I don't often go to the cinema but yesterday a friend of mine and I were chatting on an app shooting the breeze about the usual nonsense when he said "hey, I'm going to the 1pm showing of 28 Years Later, wanna go?"
I had forgotten that this film was being released this weekend and since I strangely do not have obligations at 1pm on a Friday afternoon I thought "hell, let's be some of the first people to actually see this!"
When this review ends up telling you nothing about the story just know that this is intentional. I realize that a lot of people are going to flock to the cinemas to see this one because 2025 has been such a year of the flopbuster as far as cinematic releases have been concerned.
I am going to tell you this though: I was extremely disappointed with this one and felt as though it couldn't possibly fail due to the fact that 28 Weeks Later was such a massive letdown compared to 28 Days Later. I don't think anyone is going to argue that. I figured that the bar is already so low from 28 weeks that 28 Years has to be a step up. I sincerely wish that it was, but this one is filled with the same insane coincidences and chance encounters that happen at just the right moment in order to move the plot along.
This is my biggest gripe with this movie. It doesn't make any sense at all that things happen the way that they do where, just in a general sense, something has been a certain way for what we are told decades, and then when our protagonists end up in precisely that situation, it ends up being completely different than everything we have been told.
This would be at least somewhat understandable if our protagonists were some sort of super-soldiers, but they aren't. One of them is above average as far as capabilites are concerned, but the other is a child.. and it is shown in the first 30 minutes of the movie that he is BARELY capable of not dying immediately in a pinch... yet 20 minutes or just a few days in terms of the movie timeline later, the boy is basically an unstoppable force that even the harshest of situations that have resulted in humanity being the way that it is in the first place, doesn't seem to slow him down at all.
If he had some sort of superhuman reason for being this way it would be understandable, but he doesn't. It's just a complete about-face about what this very film spent the first 30 minutes explaining to us. It doesn't make any sense! Why spend all that time building a character arc only to completely abandon it when the story calls for it? Or even better, why bother building up this character in a certain direction if you aren't going to stick with it?
If you bother going to see this one in cinemas, and trust me I strongly encourage you not to, you'll know right away what it is that I am referring to.
It isn't just this one character either. There are other characters that they spend quite a while developing in the early parts of the film, only to completely walk away from them and we don't really get any idea about what happened to them, or why they just stopped doing what they had been doing up to this point.
There are certain safeguards that are put into place and according to the film itself, are rigidly stuck to in order to ensure the continued safety of the village, but when the plot calls for it, these safeguards are immediately abandoned.
This reminded me of the reasons why I didn't care for 28 Weeks Later.* We are told for the first half of that movie that the military presence in London has been secure enough for them to begin moving civilians back into the city, but then withing moments it isn't safe anymore. Did they not check? It just doesn't make sense.
I know it is a film but without these sorts of plot devices built in to the story in a reasonable and possible way, none of the explanations and story make any sense.
While I will not reveal what they are, we are also introduced to several new types of zombies in this one that make no practical sense as to how they would survive. It was established in 28 Weeks Later that the zombie horde would starve without other humans to consume, yet here they are.
All that is just my dissatisfaction of how the plot is just thrown together and if "A" needs to happen for "B" to occur, they just make "A" happen even if it breaks the world rules that they themselves established in the first part of the film. This is after, apparently, 28 years of things always being the same predictable way. I would understand if some sort of discovery was made that changes things like it kind of did in 28 Weeks with the super-zombie-pregnant lady and her estranged husband (barf!) but none of that happens here. It is just inexplicably different one day because: Reasons.
Actually it's worse than "reasons" because no explanation is given at all. All of a sudden this unstoppable force that everyone is afraid of is easily overcome by a character that the film spends the first 30 minutes showing us is barely capable of survival.
The actual zombies and their combination of CGI as well as puppets and real human actors is done well, I will give them that. The musical score is also good. The cinematography is done in an artful way that kind of reminds me of how that was necessary when 28 Days hit theaters. They didn't have the budget of other films of that sort at the time so they had to resort to being artistic instead. Bravo, I guess.
The main problem here is that the overall story in 28 Years is nonsensical. There are parts of it that are meant to be dramatic or even tragic but it fails completely to invoke these sorts of emotions because of the bizarre and completely implausible path that the story takes to get to that point.
Another aspect of this film that I really didn't expect to have happen is that I spent a lot of time in the theater feeling sleepy and bored. There is a ton of rather useless dialogue that takes place during the film and the only way I could continue to find it entertaining was to point out (in my head, I'm very polite in theaters) how the film was contradicting itself with the very "rules" they themselves had established just 20 minutes prior.
When the movie appears to be coming to a close, I found myself hopeful that it would in fact be over because I was ready to get the hell out of there. When the credits finally hit the screen at the end I actually said to my friends "thank god" and we all kind of agreed that the film was a massive letdown and we all agreed that if we had been watching it at home, we would have turned it off.
Should I watch it?
I'm not going to tell you how to live your life but honestly, I was so hyped about this that I rushed out the door to be in a theater for the first time in 2025. I regret having bothered to do so.
When I look at the review score on IMDB it really makes me think that this film's rating is going to be rigged over opening weekend (it't currently near 8/10) and in a few weeks time it is going to taper down to where it belongs at around a 5.
But you be your own judge in this one but knowing what I know now I really think that for almost everyone, this is something that they can and should wait for on streaming services or maybe to be just not watched at all. But you do you. I don't want to be the reason why you end up not seeing this on the big screen but honestly, I feel like it is a waste of money to do so.
Currently the only legal way to see this film is in theaters around the world
