The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
To just say this up front, these movies just aren’t my kind of thing when it comes to zombies; I am much more of a Romero-style zombie guy. I coincidentally caught some of Day of the Dead on television this morning, I have a signed Night of the Living Dead poster hanging on the wall next to me as I write this and Dawn of the Dead is my favorite zombie movie of all time (and if you ask me which version of Dawn of the Dead, I will fucking slap you). That being said, both 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later are solid flicks. I don’t rewatch them, but they are good, suspenseful movies. They just aren’t really my thing.
I was, however, looking forward to 28 Years Later because the trailer was frigging awesome and I feel like I have seen that trailer in a theater ever week for the last six months. The trailer made it seem like a natural, long-term escalation of the zombie crisis from the first two movies. Now, I thought, we will see what the world has been like after being overrun by zombies for almost three decades. Well, bullshit. Similar to how every new Jurassic Park/World movie promises to show dinosaurs roaming free on Earth before just isolating them on an island again, 28 Years Later not only doesn’t escalate the situation, but, if anything, delivers a story on an even smaller scale than its predecessors.
28 Years Later is a coming-of-age story about young boy named Spike. It seems that the zombie outbreak has been successfully contained to the United Kingdom, which has been written off by the outside world and declared a permanent quarantine zone. Spike and his parents are among survivors living on an island that is connected to the mainland (which I’m guessing is Scotland or Wales?) by a strip of land that disappears and reappears depending on the tide. It is a right of passage for men to bring their sons on a hunting trip on the mainland, so Spike’s dad (played by Kraven himself, Aaron Taylor-Johnson) brings him on such an expedition. Spike’s mom is sick and he learns about a potentially insane doctor on the mainland during his hunting trip, spurring him to then bring his mom on a journey in zombie country to try to find a cure for her illness.
I was bored out of my fucking mind during most of this movie. The first two movies were at least somewhat unique when they came out, but somber, slice-of-life stories set post-zombie apocalypse have been (no pun intended) done to death since then. Not only does this movie not advance the series in any meaningful way, it seems regressive and downright pedestrian in the context of everything that has been influenced by those movies in the last 20 years. There honestly just isn’t much here. If you are looking for zombie horror, there is about 10 minutes of it in this 2-hour movie and most of it is just jerky footage of them running. I kept waiting for an escalation and a culmination that just never came.
Danny Boyle, the director of 28 Days Later, returns for this one and he…well, he certainly makes some artistic choices. They are terrible choices, but choices they were. The editing in this movie is fucking atrocious, particularly during the rare horror scenes. Whenever zombies attack, I had no idea what was happening. The camera cuts so quickly that I couldn’t understand the flow or geography of what was taking place. Were the zombies two feet away or a hundred yards away? Are people running toward the zombies or away from them? Who the fuck knows? I sure as shit didn’t because it seemed like the editor was having a fucking seizure and nobody noticed. I hope he is okay. Then there are just bizarre choices, like splicing in footage from an old war movie and frequently cutting to red-tinted footage of zombies and a deer. I really thought that this would eventually amount to something, but nope. It didn’t. I have heard British people comment that these are British cultural references that us uneducated Americans just don’t understand. Well, if your shitty army could have beaten some farmers in the 1700s, then I guess I would get your references. But they didn’t, so fuck off.
I hesitate to comment on this, but I must mention one of this movie’s most prominent features: Dick. Holy shit, is there a lot of dick in this movie. I have never seen this much cock in a non-pornographic movie. Most of the zombies are men and the movie really likes long shots of them running toward the camera with their cocks flailing around without a care in the world. Then there is the leader zombie, who….I mean, good for this guy. I don’t know if it was a prosthetic or not, but this guy’s dick is on camera constantly and he looks to be about ten inches soft. If this guy got hard, he could fuck a girl’s mouth and ass at the same time. Sure, she would die in the process, but she would be impressed before she succumbed to internal bleeding.
I can say that, aside from the godawful editing, the film is solid enough on a technical level. The performances are all good and the cinematography is strong despite being the movie being literally shot with an iPhone. I’m not making that up; they shot this movie on a fucking phone. But, regardless, 28 Years Later just isn’t scary or even engaging. It is too far up its own ass to deliver on scares and is far too late to the post-apocalyptic zombie party to deliver anything new. This is the first part of a new trilogy and I already just got bored thinking about the next two movies.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Years_Later#/media/File:28_Years_Later_film_poster.jpg
