28 Years Later | Film Review

 

25 years after the rage virus first began to spread, a group of survivors find that the virus has begun to mutate both the infected and other survivors.

I feel like I'm the only person in the world who isn't particularly keen on the 28 Days Later franchise. I didn't really like the first movie, and I thought the second was okay but nothing special, so I wasn't hugely excited to see this one.

This one was better than the first two, and better than I thought it would be, but again I didn't love it.

However, the first thing I need to praise is the production design. The designers did an amazing job of creating this world and making everything look authentic.

The entire film is visually stunning. Every location is beautiful and obviously created with a lot of thought and care.

This was an interesting expansion to these movies because it kept enough the same to make things feel familiar to the audience, while also changing enough to keep things completely fresh and new.

I thought the relationships between the characters felt really authentic. They all worked well together and had great chemistry.

And the cast was great. They all played their characters really well.

But having said this, I never felt connected to any of the characters. I didn't feel like I knew them, nor did I want to get to know them. So this meant that I didn't really care about their fates, which made the stakes of the film much lower.

One reason for this is that we're dropped into the middle of this story. We know the world but we don't know these people, and the only way we can get to know them is by watching them at the worst points of their lives. For this to work we really need to care about them from the very beginning but it's hard for that to happen in a film like this.

That being said, it's a lot better in the faster-paced moments of peril, when we don't need to care about the characters and can instead just put ourselves in their shoes. The slower dialogue-heavy sections of the film didn't work as well for me.

The emotions of the film didn't hit as hard as I needed them to, and that's probably because I wasn't as engaged as I should have been.

So overall, I enjoyed this movie, particularly from a visual standpoint. And if you liked the first two movies that explore this world, you'll probably love this one. But I didn't love the characters or the plot, so this didn't really work for me.

5.5/10