I Didn’t Like 28 Years Later

Surprise movie review!

Photo by Matt Antonioli on Unsplash

“You need to be British to get it.”

“You just want the same thing again and again.”

“It’s not for you.”

“You just hate having fun.”

These are some of the lines I have heard in the days since I watched my most anticipated movie of the year, 28 Years Later. 28 Years Later is the third movie in a series that started with 28 Days Later (2002), and continued with 28 Weeks Later (2007). While I’m not a particular fan of Weeks, 28 Days Later is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I was eagerly anticipating the third movie in the series.

And I regret to inform you that I was disappointed.

Your response may be analogous to those I have seen above. I don’t know. But I didn’t think it worked, and I am happy to tell you why – while also diving into a re-exploration of 28 Days Later, and why it’s so outstanding.

Here are some basic assumptions I start with when I’m critiquing a movie.

1. The purpose of a narrative movie is to tell a story that is self-contained. While a movie may depend on the audience’s knowledge of a previous movie (i.e, it’s a sequel), generally speaking every movie should exist as a discrete piece of art with a coherent arc and characters. There are exceptions, of course – for example, movies that adapt works that are already serialized (Lord of the Rings). Still, on the whole, even sequels should tell stories with a beginning, middle, and end. The end of a movie should provide a satisfactory conclusion to the events of the film itself. The end should not primarily exist to imply a later movie that will improve what we have just watched. I might not see that movie!

2. The components of a movie ought to work together to create a coherent theme, plot, tone, and character arcs. A movie uses cinematic language, visuals, sound, and dialogue to tell the story and to develop a theme that gives the story resonance. In addition to selecting technical elements that work together as a whole, a movie should also not subvert our sense of verisimilitude. A movie that starts with a realistic tone should keep a realistic tone. Likewise, fantastical elements should be bound by rules introduced early in a film. I accept that a ring can corrupt the wearer, but I need to be shown the ring early on.

3. Genre films should achieve the effect intended by their genre. A comedy movie should make you laugh. A horror movie should make you feel horrified. Etc.

I think there are two kinds of people who watched 28 Years Later: people who agree with what I just wrote, and people who liked 28 Years Later. My assumptions about how movies should work are pretty non-controversial. Basic, even. However, especially with the advent of series movies and cinematic universes, I think they’re increasingly becoming less common.

So let’s take a look at 28 Days Later, why it works, and then how it compares with 28 Years Later.

Part One: 28 Days Later: Plot, Theme, Character, Tone

28 Days Later is the story of Jim, a bike messenger who wakes up from a coma to discover that the United Kingdom has been overrun with a “rage” virus that escaped from a lab in Cambridge. The bloodborne virus causes people who contract it to become furiously angry and supernaturally strong. The infected chase down the non-infected and either spread the disease by biting them or vomiting on them, or simply tear them apart with their bare hands.

In the month since the virus escaped the lab, almost every healthy person in the UK has been evacuated. Jim is alone (his parents committed suicide when they were unable to escape) except for Selena, a hard-nosed former pharmacist who is emotionally shut down and fixated on survival. Selena is ruthless in her efforts to survive (when she discovers one of her companions is infected she brutally kills him with a machete), but we see flickers of her kindness and humanity – particularly when she tries to help Jim recover from a headache caused by their terrible post-apocalypse diets.

Selena and Jim eventually meet up with Frank and Hannah. Frank is a kindly cabbie who has been trying to find other survivors after losing his wife in the outbreak. His daughter Hannah is thirteen years old. Selena is concerned that Frank and Hannah are a liability to Jim and Hannah and will put them in danger. However, she agrees to set off with them in pursuit of a radio signal, made by soldiers calling survivors to their headquarters.

Along the way, Jim increasingly struggles with losing his humanity while Selena rediscovers hers. Jim is tormented after he has to kill a young infected boy. Meanwhile, Selena decides she actually wants to be part of a family and finds meaning in protecting Hannah. She is distraught when Frank is infected and dies, and dedicates herself to caring for Hannah in Frank’s place.

You can even see this in Selena’s costume. Selena starts out in a long leather duster, looking like a warrior goddess of the apocalypse. As she grows closer to Hannah, she smiles more and simply dresses like she presumably used to.

Upon meeting up with the soldiers, the survivors are horrified to find that the soldiers are specifically looking for women, with the plan that they will use them as breeding stock and sex slaves to entertain the troops and repopulate England. Selena offers herself in Hannah’s place, and when this is refused, drugs Hannah with sleeping pills to reduce Hannah’s trauma. Jim, meanwhile, is enraged at his companions’ violation, and goes on a rampage in the soldiers’ headquarters, unleashing the infected on them to save the girls and killing many men himself – usually in a sadistic manner that shows he is enjoying it. The visual language of this sequence suggests that Jim has become, in his own way, infected. His wrath at the violence posed to his friends has made him almost inhuman with anger.

In the original end of the movie (there’s more than one!), Jim is killed in his rampage, but the girls survive. Hannah and Selena cling to their belief that there must be hope and they can stick together to survive. In the happier end of the movie, which was re-shot in response to audience feedback, all three survive and flag a plane that comes to rescue them. The latter end is, I argue, less effective as a whole. We never see Selena really grapple with the horrifying things Jim did to save her, or the implications of what this means for what kind of man Jim has become. Is she willing to overlook that because Jim did it for her and Hannah, or is she looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life wondering what else Jim is capable of?

The tone of 28 Days Later is primarily bleak, oppressive, and grim, punctuated with horrifying moments of sudden violence when an infected figure suddenly runs screaming into frame. The rest of the time, we’re looking at scenes of devastation suggesting the terror that happened offstage before the movie began. A rotting married couple holds each other in bed next to sleeping pills and a bottle of wine, clinging to a baby picture of their son. Bodies are stacked in churches, apparently left by people who had no other option to dispose of their dead with any dignity. A wall of missing posters shows people who are almost certainly dead and are desperately missed by their families. The only relief is a series of light moments in the middle of the movie, where our survivors admire the English countryside, play cards, ransack a grocery store, and make each other laugh. In the end, though, this is part of the movie’s oppression. The more we see this little family enjoying each other in the midst of horror, the more grief we feel when the family is destroyed.

28 Days Later is a true horror movie. It is incredibly frightening and intense. It’s also a movie with a lot on its mind with regard to survival, humanity, and what it means to be human in the face of trauma and danger. Every shot of the barren landscapes of the English countryside or deserted London builds our sense of despair and loneliness – would it even be worth it to survive in this world? Likewise, the shots of the infected – filmed chaotically with handheld digital cameras with a glitchy frame rate – affirms the terror of what awaits those who don’t survive. The threat our characters face is the complete loss of their humanity, but we are constantly reminded that they may not even have it anymore. An inky color filter and a proliferation of Dutch angles reminds us constantly that the world is dark, foreboding, sad, and out of joint. Both Selena and Jim are pulled between their instinct to isolate and dehumanize themselves to survive, and their craving to cling to their pre-disaster identities and to each other to make survival worthwhile at all.

28 Weeks Later is a movie about how it’s hard to contain zombie outbreaks. I don’t know, I saw it one time and I didn’t like it. So let’s move on.

Part Two: 28 Years Later: Plot, Tone, Epilogue, Chaos

By comparison, here is the plot of 28 Years Later.

In 2002, a young boy named Jimmy watches The Teletubbies while his entire family is slaughtered in the outbreak.

Twenty-eight years later, Spike is a twelve-year-old boy who has lived his entire life on a sequestered island off the coast of England, which is only occasionally accessible by a causeway during low tide. His dad is Jamie the scavenger, who travels to the mainland occasionally to hunt and find useful items. His mom is Isla, an ill woman who spends her days in bed occasionally lashing out at her husband with extreme, irrational anger. She is clearly hallucinating, and seriously sick. She regularly calls Spike “Dad” throughout the movie.

Spike accompanies his father to the mainland. His journey out is part of a montage where we see old footage of the lost England of nostalgic yore – knights fighting with bows and arrows, soldiers marching down the street on their way to war, and the poems of Rudyard Kipling. On the mainline, Spike discovers Alphas, or a kind of new mega-infected who are rational and able to organize the other infected. Alphas like to kill people by pulling on their heads so hard that their heads pop off and their spines slide out. Think of it as pulling too hard on your popsicle if it’s really stuck in the wrapper and the stick comes out. No one in 28 Years Later has ribs or pelvises, in other words. There are also big mucus-covered infected people who crawl around on the ground and eat worms. Spike sees some of these infected. Then he goes home after an Alpha chases him across the causeway while dreamy synth music plays.

Back home, Jamie brags about what a brave killer Spike is. Spike balks, insisting he is not, but Jamie overrides him. The villagers throw a massive party for Spike and get him drunk to celebrate his elevation to being a scavenger. Spike sees his father sneak out with another woman and cheat on Isla.

Spike learns from another villager that on the mainland, there is a survivor named Ian Kelson who used to be a doctor. He proposes to Jamie that they go and find Ian to see if he can cure Isla’s illness. Jamie insists that Ian is insane, because one time he saw Ian’s lair and saw it was covered in corpses that Ian had dragged there and organized in rows. Spike accuses Jamie of wanting Isla to die so he can be with his new girlfriend.

Jamie sets a fire to distract the watchmen and sneaks Isla off the island, intending to bring Isla to Ian. On the mainland, they meet Erik, a Swedish soldier whose boat sank on patrol. He is now trapped in the UK and is the only survivor from his unit. They also meet an infected woman who is in labor. Isla delivers the infant, who is not infected, and Erik kills the mother. Erik intends to kill the infant, but an Alpha pulls his head off with the spine attached, as Alphas do.

Meanwhile, Ian finds the group and sedates the Alpha. He takes Erik’s head and spine and leads Isla, Spike, and the baby to his bone temple. Ian has been tirelessly constructing a forest of femurs and a large pyramid of skulls to honor the dead – infected and non-infected alike. He cleans Erik’s skull and gives it a place of honor on the pyramid.

Ian then examines Isla at Spike’s request. Ian determines that Isla has terminal cancer. Isla has Ian sedate Spike and euthanize her. Ian cleans Isla’s skull and tells Spike to give it the place of greatest honor, on the top of the pyramid. Spike does this. Ian then sends Spike home.

Spike leaves the infant on the gates of the village, calling her Isla, and leaves a note saying that he intends to explore the mainland. He is chased by the infected but rescued by a gang of men and women who are dressed like Jimmy Savile, led by Jimmy, the little boy from the first scene of the movie. While a metal remix of The Teletubbies theme plays, the gang of Jimmy Saviles fight the infected in a style reminiscent of the Power Rangers, and then invite Spike to join their gang.

The end.

Well, that sounded pretty different, didn’t it?

Let’s go back to my original three premises about what a good movie is: a standalone feature that tells a narrative story, where the component parts work together to build theme and tone, and where the movie accomplishes the aims of the specific genre.

On all three points, 28 Years Later whiffs. Let’s learn why!

Problem One: 28 Years Later does not work as a standalone movie.

So here’s my first question: what the entire hell is 28 Years Later about?

Most of the movie is about Spike and his journey to grow into the man his community wants him to be – a brave hunter who scavenges the land and kills infected with ease. It is also about Spike’s disillusionment with his cheating father, his desire to save his mother’s life, his acceptance of her death, and ultimately, his desire to set out on his own to understand the world as it used to be. (That’s already a lot.)

The movie is also about Jimmy. It is bookended by sequences not of Spike, but of Jimmy and his band of Jimmies, a roving gang of people who were about six or seven at the time that the outbreak occurred. They now dress like the 1990s television star Jimmy Savile, who made children’s programming in the UK and was revealed to be a serial sexual abuser in 2012. Jimmy’s last memories of normal life are clearly heavily influenced by The Teletubbies and, apparently, reruns of Jim’ll Fix It, though presumably in universe it never became known that Jimmy Savile was a predator (this was made public in 2012, by which time, in the universe, Jimmy Savile and all his victims would have died in the outbreak.)

So, 28 Years Later is about a young man named Spike who comes of age and learns to reject the culture he grew up in after learning some hard lessons about mortality from a kind man who lives in a bone palace. It is also about a young man named Jimmy who starts an apocalypse gang inspired by children’s programming of the 1990s. We end with Jimmy and his band of Jimmies apparently because of the already-filmed sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, set to release in January 2026.

The story of Jimmy as it exists in 28 Years Later is too brief to comment on. It is not clear if the point is that Jimmy is, like his namesake, secretly a monster (Apocalypse Jimmy would, after all, not know about Jimmy Savile’s crimes, since those came to light in 2012 and the Rage Virus apparently swept the United Kingdom in 2002). It is not clear if we are supposed to think that the Jimmies are pathetic because they have survived the apocalypse by acting like characters from kids’ shows. They’re actually pretty effective at killing the infected. We don’t know anything about them, what they mean, or what they represent, because they are only in one scene of the movie, which is the last scene. We can’t say anything about their characters or the themes they are meant to invoke, because that will apparently be covered in a movie we haven’t seen yet.

To summarize it briefly: 28 Days Later, the grim microbudget outbreak movie about man’s inhumanity to man, got straight-up Marveled in its last scene. The tone and theme of 28 Years Later is scrambled to set up a cinematic universe.

See how they massacred my boy.

Jimmy Savile ninjas who fight to the theme from The Teletubbies have nothing to do with the theme or tone of the macrostory, which is about a preteen who has become disillusioned with his hometown after losing his mother. The first half of Spike’s story seems to be about how Spike is socialized into becoming a warrior, only to register his disgust with this culture when he feels he cares more for his mother than his own father does. The second half is about Spike coming to accept the inevitability of death, with some faffing around with Erik the Swedish guy and also a baby, who symbolizes new life or hope or something. I don’t know, somehow the baby gets by with no milk for a night and a day without crying or pooping, so I assume this is a symbolic post-apocalypse baby more than an actual character or obstacle. I don’t know why the baby is in the movie. Babies in these movies usually represent a fresh start for humanity, but this baby has been sent to the insular, militaristic world of the island, so I don’t think that’s what this baby means.

At any rate, none of these sequences, which are about family, loss, disillusionment, grief, parenting, caretaking, memorializing the dead, isolation, culture decay, and hope, are meaningfully augmented by Jimmy Savile ninjas and Teletubbies. The pieces simply do not go together.

The fact that it might turn out the pieces go together when we buy tickets to a different movie next year does not make the pieces go together now. Right now, all I can see in theaters is 28 Years Later. I can’t hang my experience of this movie on hope that another movie will improve it. As it stands, 28 Years Later ends up tonally and thematically at war with itself, by introducing characters and ideas who are wildly discordant with the primary narrative, which focuses on Spike.

So, 28 Years Later could potentially be improved by removing the Jimmy sequences and saving that for its sequel. That would help 28 Years Later be a better and more coherent movie.

But it still wouldn’t be a good one.

That’s because–

Problem Two: The cinematic elements of 28 Years Later do not work together to create a coherent whole.

28 Years Later is about a young boy being socialized into violence. Also, it is about a young boy who becomes disillusioned with his father. Also, it is about a young boy who learns to accept the inevitability of death. Also, it is about a young boy who finds hope in a newborn infant. Also, and finally, it is about a young boy who decides to walk away from his hometown, Omelas style.

There’s no real reason why these themes shouldn’t get along perfectly well. They all coalesce fairly nicely around the theme of maturity and growing up as a man. The problem is that all these themes are explored with different sets of characters on different sets, which makes the movie feel more episodic than coherent.

The socialization sequence involves Spike and Jamie, on the island but also on the mainland. The disillusionment sequence involves Spike, Jamie, and some local boys, on the island. The hope sequence involves Spike, Erik, and Isla, back on the mainland. The death sequence involves Spike, Isla, and Ian, in the bone temple. The sequence where Spike rejects his home involves Spike and Teletubby ninjas.

The problem is that when characters keep circling in and out on new sets while our characters’ goals are constantly changing, we have the feeling that we’re watching a really fast television series, instead of a movie. Erik, I would argue, didn’t need to be in the movie at all. Ian could have shown up much earlier. Jamie’s philandering, which is so central to his strained relationship with his son, drops completely out of focus in the last hour of the movie. There are a lot of pieces on the board, and we keep losing track of them.

In the midst of this, the movie never crystallizes around any single theme around male maturity and civilization. Spike originally left his island home attempting to save his mother, with every expectation he would return. When he sets out on his own, he tells his father that he wants to see the interior of the mainland United Kingdom – but, again, it’s not really clear why he no longer has any intention of returning home. We, the audience, have seen many sequences of stock footage from the glory days of the United Kingdom and Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V while watching this movie, suggesting that there is a faded, lost England worth mourning and interrogating and examining. Presumably, though, Spike hasn’t seen those clips, because they are non-diegetic and shown directly to the audience, not through an in-universe prop like a television. These clips are for the audience only. What Spike has experienced is what Spike himself saw. What was it about Ian’s lessons that persuaded him he had to continue to travel further into the mainland? What was it about the baby that persuaded him? What about his mother’s death?

But, let’s say you like this style of filmmaking, and you’re okay with the fact that we as the audience have seen things that suggest a thematic tension and weight that the characters themselves haven’t seen. Let’s also say you don’t mind the episodic quality of the movie. Boyle takes us on a wandering ride through the apocalypse where we meet people and lose them regularly, Mad Max style.

Even if I grant all that, the problem is still that the technical elements of the movie do not hold together.

28 Years Later is a movie that is curiously at war with its own cinematic language. Shots insist on someone’s importance, then the narrative forgets about them. Music and scenes are at odds with each other. Suspense is sidelined in favor of experimentation. The movie doesn’t feel as though it is speaking with one voice, trying to create a unified theme or immersive experience for the audience.

Here’s an example. At the end of the first act of the film, Spike and Jamie are sprinting down the partially flooded causeway back to their home, on the run from a very fast, very strong mutant. What’s the music that should be playing here?

If you’re thinking that it should be something dark or ominous, or fast-paced and frenetic, those are both good options.

The music that plays during this chase in 28 Years Later is a trippy synth score during this scene.

Why? I don’t know. I assume because everyone sitting in the theater was expecting something more conventional, and this was not conventional. Of course, now you as the viewer are not thinking about these characters and empathizing with them. Instead, you are thinking, “Huh, I wonder why they chose this for the movie?” Thinking about the movie as a movie while you are watching it is not conducive to experiencing this as a moment of suspense. We are being reminded by the score that we are just watching a movie. The fictional dream of immersing ourselves in the story has been broken. We are made aware that we are watching actors portray a scene, while editors pick post-production elements to create a novel experience. That’s not inherently wrong, but it is alienating. It’s also not scary.

Here’s another one. There’s a shot about thirty minutes into the movie where a man steps sharply towards the camera. He is wearing an incredibly creepy mask, and the camera pushes in to meet him. We’re immediately confronted with a mystery. Who is this man? Why is this man wearing this mask? Why is it covered in blood?

The human eye has a tendency to focus on faces, and revolt at the uncanny. A man stepping toward in a frightening mask is standard cinema language for a threat. One would usually think that this shot is foreshadowing a serious menace – a masked man who will eventually threaten our heroes.

It’s an intense-looking shot, right? It is even more so with the motion of the actor, stepping into the frame.

Why is it there?

I don’t know. The rest of the sequence gives way to a montage of characters cooking dinner. This man is never seen again.

One more. A prominent set piece that appears in most of the marketing of 28 Years Later, and which is the namesake of the sequel, is “the bone temple,” the massive monument of human femurs and skulls that Ian has been painstakingly constructing for the last thirty years. This image is deeply sinister. Any shrine made out of human bones would be. But, we are told, Ian built it to commemorate those who died, and to honor them. This is brought home when Spike puts his mother’s head on the top of the pyramid.

Here’s the thing. This actually could have worked really, really well – if the movie had not constantly been presenting us with the cinematic language of fear, only to reverse course abruptly and give us nothing instead. In text, there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea that Ian is a misunderstood, decent man who has tried to honor the dead in the only way that is available to him. However, when this is the third time in a movie that we have been presented with a fearful image, only to see it subverted, it does start to get a little tiresome. It starts to feel as though the filmmakers haven’t really reckoned with what they’re showing us and the effect it would have on an audience. Ian and his bone temple could have been a very effective foil to the world of Spike’s island home, which is ostensibly civilized but actually cruel. Spike’s home forces boys to grow up too fast, and the men callously disregard ill women, while Ian the hermit treats a sick woman with tenderness, decency, and respect and honors Spike’s crushing grief. Or, Ian could have been the one glimpse of kindness we see in a brutal world, if we leaned more into the sinister underbelly of the island paradise. The movie doesn’t take these paths. The problem is that Ian, instead, emerges as one more potential threat, who is then immediately neutralized by the storytelling, not the characters. The audience is assured he’s not a problem. Then he’s not.

It is okay for a movie to subvert our expectations. It just can’t be the only thing a movie does. The movie constantly presents us with images that are apparently sending us one signal, only to undercut them shortly after. That can be done effectively once or twice, but here it feels like it’s the whole game. We are presented with scary scenes, then we are reminded to not be scared. We are shown villains, then told they’re not villains. There’s no real chance for dread to build or even for one consistent tone to emerge. If Spike is to react against anything, the only consistent antagonist he really has is his hometown. The problem is that we don’t see this hometown for the last twenty minutes of the movie, and for all its unease, it still is much less threatening than the mainland, which is full of zombies, infrared camera sequences, and – and I cannot stress this enough – ninjas who dress like pedophiles and fight to the theme of The Teletubbies.

So what’s left instead? What do we have to be afraid of in this world if it’s not a chase scene, or a man in a mask, or a recluse who lives in a bone temple?

Well, it’s the Alpha. The Alpha is an infected man whose expression of the Rage infection is utterly unlike anything we’ve seen in the series so far. He is able to command and direct the infected. He seems to be able to impregnate them (the way he responds to the dead mother’s corpse is suggestive), and he’s able to strategize. So, whatever is going on with this figure, he’s not an “infected” as the series has traditionally understood them. He doesn’t seem to actually want anything – he’s still a zombie – but he also is able to plan and act in a way that is out of keeping with what we’ve usually seen the virus do.

The problem here is verisimilitude, or “the appearance of being true or real.” This is very distinct from the contents of a film being actually real. You can create an experience of verisimilitude in a fictional narrative. We know that this movie is fiction, and that it is about a fictional virus. Verisimilitude is the experience of being persuaded that the elements that we are seeing on screen could be real. When we become aware that what we are seeing is artificial or improbable, we become aware that we are not lost in a story with our characters. We suddenly find ourselves thinking about the fact that there is a film in front of us. It interrupts what John Gardner called “the fictional dream,” or the experience of being immersed in a narrative, lost to ourselves, caught up in the experience of fictional characters without being consciously aware that we are seated in front of a text.

The character of the Alpha is a major disrupter to the fictional dream, as 28 Days Later established it. We have been told and shown, repeatedly, in this series, that the virus causes people to act with irrational, extreme rage. Then we have one man who has this disease, but he doesn’t have irrational rage, and he is able to lead others who do have that symptom.

How did a virus do that?

I understand that the literal plot point here is “it evolved,” but there is a serious verisimilitude problem here in that the zombies are caused by a virus. A virus is not a living organism. Viruses don’t plan. They definitely don’t collaborate. So how is it that a virus is able to create beings that collaborate? It’s not a parasite. It’s a bit of RNA in a cell.

So I already don’t believe, in a movie series that has historically insisted quite a bit on realism, that for some reason the virus is now able to create armies of men who work together for a common cause. And yet, despite this ability to think collaboratively, the infected can’t recreate their rational minds in any meaningful sense. How does that work?

If you were looking for any further evidence that realism has gone entirely out the window here, the signature move from the Alpha is to pull on a human head (and at one point, a stag’s head) so hard that the spine comes the whole way out with the head. How does this happen? I don’t know. I don’t know why Alphas are able to pull on heads so particularly that they break all the ribs of their victim, and also the pelvis, but not the connection between the skull and the spine. Somehow, in this movie, the spine slides right out of the torso of both man and beast, like an olived toothpick in a sandwich at a diner. It’s like if you make popsicles and you don’t remember to run the container under hot water before you pull the stick out. The spine just slides right out as though it’s not attached to anything internally. It all feels like a 1990s video game, which is a problem, because this is ostensibly happening in real life.

28 Days Later was committed to verisimilitude to such an extent that a great deal of the filmmaking depended on handheld, digital cameras. These were more agile and easy to transport for the many, many sequences in which crew members had only minutes to shoot a sequence in a deserted part of London. The form of 28 Days Later’s cinematography came from the needs of the film – to create hyper-realistic shots on location, in settings that were only available for short periods at a stretch. The result is that the movie looks, and feels, incredibly grounded. Sure, it’s not terribly realistic for a virus to have an incubation period of eight to ten seconds. However, we believe it is real because we’re following the characters around the real London through grainy, gritty lenses.

By contrast, 28 Years Later actually seems like it’s constantly drawing attention to its unreality – through the sharp swivels and freeze-frames created by the camera rig (which is a series of iPhones welded to a metal arc), the experimental use of music, and, above all, to the near-supernatural killings that are the calling card of the major villain.

Horror movies can and do function with a sense of unreality. The original Suspiria is like this, as are most giallo films, and James Wan’s goofy creature feature Malignant. But none of those movies were follow-ups to a highly realistic classic. And, none of those movies are particularly scary.

Which brings me to the third problem, which is –

Problem 3: 28 Years Later Isn’t Scary At All

Genre films should achieve the effect intended by their genre. A horror movie is supposed to make you feel scared. The best horror movies – The Shining, The Exorcist, The Babadook – hold up because they are incredibly effective at making the audience feel fear.

Now, this is, obviously, highly subjective. Many people are not scared by the same things, and some horror movies actually use the language and imagery of horror while producing a very different effect.

A great example here is Malignant. Malignant is a 2021 horror movie directed by James Wan, following up his long slate of modern horror classics including Saw (2004), Insidious (2010), and the first two The Conjuring movies (2013 and 2016, respectively.) In Maligant, a woman (and here there be spoilers) gradually discovers that she has an evil twin that lives in the back of her head. This twin takes her on backwards missions around the city, killing people with a weapon he fashioned himself, until she is finally able to defeat him.

This plot is absolutely outrageous, and is full of moments that are played perfectly straight while feeling as silly as possible. A camera pushes in on a woman saying, “I’m adopted,” while an aggressive music sting punctuates the statement. Another woman parks a car next to a scary abandoned hospital about two inches from a cliff. Exterior shots of a narrow Bay Area home cut to the interior, which is laid out like a Wal-Mart full of fog machines. A monster rips off a cop’s arm and uses it to kill a different cop.

These sequences are bonkers, silly, and parodic, ribbing both Wan’s own movies (try to count all the Saw references!) and recent lights in horror like Michael Flannagan. What it isn’t, though, is scary.

It’s okay for a horror movie now and then to not be scary. All kinds of emotions are valid to experience in a horror movie. Some horror is funny, like Get Out. Some horror is sad, like Lake Mungo. Even so, most of these movies still have some scary sequences, but more importantly, they simply have a unified tone. Malignant is never particularly scary. Stll, from the early scenes of scientists with British accents solemnly proclaiming that an evil baby is eating electricity to the tune of an oppressive synth soundtrack, the audience knows exactly what kind of movie they are watching. This is a wild romp made by a horror fan, for horror fans. Wan tells the audience the joke almost immediately, and any Wan fans watching will get it.

So even if we allow that sometimes, a horror movie can still work without being scary, there’s still another critical element here. If a horror movie is not scary, it has to be something else. It can use horror tropes to make us laugh, make us think, make us cry, make us cheer, or create some kind of unified tonal experience around the imagery of horror.

This is a real highwire act for a director. Malignant only works because Wan’s knowledge of recent horror is so exhaustive that he’s able to pack his movie with so many jokes and references that are guaranteed to delight a horror audience. We don’t mind that we’re not scared, because we’re having such a good laugh with Wan. We know Wan gets the joke, because he scared the absolute hell out of us in The Conjuring. It feels like a mutual exchange of affection between the director and the audience.

Danny Boyle is about as iconic of a filmmaker as one can get. He’s directed modern classics like Trainspotting, Oscar darlings like Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours, and, of course, horror classic 28 Days Later. Highwire acts should be cake for him. If Wan can do it, so can Boyle.

So does he?

No.

I don’t think there is any unified tonal experience in 28 Years Later or any clear indication of exactly what kind of movie we’re watching. The first sequence, in which a group of first graders cower in a living room watching The Teletubbies while their family is slaughtered outside, is harrowing, high-octane horror — though it’s not particularly scary, since it’s the first scene and we don’t care what happens to these characters yet. The sequences on the island are the stuff of classic family dramas. The mainland sequences involving the infected are chases and suspense sequences (though usually the failed verisimilitude and post-production elements get in the way of the audience’s anxiety). The montages are forlorn about the faded glory of the United Kingdom. The bone temple sequences are sad and meditative. And the last scene with the Jimmy Saviles is zany, goofy, and off-putting.

It’s absolutely possible for a movie to maintain many different tones. Parasite is particularly beloved for this. But movies that do the tricky work of changing tones often guide the audience from one experience to the next, throwing up flags when the story is changing and adapting stylistically to the shifts in the script. Parasite’s big tonal turn is flagged by a doorbell ringing, an unnerving close-up of a woman, and a dramatic change in the sets used.

By contrast, movies that don’t commit to steering the audience from one genre to the next feel disorganized, chaotic, and even inappropriate. If you’ve seen The Book of Henry, you know what I’m talking about. It’s hard to watch a movie when we don’t know what we are supposed to be feeling. In 28 Years Later, it’s rarely clear what we are supposed to be feeling, and in the few scenes where it is, the scenes don’t go together as a coherent whole.

The ostensibly scary scenes of 28 Years Later are straightforward failures of craft. The music, the staging, or the script prevent us from feeling fear for the characters. The funny, sad, or reflective scenes feel at war with each other. And then we have scenes where it is anyone’s guess what we are supposed to be feeling.

I have to keep coming back to this man in the mask because I think that’s the most emblematic of 28 Years Later’s frustrating third category of scenes. There are so many sequences of 28 Years Later where I simply had no idea what the goal of the scene was. We see threatening images juxtaposed with preparing for dinner. We see infrared nightmares that end with shots of chimneys caving in. We meet new characters in the midst of sequences that are supposed to make us fear for their lives, even though we’ve never seen them before. Images like a man roasting a skull are overlapped with reflective, thoughtful dialogue. A woman who is devoted to her son asks to be euthanized while fully aware she’s abandoning her twelve-year-old child in the middle of a zombie-infested jungle, while the music swells with pathos.

It’s not scary. But it’s also not anything else.

All in, 28 Years Later feels very little like a horror movie and much more like a sloppy coming-of-age movie, where the message and tone are constantly shifting while the audience struggles to keep up. It’s undeniably ambitious. Still, it constantly feels as though the filmmaking is in its own way, that it has nothing coherent to say about growing up, and that the audience is both intentionally and unintentionally denied any possibility of being afraid.

So, I have to return to my original beef with critics regarding 28 Years Later. I don’t think I hated it because I “hate having fun.” I love having fun. I just don’t go see a legacy sequel to a horror movie, where the poster is a pile of skulls, for the goal of “having fun.” I don’t think you have to be British to get it – I know exactly who Jimmy Savile is, and I still have no idea what the point of the last scene is. And I don’t want the same thing over and over again. Heaven knows 28 Days Later itself was not “the same thing” – it was a paradigm breaker in horror.

What I want is a unified tone and a coherent story, where I can tell what the filmmakers want me to be experiencing, and where I can tell what they have to say.

Also, I want to be scared.

Is that so much to ask?