policies of Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative prime minister whom the artist said had made it seem as though “everything that had come out of the Industrial Revolution” was “over.”
The work was initially controversial, not for responding to Thatcherite politics but for its look, with many local politicians claiming it was an eyesore. Jewish residents of the surrounding area also said the work reminded them of German aircrafts, leading Gormley to be labeled a Nazi by certain outlets.
More recently, however, Angel of the North has found itself at the center of a different hot-button debate: the conversation that preceded the 2016 vote on Brexit. That year, the anti–European Union group Vote Leave projected the words “Vote Leave Take Control” across the angel’s wingspan. That moved Gormley himself to send a letter to Vote Leave in which he said that the stunt implied a “false endorsement” on his part of the group’s cause.
In a statement on his website, Gormley writes that Angel of the North was the product of “a focus for collective hope”—something not notably possible in 28 Years Later, in which quarantine acts as a parallel for post-Brexit isolationism.