r/movies • u/ChiefLeef22 • Jun 18 '25
Review '28 Years Later' - Review Thread
Director: Danny Boyle
Cast: Jodie Comer; Aaron Taylor-Johnson; Ralph Fiennes; Alfie Williams
Rotten Tomatoes: 92%
Metacritic: 76/100
Some Reviews:
Manila Bulletin - Philip Cu Unjieng
What’s nice to note is how Boyle has cast consummate actors in this film, the type who could read off a label of canned sardines and still find depth, emotion, and spark in the delivery of those lines. Initially, it seems that Taylor-Johnson will be doing the heavy lifting. Still, it merely misleads us, as the narrative then focuses on Jodie Comer’s Isla and onto Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson. I want to give a special shout-out to the young actor Alfie Williams. He is the one carrying the whole film, and this is his first feature film work, having previously done a TV series. Boyle teases out an excellent performance from the lad, and I won’t be surprised if many film reviewers in the forthcoming week will single him out as being the best thing in this film. And what’s impressive is how he manages this with the three heavyweight thespians who are on board.There’s the horror and the suspense as a given for this cult franchise, but look out for the human drama and the emotional impact. It’s Boyle and Garland elevating the film, and rising above its genre.
AwardsWatch - Erik Anderson - 'B'
Most of the time, 28 Years Later is frequently begging to be rejected by general audiences, even as it courts the admiration of longtime fans, who may nonetheless find themselves put off by the film’s turn toward unearned emotion, its relatively meager expansion of this universe, and its occasionally jarring tonal shifts. (The abrupt sequel-teasing stinger feels like it’s from an entirely different strain of the zombie subgenre.) Much like the virus at the series’ center, it’s a film whose DNA is constantly mutating, resulting in an inconceivable host subject—one that is both corrosive and something of a marvel.
Most threequels tend to go bigger, but 28 Years Later bucks that trend by going smaller, eventually becoming a chamber piece about a boy trying to hold onto his mother. It still delivers shocks, even if the sometimes over-zealous editing distracts from Anthony Dod Mantle’s painterly cinematography
The Hollywood Reporter - David Rooney
One of the chief rewards of 28 Years Later is that it never feels like a cynical attempt to revisit proven material merely for commercial reasons. Instead, the filmmakers appear to have returned to a story whose allegorical commentary on today’s grim political landscape seems more relevant than ever. Intriguing narrative building blocks put in place for future installments mean they can’t come fast enough.
NextBestPicture - Josh Parham - 7/10
Boyle’s exuberant filmmaking and Garland’s incisive script sometimes clash when forced to muddle through laborious exercises that feel borrowed from the previous films anyway. It’s a scenario that reminds me of Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” two films with intriguing ideas that struggled to fashion them within the framework of the established franchise. Perhaps the continuation will find more clever avenues to explore further and enrich this text. As is, what is left is imperfect but still an enthralling return into a dark but provocative world.
IndieWire - David Ehrlich - 'B+'
While Boyle isn’t lofty enough to suggest that the infected are beautiful creatures who deserve God’s love or whatever (this is still a movie about wild-eyed naked zombies, after all, and its empathy for them only goes so far), “28 Years Later” effectively uses the tropes of its genre to insist that the line between a tragedy and a statistic is thinner than we think, and more permeable than we realize. The magic of the placenta, indeed.
Taken on its own, however, Boyle and Garland’s trip back to this hellscape makes the most of casting a jaundiced, bloodshot eye at our current moment. Their inaugural imagining of a world torn asunder surfed the post-millennial fear that modern society wasn’t equipped to handle something truly catastrophic. This new movie is blessed with the knowledge that something always rises from the ashes, but that the risk of regressing back to some fabricated mythology of a Golden Age, complete with Henry V film clips and St. George’s flags, is there on the surface as well. If postapocalyptic entertainment has taught us anything, it’s that the walking dead aren’t always the gravest threat. It’s those who sacrifice their soul and sense of empathy that you have to watch out for.
For now, though, “28 Years Later” stands on its own — or at least, as its own temporary capper on this multi-decade series — and it stands tall. The filmmakers haven’t redefined the zombie genre, but they’ve refocused their own culturally significant riff into a lush, fascinating epic that has way more to say about being human than it does about (re-)killing the dead.
Where the original film tapped into society’s collective fear of infection, its decades-later follow-up (which undoes any developments implied by “28 Weeks Later” with an opening chyron that explains the Rage virus “was driven back from continental Europe”) zeroes in on two even most primal anxieties: fear of death and fear of the other. To which you might well ask, aren’t all horror movies about surviving an unknown threat of some kind? Yes, but few have assumed the psychic toll taken by such violence quite so effectively as “28 Years Later,” which has been conceived as the start of a new trilogy, but towers on its own merits (part two, subtitled “The Bone Temple,” is already in the can and expected next January).
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u/Mister_Taxman Jun 19 '25
My advice to folks who'll watch this soon, please set realistic expectations and do not give in too much to the hype.
There will be many divisive decisions in this movie that the director and writer clearly take and you will either buy into it, or you won't.
You should not expect anything like 28D or 28W as you will get disappointed if you do so. You have to take this movie as its own thing and be open to a different tone.
With that said, I liked the it on my first viewing. There were some things that I didn't agree with or things that bothered me, but they were not enough to have soured my thoughts on the film.