28 Years Later: Is the Movie Worth Watching? (without spoilers)

28 Years Later comes more than two decades after the premiere of Extermination, to show how the rabies virus has evolved, how survivors live, and what has changed in the terrifying universe that was built by Danny Boyle. The first movie happens 28 days after the initial infection, where a delivery man named Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma to discover a world marked by death, chaos, and the infected. The second film happens 38 weeks after the infection, following two children arriving in an army-insured area, which ends up destroyed because no one knew that some people could carry the virus without completely becoming monsters. This third movie, which brings a return to Danny Boyle, takes place almost 30 years later, where there are still many people who witnessed that first wave, but there are also those who never knew another reality. For Boyle, it was worth waiting so long to make a sequel, and for fans of the movie, there are plenty of reasons why this is all worth it, too.

Why is 28 Years Later Worth Seeing?

It’s Danny Boyle’s Return

The second film in the saga did not feature Danny Boyle, and that shows in the style and in the way the story is told. The second is not bad, but it lacked that touch that only Boyle can give his movies, and 28 Years Later has that.

Boyle gives everything a disturbing intensity, but he also finds moments for drama, intimacy, and playing very real themes, such as fear of death and the process of growing up and becoming adults.

The Cast is Spectacular

Cillian Murphy did an amazing job in the first movie, but this is not his story, and it is not his time. 28 Years Later has a new cast and new characters.

Among them we have Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Jamie), who plays a father for teaching his son to survive in the world in which he has to live, Jodie Eat (Island), a mother who fights against a strange disease that is consuming her, and Alfie Williams (Spike), a child who has to grow up quickly and discover a series of things that change his perspective.

The film also has Ralph Fiennes as a strange doctor who may be the key to helping Spike save his family, and Jack O’Connell as a cult leader named Sir Jimmy Crystal, who is the leader of the Jimmy Gang.

Chaos, Violence and A Family History, Drama And Growth

28 Years Later has a lot of the chaos, blood, killings, and violence of the first two movies. Some new infected people are even more lethal, and human characters who are also very dangerous, cruel, and brutal, but it is also a story of drama and self-discovery, where a 12-year-old boy faces a harsh and challenging reality, and must learn to follow his own path. In this story, survivors live on a protected and isolated island (their only access to dry land is a road that floods and offers them protection), but security is only an illusion, and the protagonists must leave it behind to avoid living a family tragedy. This is one of the great successes of this film, telling a story of family, growth, loss, and very real pain, in the midst of an apocalypse of zombies, which are not the typical zombies that we see in many other movies.

Spectacular Photography and New Zombies

From the first trailers, it became clear that this film, like the first one, was going to have a very clear and very powerful style. Visual elements are essential in this story, as they help create tension and horror, but also moments that seem almost magical and as if taken from a fantasy (although quite dark). It is made in a way that you can feel the fear and tension of each character, and where there are certain touches of rarity that play with the most familiar and realistic elements.

“Monsters” Are Not the Only Monsters

One of the best elements of all the movies in the saga of 28 Days Later is that all 3 comment on what it means to be a monster or villain. All three show that while the infected are in great danger, you also have to be afraid of humans, who are willing to do terrible things when they feel desperate and when they believe their survival is in danger. What are we willing to do to survive? That is what these films ask themselves, and it is something that is analyzed from different perspectives, including that of a child who lives in a world full of horrors.

An Innovative Visual Experience

One of the biggest bets of this new installment is its visual style. Danny Boyle, along with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, decides to break the traditional rules of big-budget cinema using 20 ring-mounted iPhone 15 Pro Max to capture action sequences. The result is a “bullet time” “Matrix” effect, but with a crudeness closer to a punk experiment than to a polished overproduction. These technical decisions, while generating visually shocking moments —like a lonely train stranded in the middle of nowhere or a tower of skulls that freezes blood — also affect visual coherence. Sometimes the film looks like an immersive masterpiece; in others, it looks like an amateur tape recorded on a mobile. This irregularity can baffle viewers more accustomed to homogeneous aesthetics, but it gives it a risky and unpredictable character that is undoubtedly the author’s stamp.

A Script That Starts Strong … and Then Scatters!

The film starts strongly. It places us on the first day of the outbreak, at the exact moment that a priest interprets the infection as the beginning of the final judgment. From there, we jumped 28 years into a UK in total quarantine, turned into no man’s land, patrolled on its borders by the military, and inhabited by survivors who have created their own rules. One of Garland’s greatest successes is showing how the passage of time has transformed not only humans but also those infected. There are now “alphas”: infected faster, smarter, capable of coordinating attacks and forming hierarchies. This concept gives a new air to the mythology of the virus and proposes a biological evolution that brings it closer to a social dystopia than to a typical zombie story. Unfortunately, after a powerful and atmospheric first half hour, the script begins to falter. It becomes episodic, with encounters that seem disconnected from each other and whose only function is to push the protagonists to the next visual sequence. Some interesting characters are wasted, and the central plot is diluted between narrative decisions that seek more immediate impact than long-term cohesion.

A Sociopolitical Evolution of the Apocalypse

One of the most interesting elements of “28 Years Later” is how it expands its universe on a political and social level. New human communities, both inside and outside the quarantine zone, operate with their own hierarchical rules and structures. At the same time, the infected are no longer just mindless threats: they have also formed something akin to “societies”, with their own patterns of behavior and leadership. In this sense, the script presents a metaphor for isolation, otherness, and fear management. It is not difficult to read in its background a veiled criticism of Brexit, British isolation, and the conflicts that arise when the connection with the outside world is lost.

Boyle and His Punk Style: Beautiful But Imperfect Chaos

If Danny Boyle knows how to do something, it is to print an author’s stamp on the genre. With its filthy aesthetics, its frenetic rhythm, and its rejection of conventional cinema, it achieves that “28 Years Later” has a very strong identity. The action sequences, although not always fluid, are charged with tension and surprise. Some, such as the attack on a passage submerged by the tide or the ambush of the alphas, are small works of post-apocalyptic terror. However, that same irreverence can turn against him. There are times when the montage is so frenetic that it is difficult to follow the action, and others when the tone abruptly changes between the poetic (with fragments of poems and ancient cinema) and the grotesque (with scenes of explicit violence and dismemberment that seem taken from a movie series B).