28 Years Later is Plagued by more than The Infected
Director Danny Boyle potentially had a next-level horror film on his hands with 28 Years Later (2025). He had it. It peeks through in specific scenes and precisely captured moments, like a Terrence Malick film at some points, and then it is dropped, easing back onto a bumpy narrative road filled with plot holes and inconsistencies.
28 Years Later is a deeply flawed film, unequal in script quality to 28 Days Later or 28 Weeks Later. This film is a waste of potential, a waste of acting talent, and a waste of directing prowess. This film, whatever it truly is, does not deserve the moniker “28” as it bears only a tangential connection to its predecessors. This film does not expand and carry on the original storyline, as did 28 Weeks Later. This film feels like a stand-alone, post-apocalyptic film in need of more script revision and polishing.
Signs of Trouble
The second scene in 28 Years Later, in the church, and how it is resolved, is an earlier indication of storytelling trouble for the film. It’s a strange and off-kilter resolution. Extremus can drive a normal person mad, but the situation with the priest is utterly baffling considering that there is a house full of children that possibly needs his help and protection a short distance away, a house containing his wife and son.
This is the first major conceit the film asks the viewer to accept, and it isn’t the last. By the end of 28 Years Later, its ridiculous contradictions and plot points bewilder the viewer, causing them to ruminate on what could have been if someone who is capable of maintaining tonal consistency and imbuing characters with rationality had written this film.
The ‘Gas’ Station Flame Out
The gas station scene is the point in 28 Years Later where all pretense of realism leaves the film and never returns. Exploding the fumes in the gas station would indiscriminately kill everyone, infected and uninfected alike. Being a good person doesn’t and shouldn’t protect you from the flames—except in this film. In 28 Years Later, only the bad guys get roasted. The flames don’t touch the good guys, even though they are nearly at the center of the fumes before they are ignited.
Brilliance
When Alpha is kept as a nebulous force in the first act of the film—dark, mysterious, a shape of masculinity—it works. Add in the crows and them possibly communicating with him, providing location intelligence, and heralding his presence and arrival; it really works.
The causeway run sequence while the tide is still in is a tense and beautifully shot moment in 28 Years Later, one of the best, second only to Spike sneaking her mother off the island and across the tidal bridge onto the mainland.
Another splendid scene in 28 Years Later is the resolution to the encroaching fat slug ragger in the church as Spike ‘stands watch.’ The viewer wonders who killed the fat slug ragger, as no one else seems to have been present. The reveal of the dispatcher is well-handled and adds to Isla’s value in the film and to the narrative as a whole.
That value shows itself again in the wheat field scene.
The wheat field scene, starring Isla (Jodie Comer), is like a separate moment from a sensible, balanced, well-written, and well-acted film. 28 Years Later becomes that film momentarily with the wheat field scene, and Boyle obtained a great actress to star in this short film, but it’s an isolated capsule, like the protagonists’ home, and disappears as quickly as the tide and Isla’s moments of lucidity.
Leaving Alpha Alive—Twice
The protagonists have two opportunities to kill an Alpha ragger on the mainland when it is anesthetized, and they just leave it alive so that it can wake up and keep attacking and killing them. It’s nonsensical and breaks the logic of the film.
The Spine
Showing an Alpha ragger continuously ripping out the heads and spines of human victims eventually kills the sensationalism of such a gruesome death. By the third time it happens in 28 Years Later, it’s comical. Human beings have many body parts that can be torn off by an individual with advanced strength, yet this seems not to have occurred to the screenwriter of this film.
Pregnancy and Evolution Questions
The pregnant ragger woman in 28 Years Later—are the infected having sex now (or was she pregnant before infection)? Rage-infected only have three desires: attacking the uninfected, biting the uninfected, and eating. In 28 Years Later, Boyle is suggesting (possibly) that there is now a fourth desire—ciotus.
And why doesn’t the pregnant ragger attack Isla? The hand-hold moment is good, but there’s no explanation for it. It just happens, and then there are no deep, resounding story implications from it. Though an interesting scene, it also breaks the logic of the movie and its world. The woman is supposed to be rage-infected and thus is supposed to attack the non-infected on sight. The rage woman in this film doesn’t do that. She acts normal for a moment—for the birth and the umbilical cord being cut—then she conveniently snaps out of it and is a rage monster again. It’s imbecilic. As a writer, you can’t establish a rule and then break it because you feel like it and then re-establish it with no elucidation.
Are the raggers evolving? Say so. Are the raggers learning to control the rage? Indicate that. Does pregnancy grant moments of mental, non-rage clarity? Go into that with Dr. Ian Kelson.
The writer does not have to be explicit and explain everything to the viewer. The explanations could be sub-dermal, left to the imagination but graspable. In 28 Years Later, there are no explanations anywhere, barely anything to intuit, just rule-breaking and the inexplicable.
The Ending
28 Years Later has an inappropriate ending with cleanly dressed, acrobatic court jesters bouncing off rocks, dispatching the infected as if they were adult-sized dolls, killing any hope of plot redemption, and extinguishing the promise briefly seen during key moments in the film. I don’t know what Boyle is thinking, but it is not about maintaining the aesthetic of his film or consistency. It’s pure goofiness with a person that has disappeared for the entire film and reappears with no character development, no storyline, and no personality. Wasted character. Wasted film.
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