"28 Years Later": an ugly, stupid and bad movie

If it is already difficult to get an appointment at a health centre today, imagine what it will be like after the zombie apocalypse, when there are no more doctors. Just ask little Spike (Alfie Williams), the hero of 28 Years Later, the third film in the horror and science fiction series directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, which began in 2002 with 28 Days Later; and the first of three new films set in a Great Britain devastated by those infected with a powerful rabies virus released from a laboratory and quarantined from the rest of the world (Boyle never wanted to call his creatures zombies, but that is just a detail, and he was the first to have them run like high-performance athletes, which from then on became a convention in films and series of the genre).

Almost three decades have passed since the events of 28 Days Later. Spike lives with his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and mother (Jodie Comer) in a community of survivors on an island off the mainland, connected to it by a walkway that is submerged when the tide rises. His mother is always bedridden, afflicted by a disease that no one knows what it is, because there is no one there with medical knowledge. And when, after having gone to the mainland with his father on a raid to hunt the infected, he tells her about a crazy survivor doctor who continually burns corpses, and whose bonfire can be seen in the distance, the boy grabs his mother, creates a distraction so he can leave through the fortified gate that is always guarded, and goes to try to find the doctor, so he can examine her.

[the trailer for “28 Years Later”:]

Neither 28 Days Later nor its sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007), directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, added anything special or original to the zombie apocalypse films (or infected films, to please Danny Boyle), apart from the aforementioned talent for the race given to those. But their commercial success meant that a third installment was inevitable, even more so, as is now the case (the fourth, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple , directed by Nia DaCosta, was shot at the same time as this one). Directed by Boyle once again and written by Alex Garland, 28 Years Later aims to open a new chapter in the series and give it other dimensions of horror and adventure, but it is nothing more than a filler verb. And soaked in blood to the brim.

Lacking imagination and creativity, Boyle and Garland resort to gore in a rush and an overdose of the macabre to fill the nearly two hours of 28 Years Later . There are infected heads pierced by arrows or smashed against rocks, human and animal heads torn off by hand, infected people blown up with machine guns, a graphically detailed birth of an infected person in an abandoned train and a mutant infected person (aka Alpha) impaled on a huge flaming arrow. Meanwhile, the doctor, played by a Ralph Fiennes covered in iodine, entertains himself by erecting a tower of human skulls and making poles out of bones, in a sinister variation of performance art.

Danny Boyle's visual stylebook remains limited and crude (eccentric angles, saturated colours, arbitrarily accelerated images and clumsy shots, all accompanied by a crushing soundtrack). Which, added to the unbridled gore and the excessive morbid horror, makes 28 Years Later an ugly, stupid and bad film, which brings no innovation to cinema and series set after the zombie apocalypse (or the infected, for that matter). Which, it must be said, are also on the verge of death for the undead.