They’re not coming back, exactly. They never really went away. A mere 23 years after 28 Days Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s indelible 2002 zombie movie, it’s time for 28 Years Later, the first film in a new trilogy that returns (or fast-forwards) us to a time when the rage virus wreaked havoc on the world.
That first movie starred a young Cillian Murphy [ed note: heart eyes], who appears to pop up here as a zombie; he is expected to appear in these films, but his zombification has yet to be confirmed. Our new hero is Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kraven the Hunter) who heads out from his lightly oldey-timey civilization with a young boy, presumably his son. They have bows and arrows and appear to be hunting dinner. Naturally, they find something else entirely.
After a seemingly endless number of seasons of The Walking Dead, most of which I did not even watch, it is hard not to find the imagery here familiar: the carefully guarded settlement, the not-so-unexpected threat, the attempts to make life go on. There is no dialogue, so we can’t get much sense of the characters. Instead, we get what Deadline identifies as “a Taylor Holmes recording of Rudyard Kipling’s war poem ‘Boots’,” glitchy and monotone and eerie.
Boyle and Garland have both returned to this continuation of the series; along with Taylor-Johnson, new cast members include Jodie Comer (Killing Eve), Ralph Fiennes (Conclave), Erin Kellyman (Solo), and Jack O’Connell (Ferrari).
Get ready to run fast when 28 Years Later arrives in theaters June 20, 2025.
