The many problems of "28 Years Later"

It's a mess and has nothing to say

*Spoilers*

1. All the edited-in shots of random British WWII and Medieval footage was intriguing (was Boyle/Garland saying something about an ingrained English martial spirit?), but the footage didn’t really feed into a larger theme and, looking back, felt vague, amateurish, and arthousey.

2. Sending a 12-year-old boy with little support — as a rite of passage — onto a zombie-infested mainland is a surefire way to start you movie with a bang, but throw in too much implausibility and you will quickly lose your audience’s trust.

3. The son’s conflict with the father made no sense (even from the flawed perspective of a 12-year-old boy). The dad was a good dad — constantly boosting his son’s morale and feeding him eggs — yet the son wants to stab and separate from the father because of one moment of (forgivable?) infidelity?

4. A stampede of deer inconveniently causes the stone house (that’s probably stood for hundreds of years) to cave in the moment the son and father take refuge in it?

5. Let’s move on to Dr. Ian Kelson, architect of the “bone temple.” Feeding, sheltering, and caring for oneself in a cold, damp Northumberland landscape — surrounded by flesh-eating zombies — would have consumed Dr. Kelson’s every waking moment. [Watch a reality-survival TV show like Alone and note how much time successful contestants devote to high-energy activities unrelated to survival. (It’s not much.)] And yet, Kelson has somehow found the time to not only survive, but singlehandedly construct what would have been a wonder of the world — his bone temple — made up of hundreds of towers of femurs and ulnas, as well as a pyramid of skulls as tall as the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. A Hindi funeral pyre requires almost 1,200 pounds of wood fuel just to incinerate one body. While I realize Kelson’s goal wasn’t full incineration and his furnace helped reduce fuel consumption, the amount of wood chopping, alone, would have been exhausting… AI tells me it would have taken 3,260 man-hours of time to cut wood for fuel, erect towers, deflesh, sterilize, and mount human skeletons, which I think is a gross underestimation.

6. It rains a lot in Northern England and Dr. Kelson’s protective iodine layer would be constantly washed off.

7. Dr. Kelson is wearing his protective iodine layer when an Alpha thrusts his hand through a meter of soil, making you wonder just how protective it is…

8. We see a group of European Union soldiers whose boat sunk, and yet the marooned soldiers are all wearing crisp uniforms, outfitted with cutting-edge gear, and carrying functioning guns. It does not look like they just experienced a harrowing swim across the North Sea.

9. During the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, a few hundred Spaniards with muskets and a few dozen horses took over an empire of millions. But somehow this trained European force, armed with automatic weapons, gets wiped out by about a dozen naked zombies (about a 1:1 human zombie skirmish) whose only weapons are their arms and mouths.

10. The presence of the one surviving European soldier on the British mainland seemed like a good opportunity for the movie to say something about Britain, the European continent, or the relationship between the two. But all we got from Eric, the Swedish soldier, were some whiny complaints about his job and his low-battery phone. Does that mean we Brits are living in post-Brexit austerity while the likes of the Swedes and Swiss live in post-apocalyptic decadence? Either way, the opportunity to say something was wasted.

11. That gas station fuel vapor scene… Would there still have been vapor in that gas station 28 years later? Do you think that idiot soldier has the chemical know-how to incinerate the zombies while giving the two humans a chance at survival?

12. Ralph Fiennes whispers a few lines in latin (“memento mori”)—a way to infuse profundity into a plot lacking any?

13. There’s a random baby in the plot that somehow survives for days despite having never been fed any milk (or any nutritious substance). Also, what’s the point of the baby in the story?! “Life?”

14. The sick mom character has something akin to clairvoyance—which is a common trope. (The clinically insane see the truth better than the sane but I haven’t seen any research that backs that up.)

15. How did the mom bash in a zombie’s skull directly next to the sleeping boy and not wake up the otherwise jumpy and alert boy?

16. “Alpha” zombies now have some Saruman-like ability to communicate with flocks of crows. Super intelligence, indeed, but not enough to deter the Alpha from running face first into a palisade wall guarded by flaming siege weapons.

17. Fat zombies. It’s now 28 years after the pandemic started on a zombie infested island where people now must live hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyles. Obesity was probably cured within the first month of the pandemic, so there won’t be any fat humans for the zombies to convert in 2025. And self-breeding zombies wouldn’t have enough natural resources (worms?) to get fat on…

18. Again, the boy had no real reason to fully abandon his father, the island, or his idyllic community! We were given no indication that this boy had a renegade spirit.

19. There was nothing thematically consistent about this movie. Some critics have said that the movie has something to say about modern-day Britain. It’s “a stark indictment of the British empire,” writes one critic. But I don’t think it had anything to say about Britain. It could have been about masculinity and how we have to go back to a zombie apocalypse for men to find their roles again, but they gave up on this theme quickly. It wasn’t about fathers and sons. It was barely about mothers and sons. It was about death, but did it have anything interesting to say about it?

20. The most interesting thing about zombie movies is that human communities must undergo radical alterations to survive—something many of us yearn for in our disconnected, screen-addled lives. We see this within the first twenty minutes of the movie (the movie’s strongest) when we observe how a small English island community has melded the 21st and 12th Centuries. Usually the most uninteresting part of a zombie movie is the zombies. And that’s what this movie is: some zombie world-building (there are “alphas” and now some sluggish fat zombies), but mostly just arrows competently aimed through zombie eye sockets. Arthousey editing aside, this film is, at bottom, a scatterbrained gore-fest with a few nice shots of the English countryside (which ought to have been depicted as more woodsy than pastoral, by the way).

21. They threw a few Jesus crosses in the movie. Some half-arsed attempt at religious symbolism?

22. That ending… It was offensive to any viewer who was doing their best to take the movie seriously. As a whole, it felt like a movie we rarely see anymore: a coked-out 80s movie in which one actor/director wields too much influence, surrounds himself with yes men, and trusts above all his instincts, leaving us with something terrible but uniquely terrible.

All that and this movie has a 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes with some critics calling it the “best film of the year so far.”

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