28 Years Later Review

28 Days Later is one of the greatest horror films Britain has produced. It revitalised the zombie sub-genre and British horror cinema. After a 23-year break, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reteam for the third film in the series and the start of a trilogy.

After the outbreak of the Rage Virus, Britain has been placed under quarantine, and the people on the island are forced to fend for themselves. A community has formed on the island of Lindisfarne in the Northeast of England. Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes his 12-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams), to the mainland so he can kill an infected as a rite of passage. When Spike learns that there’s a doctor on the mainland, the boy sneaks off the island with his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), in the hope she can be healed.

I enjoyed the first two films, and 28 Years Later was my anticipated film of 2025. Years Later brought back the creative team of the first time, had an incredible cast, and all the films have been different from each other. The first film was about the immediate aftermath of the zombie apocalypse and showed a makeshift family travelling from London to Manchester in the hopes of finding safety, but was duped by the real villains: men! 28 Weeks Later was about a broken family struggling to repair their relationship whilst the American military’s attempt to repopulate London was a thinly veiled metaphor for the American occupation of Iraq.

28 Years Later kept the family theme. The film was about Spike’s relationship with his parents. Spike’s father was pushing his son to become a hunter when the rite of passage was usually performed at the ages of 14 or 15. Despite Jamie’s encouragement, there was tension between the father and son since Jamie was forcing his son into a dangerous situation, and Jamie kept many secrets from his son. These tensions slowly build up during the film. On the other hand, Isla was suffering from a mysterious illness, and Spike was desperate to find a cure for her ailments. The family theme even extended to the prologue, where a young boy, Jimmy (Rocco Hayner), saw his whole family being killed by the Infected.

The majority of 28 Years Later was an escort story. It was about an adult and a child having to navigate a post-apocalyptic landscape. It was used in films and video games like Children of Men, The Road, and The Last of Us. The twist with 28 Years Later is that the child has to protect the adult, since Spike was trained to use a bow and arrow, whilst his mother’s illness made her confused. Spike acted as the audience surrogate since he didn’t know what the world was like before the outbreak, and everything was new to him. This made 28 Years Later feel a little like Civil War since it was a simple story that was used to explore the changing world: there were different types of Infected, the Infected were more complicated than simple rage monsters, and there was graffiti about Jimmy on the buildings and the bodies.

As a writer, Garland does take established ideas and recontextualises them. 28 Days Later used ideas from the original Dawn of the Dead, and Dredd had elements of Die Hard and The Warriors. 28 Years Later was the Threads of the series. Threads showed the aftermath of a nuclear war on Britain, resulting in Britain regressing to an agrarian society, which had limited resources, and the people suffered from collective trauma. This resulted in Lindisfarne’s residents becoming a medieval subsistence society. Boys were taught to become archers from a young age, and the community had a sense of English nationalism.  The film hammered home the point have intercutting the archery with footage from films like the 1944 version of Henry V, and footage from the Second World War.

28 Years Later seems like it was trying to make a Brexit point about people reverting to Nationalism. There was even a moment when a St. George flag ended up catching on fire. However, the Brexit parallels do fall apart considering the circumstances in the film since Britain was blockaded by the rest of the world. Isolation was forced upon the nation. The graphics showing the blockade and the quarantine zone were like Doomsday, a film that showed Scotland being blocked off by the rest of the United Kingdom.

28 Years Later brings a lot of ideas to the table. There were some stylised sequences of violence, like it was a video game, since they were so celebratory. The Infected evolved into different classes with slow fat ones, fast ones, and Alphas, huge, strong creatures that need dozens of arrows to kill them. The Alphas were able to rip the heads and spinal cords off of animals like they were Predators. The film introduced the idea that Infected could breed, which felt like an idea used in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. All these ideas didn’t quite gel together, and it seemed that 28 Years Later had an eye on the world-building and the sequels.

28 Years Later had to meet high expectations, but the audience’s reaction was mixed. It was a simple story that had a lot going on around it. The world-building was compelling, and there was an emotional core, but it doesn’t all work as well as the first two films.