The long-awaited sequel to 28 Days Later is finally here, and pretending 28 Weeks Later doesn’t really exist.
Twenty-three years after 28 Days Later comes 28 Years Later (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), and if you don’t mind, we’re just going to skip over 28 Weeks Later. So Years is technically the third movie in the series, although it’s being treated like the second, since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the series after making the first movie one of the best zombie flicks ever. The new film has been a critical (88 percent on the Tomatometer) and financial success ($150 million global box office), which is a good thing not for those of us looking for something worth watching, but for the filmmakers, who’ve already shot a fourth film, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, with key cast members returning – Alfie Williams, Ralph Fiennes, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Cillian Murphy reprising his role from Days – albeit directed by Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, Candyman). The next movie is due in January, 2026, which is about enough time to psychologically recover from the current one’s vibrant display of human emotions and human spines.
The Gist: And by “human spines” I mean they’re ripped right out of the humans in lovely bloody detail, heads still attached. NEAT. That’s what the alpha zombies do, and they’re scary as hell. But we’re not quite there yet. Twenty-eight years after the rage-virus outbreak that turned zillions of civilians into Fast Zombies, mainland Europe has eradicated the illness and apparently resumed making TikToks and ordering junk from Amazon, but the British isles are a quarantine zone, overrun with the undead, with uninfected survivors left to fend for themselves. The island of Lindisfarne is a hop and a skip off the U.K. mainland, a healthy quarantine within the larger quarantine where a village of folk live a near-medieval existence, fashioning bows and arrows for protection and toting buckets of water, because plumbing is something that apparently hasn’t been sorted yet. They fish and raise sheep and wear baseball caps and hoodies, and an old flashlight might provide a little artificial light if the batteries are still holding on.
Here, we meet a family of three: Jamie (Taylor-Johnson) is a burly forager type, Isla (Jodie Comer) is his bedridden wife and Spike (Williams) is their 12-year-old son. At breakfast we learn that bacon is a luxury – and so is medicine, as Isla is a mental and physical shambles without a diagnosis, treatment or medicine. Today is to be Spike’s rite of passage into manhood: Jamie will lead him to the U.
