28 Years Later: Despite What You've Heard, It's Great

After seeing the more-or-less down-the-middle reaction to 28 Years Later, I believe the biggest difference between me and most of the rest of pop culture is that I have a better tolerance for being surprised than most. This puts me in a frustrating position as a reviewer. I have to explain why I liked a surprising movie to a bunch of people who probably hated surprise parties as kids. I say this to mean that, once again, the audience is upset because a big blockbuster dared to go against populist expectations, yet I am overjoyed. Thank you, Alex Garland and Danny Boyle, for taking risks and delivering memorable, flavorful cinema. And thank you, Sony, for allowing them to. My patience with a society that claims it wants fresh cinema yet complains about anything remotely dissimilar is wearing thin. All that said, 28 Years Later is a pretty awesome movie, a fresh take on post-apocalyptic horror that gives a lot of familiar tropes an attractive facelift. What's more, it refuses to litter what's supposed to be an original story with any obvious callbacks and references, perfectly content to be its own story, as it should be. But apparently, it's too much for modern audiences to comprehend such an idea. If I sound bitter, I am. This movie found itself in a no-win situation the instant its trailer went viral for the TikTok audience to see.

Anyways, 28 Years Later is a coming-of-age story about a boy named Spike who is forced to grow up too quickly when his mother falls deathly ill and his father grows interested in another woman. Rumor has it that Kelson, a celebrated doctor, is living somewhere on the mainland, so Spike and his mother set out to find this doctor in the hopes that he can heal her. Along the way, they'll have to contend with both an infected population now indigenous to Great Britain and some humans who pose a threat that the infected never could.

Do you remember the tacky cinematography of the first movie? 28 Years Later applies a modern spin to familiar source material. If you can believe it, most of this movie was actually shot on the iPhone 15. Its visual scheme perfectly captures the tacky-rich aesthetic of the previous two movies while striking out in an exciting new direction. It looks nothing like any other movie being made today, and is accompanied by an equally strange and even hallucinogenic soundtrack. The recitation of Rudyard Kipling's poem Boots, made infamous by the trailer for this same movie, gets incorporated into the soundtrack of the actual film in bold and memorable ways. The sound design of 28 Years Later is simply disgusting, and I mean that as a high-flying compliment. This movie crunches, sloshes, and groans its way across the post-apocalyptic British mainland, and sounds both incredible and incredibly visceral coming from the surround-sound system of a theater.

Garland and Boyle's vision of an apocalypse-ravaged and all-but-abandoned Britain is thought out remarkably well. My favorite detail of the world was its portrayal of how the infected population has incorporated into the animal kingdom over three decades. They're illustrated less as a mindless horde and more as the apex predators of the region, a detail that makes a remarkable amount of sense. Flocks of birds take flight at their approach, herds of deer stampede to get out of their way, and rats scurry back into the hidey-holes they came from when the infected draw near. Of course, none of this attention to detail would matter if 28 Years Later lacked a soul, but luckily, the writing team put plenty of thought into Spike and the rest of the cast. Watching the relationship between him and his father, Jamie, crumble was particularly heartbreaking, and seeing the father be primarily at fault instead of the son was a refreshingly unusual dynamic.

In fact, every character in this movie had a remarkable amount of thought put into making them as three-dimensional as possible. From an unfaithful father to a deathly-ill mother to a young and big-mouthed soldier to a boy forced to become a man too soon to even a potentially mad doctor, everyone in this movie has a distinguishable voice and a well-rounded persona. 28 Years Later can be eccentric, intelligent, and heartfelt all in the same breath, and even if it fleetingly works better as an experience than as a story while also leaving the door wide open for potential sequels in ways that feel like advertisements, it works in so many more ways than it doesn't, and is ultimately a movie that leaves me wanting more. And for a story that's supposed to be a part of a trilogy, that's an absolutely vital thing to be.

28 Years Later, while the start of something bigger than itself, is still a very strong and willfully simple story told in some eccentric ways, and populated by a cast of interesting, unusual, and surprisingly three-dimensional characters who aren't always what they seem. I can't say I've ever seen anything quite like it. Aesthetically and tonally, it's sufficiently distant from even its predecessors, though it does share a lot of habits and pay a lot of homage to them. It's a visually trippy movie, as if the characters took acid before heading out to the mainland, and while it won't be to everyone's liking, I'm impressed by its willingness to blaze trails instead of simply reciting expectations. Expectations were overrated, anyway, and you know how much I hate that word.

28 Years Later - 9/10

Matthew 5:27-30