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28 Days Later Movie Review

28 Days Later is a British 2002 zombie horror film directed by Danny Boyle and starring Cillian Murphy. It is one of the most overrated genre films of the aughts.

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“You’d never think it… needing rain so badly.

Not in fucking England!“

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Twenty-eight days after the outbreak of a deadly virus in London, which infects everyone and turns them into brain-dead killers, the survivors try to cope with their losses and find sanctuary. I have never cared for this movie and upon rewatching it after many years, I still have to say that I dislike it. It’s not a bad movie by any means, but it’s wildly overrated in my opinion.

My main issue with this movie is its look. This was filmed on an obviously very low budget, so it turned out to be a big hit with great box office in comparison. But it looked and still looks like absolute shit. I am sorry, but it is one thing to have an indie film that looks cheap, but it’s another thing to have a movie that tries to be a genre film and has a lot of action in it, but they couldn’t do it properly, so it ended up having these grainy, bad-looking, dreary visuals with most of it happening at night, which was its worst offender.

I would have forgiven them for the visuals had they included a strong story and memorable characters, which this movie also lacked in. There are some great actors in this movie including Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston. Cillian Murphy is the main star himself. And while all of them were strong and especially Murphy, their characters were thoroughly underdeveloped, boring and forgettable, so I didn’t care or root for them at all.

28 Days Later was written by Alex Garland himself. I adore the guy, but this was early on in his career when he wasn’t a director and this is one of his weakest efforts. While the uniquely grounded approach to telling a zombie story was admirable, some political elements worked and zombies being fast was refreshing, the plot for the most part was going through the motions and the world building and attention to detail were mostly subpar.

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It’s a film of great moments with such a memorable ending and a powerful, thrilling and scary beginning that really started the story on a strong note, but everything in-between those two scenes was tedious and unremarkable. It’s a movie that lost so much of its edge after the release of ‘The Last of Us’ and its television adaptation. The human drama here paled in comparison to that masterpiece.