28 Years Later is a film that made me more angry than any film that I can think of in recent times. It wasn't just that I thought the film was bad and a massive letdown, but also because I feel as though there was a massive coordinated strike of untrue information and fake reviews praising the film and giving it characteristics that it did not possess. The continuity issues were just insane in the first one and upon many occasions the film broke the rules that the film itself established.
No matter what you came up with though, there was some apologist on the internet that would defend it. The main thing being that the main character "Spike" went from being basically completely useless even as a support character vs the zombies to being a one-man-army just 10 minutes later. When the film concluded and he was rather effortlessly living on his own in the wild I was basically done with the film at that point... then the stupid ending with the Jimmy Savile ninja kids just really pushed me over the edge.
I didn't plan on paying any attention to The Bone Temple but well, its release time was done well and I had nothing else to do so I figured I may as well check it out.
The film is much better than the first one, but the bar was set so low with 28 Years that almost anything would have been a vast improvement.
I'm going to make this one spoiler-free but later will write a very angry and spoiler-filled one where I show my true colors.
This film is rated very high on all the major online review sites and once again, I feel as though this is rigged by thousands of fake accounts that are going to say glowing things all over the internet in order to dupe people into going to see it.
The IMDB rankings are predictable as usual and I really think that the 5 and 6's are probably the only actual and truthful reviews. I have a bone to pick (haha) with this film franchise for sure, but it is not a 1-4 rank film. It is not a 7-10 either. It's something rather "meh" in the middle and the fact that there are people out there that are plugging both ends of this equation just makes me made. I feel like the 1's and 10's are very clearly fake reviews by people who are either morons or are paid to do this as a job.
Rotten Tomatoes is about the same. The professional reviewers are always going to suck the toes of these producers who are intimately connected to all things Hollywood. To do anything other than that would have backlash that could be career ending for them. It can't be easy to be a professional reviewer because almost nobody makes any money doing that so if you are one who gets thrown some money here and there the last thing you are going to do is piss somoeone powerful off and end up losing your gift egg job.
RT no longer allows you to see the distribution of votes. You do not have the ability to look at just the 6's or 7's at least not in my interface. You used to be able to and the fact that this is no longer possible says to me that RT is definitely helping the industry in rigging certain ratings of certain films.
The Bone Temple is just fine I guess. If we break it down in a way to see if it follows what was done in the first film there are as I have come to expect, a metric ton of violations of the very rules the that films themselves established. I think it is perfectly fine if a film breaks from what we already think about zombies (or vampires or any supernatural creature) but the thing that really pisses me off about both of these films is that they will establish some sort of character arc or characteristic of some creature or person in the film, then 5 minutes later either completely ignore this rule or violate it in a 180 degrees sort of way.
It can be entertaining as long as you switch your brain off and just pay attention to the thing minute by minute.
There are a ton of inconsistencies in this film but I will be vague about them so as not to spoil.
In the first film the mainland is made to look as though it is just absolutely inundated with the undead horde... like around every single corner, but in the Bone Temple the undead or the infected or whatever you want to call them, seem to have taken some very much needed time off. Unless some very convenient point in the plot calls for it, they basically aren't in this movie at all and when they are, there is only a straggler here and there, not a horde like it was presented in the first film.
Things like this piss me off. You built the bloody world that we are looking at here and now you completely abandon it. It would be like if in Star Wars all of a sudden space travel wasn't possible and nobody ever explains why. It is the "somehow, Palpatine has returned" but in zombie form.
If i was to be grateful for one thing in The Bone Temple it would be that the fat, slow, worm-eating, obese zombies have not made another appearance.
To me The Bone Temple is not a continuation of the first film at all. There is no continuous story here the likes of other trilogies. These films really don't have anything to do with one another other than the main character "Spike" who by the way seems to be completely incapable of acting at all.
Go ahead and type "spike 28 years later" into an image search and you will see for yourself that this guy has exactly the same stupid facial expression on in every single still.
I think the writers and director are aware of this and Alfie Williams (Spike) is intentionally not given very much dialogue because regardless of what the rigged reviews will say, I think that most people agree that this kid cannot act just like whoever it was that played Anakin in Episode 1 couldn't act. It was bad casting but now there is nothing that can be done about it.
There are strong performances by other actors in The Bone Temple and I will give credit where it is due
For example, Jack O'Connell, who we briefly met at the end of 28 Years Later is absolutely outstanding in his role as "Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal." It's just a shame that his character arc is just as nonsensical as anyone else's... ok, maybe a little bit less bad.
All in all I'm not going to tell you to not see this one but I do think that this film and the one that proceeded it could be a case study in the new normal about how movie releases are manipulated in order to dupe people into seeing them, rather than actually making a super-high-quality product that is genuinely worth seeing. These are the times that we live in now and I think we can count on this practice continuing because at least for the first film, it worked.
But do understand this please: Even though I feel like the rollout of both of these films are mostly BS they didn't make enough money to really consider them to be a financial success. After advertising costs are deducted 28 Years made about $25 million in profit and as it stands right now The Bone Temple is still standing at around a $60 million LOSS. While some money can be expected to be made with streaming on demand and the eventual sale to streaming services, this is rather huge loss and Sony may not choose to make the 3rd installment even though they technically already green-lit it.
I wish no ill will to films but when you intentionally mislead your audience, people tend to remember and this may be why we are seeing such a huge drop in the amount of people that paid to see The Bone Temple... that whole "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me" sort of thing.
This movie isn't awful so go ahead and watch it, or if you are like me, hate-watch it and see how many holes you can punch in the plot. Either way you are going to have a reasonably good time.