I’ve been debating if I should review this movie. I have pretty mixed feelings on it, and it seems I’m not alone. People are either loving it, so much so they are calling it a masterpiece, which it isn’t. To folks calling it complete garbage, which it also isn’t. The truth I think lies a bit in the middle.
This movie has some serious issues, which I want to address sooner than later, but it also does a lot of great things.
Let’s first talk about the trailer. After seeing the movie you’ll notice how misleading the trailer really is. Even though they didn’t add footage that wasn’t actually in the movie. Everything you see in the trailer is in the movie, however how it is portrayed couldn’t be more different.
Even the marching song in the trailer is actually in the movie.
28 Years Later is basically two movies, the first half being about a son and his father going out and earning his first “I killed a zombie badge”. A typical coming of age movie, a kid abandoning childish things, shown by him not packing his action figure. He must be a man and kill him a zombie.
The second movie in this is a kid wanting to get his dying mom to the only doctor left alive in the zombie apocalypse.
You might argue, well the first half is just to establish the kid’s character, and how he grows throughout the journey, and yes you’d be right. However it doesn’t feel like one cohesive story, but two movies cut together Godfrey Ho style. A director known for buying incomplete Asian films and using English actors to fill in the missing scenes, resulting in what you’d expect, a giant mess.
I think that’s what 28 Years Later is, a mess.
I was never that big of a fan of the first film and I barely remember anything about its sequel. But I do remember why it was called 28 Days Later, as that was how long it took for the infected to die out, as the rage virus caused them to forget all reason, all need to eat or drink, just rage.
In 28 Years Later, they retcon all that, making the infected hungry little piggies, shown in the first set of zombies we see, as they are an obese couple who look like they’ve been infect for a while now. They even had a chubby infected kid with them.
For a story standpoint I guess this was something they needed to retcon, since the established rules of the other films make it so this one shouldn’t exist.
And speaking of movies that don’t exist, 28 Weeks Later I guess never happened either, as that film ends with the infected taking over all of Europe and I think even the US, right? Or maybe just France. It’s been a really long time since I’ve seen the second movie, so my memory on it is very hazy.
Another thing that really didn’t work for me was the camera work, the early 2000’s shakycam trend that died out years ago. It turns out people actually want to see what is happening in their movies.
But like 2002, we are back to a film giving you motion sickness. The shakycam is meant to give you a sense of realness but if the tradeoff is you don’t see what is happening in action sequences, I don’t know if it is worth it.
They do something different for 28 Years Later as they filmed everything on smartphones, to really get that shitty look, I guess.
But they also do this… how do I explain it. I guess bullet time Matrix style slow down, but it is done with arrows… it didn’t work for me at all. It was jarring every time they used it. Think bullet time if the bullet didn’t slow down, but the camera still moved around it.
So you’d get these really quick cuts of like a 360-arrow shot. If felt a lot like that smartphone feature where you can take a picture and move it around in a 3D space.
They only really use it at the start of the film, then forget about it as the movie goes on.
Another issue I had was that ending. It’s a terrible ending, or should I say non-ending as it just sets up another movie, not really finishing the one it started.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg, because this is when things get really stupid. I’m talking about a complete tonal shift from the rest of the movie. We’re talking Kung fu priest from Dead Alive levels of silly. They might as well have said I kick ass for the lord.
At the start of the movie we are introduced to Jimmy, who I thought was our main character’s dad for the whole movie. Why else would he be the first person they introduce to us if he isn’t in the rest of the movie?
The infected are at this kid’s door while him and I guess either his sisters or girls from the neighborhood are taking shelter in the living room, watching Teletubbies as the zombies storm in and infect everyone put Jimmy as he just bolts out the door to find his priest father, who willingly gives himself to the infected.
At the end of the movie Jimmy shows back up with his gang of albino gypsy parkour kids as they take out the infected with their Power Ranger hardcore parkour moves.
And the movie ends there. It’s stupid, it doesn’t fit within this movie at all and should have been cut.
Another thing also bugged me, as I don’t think it made much sense and that’s I guess infected can have babies now? A quick subplot that just drops into the main story is this pregnant infected lady giving birth. We don’t know if she was infected while pregnant or the zombies were boning. It has been 28 years, like the name suggests, England has been quarantined off from the rest of the world.
So after 28 years unless you’re a small fishing village cut off from the main land like our main character Spike is, the rest of the UK should be about empty.
Where these new infected come from, I don’t know. Either way, having a baby doesn’t make any sense whatsoever for the infected.
The last film that did this stupid plotline was that Zack Snyder out of focus shitfest Army of the Dead.
God, they almost have the same plot if you think about it, a zombie gives birth and the big giant zombie goes after them when they take/or kill the baby.
Another movie this was reminding me of was a movie called Doomsday. It has the same damn plot as 28 Years Later but set in Scotland. For a bit I wasn’t sure if this was by the same director. But then I remembered that director did Dog Soldiers, so no, different guys.
Anyway, I guess get to the plot breakdown.
Spike is our main character, he has just turned 12 and is jumping the gun on getting his first zombie kill, something every 15 year old has to do as a right of honor on this isolated island that connect to the mainland by a land bridge that only lasts for a few hours a day.
Spike and his father Jamie… oh now I get why I was confusing him for Jimmy.
The two set off to get their kills, leaving behind his sick mom whose is bedridden.
This could have been the movie, a father and son go out to do their ritual, things go wrong, and they are cut off from the safety of the island.
They get chased a few times, catching the eye of an ALPHA, which I guess is a large, infected person that kind of leads the others. They mentioned in some passing dialogue, something about them being so big because of steroids.
This movie is very British, and was hard to understand them sometimes, sadly them explaining what the Alpha zombies were was one of those moments.
Spike and his dad have to make a mad dash to the land bridge once the house they were taking shelter in collapses, drawing the attention of the Alpha as it chases after them.
When Spike and his dad make it back, they are thrown a celebration party, Jamie gets drunk and runs to have a snog with some local girl, getting caught by Spike.
Spike then gets the idea to sneak out and get his sickly mom medical help from the rumored doctor in the wasteland, burning bodies. He is easy to find by the constant giant plumes of smoke in the air.
So now Spike and his mom roam the countryside, trying to get to this doctor while we awkwardly cut to a group of soldiers running for their lives as their boat crashed to shore.
It kind of seems like what it is, just an excuse to get more bodies in the movie for the zombies to kill. Or infect? I’m not sure, Alphas just rip your head off, so maybe only they kill and the rest just infect.
Spike and him mom run into the last surviving soldier, who doesn’t stick around long. When Spike’s mom helps a zombie give birth, the soldier really wants to shoot it, but is grabbed by the Alpha, which I’m guessing is the father by the way he was acting after seeing his dead zombie wife.
Spike and his mom are rescued by Dr. Kelson, who uses his blow dart of sedatives on the Alpha, stopping him in place.
The Doc takes them to his bone temple, where he has made a massive structure out in the woods out of nothing but human bones.
In the middle, a mountain of skulls.
He gives Spike’s mom a checkup, diagnosing her having cancer that has spread to her brain, which is why she acts funny at times.
And then almost immediately they go from telling Spike she’s dying, to the doctor leader her off and killing her, only to return with her skull for Spike to place at the top of the skull pyramid.
Spike drops the baby off back to the fishing village, leaving a note for his dad that his mom is dead and for some reason he still wants to explore the countryside.
And that’s when we get that batshit stupid ending.
So, I don’t know. I’ve had a few days to think about this, what to rate it. I don’t think this is a SKIP. I liked some things in this, you can tell some really talented people worked on this. They really didn’t give you the same movie again, I guess trying something new. However, they did retcon two other movies and featured a terrible ending… by those standards, this gets a soft RENT.
I might go as far as to say wait until it comes to Hulu like that other 28 Days Later movies.
Next on the review list, god another Jurassic World movie. Make it stop!!!!
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