David Roth: I feel like when we have these sorts of conversation blogs on the site, the subject is generally something that everyone kind of likes, but not in a way that they’d fully feel comfortable putting their name on a blog about—your Reachers, or your Wildwood Boardwalks. So I want to begin by saying that I think that both of the recent sequels in the 28 Days Later series are really good, and even intermittently kind of profound-feeling, and that no one throws a regulation-size barbecue grill at anyone else.
Tom Ley: Right off the bat, I need to say that I love 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple in a totally genuine, non-ironic way. I just really admire what Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are doing with these latest installments in the series, and I can’t think of any studio movie I’ve seen recently that strikes a better balance between off-the-wall weirdness, gnarly violence, and true profundity. I especially like how these two movies counterbalance each other, with 28 Years Later being this kind of mythical, big-hearted story, and The Bone Temple being this deeply upsetting horror flick that also manages to be really, really funny.
David: This is the bit that I’ve tried and failed to convey to people in explaining how much I have enjoyed these last two movies—they really are, tonally and in terms of basic storytelling choices, completely berserk. Just some of the wildest decisions that I have seen made in a film of this scale since the decline of widespread cocaine-driven decision-making in the industry during the 1990s. None of this was necessarily anything that you’d be able to predict from having seen the (very good) original or 28 Weeks Later, the pretty effective but slightly more disreputable and much less interesting first sequel. What was a very stylish and scary franchise of zombie movies has become, somehow, both a much more commercially successful enterprise and something much weirder than it started out being.
Tom: Should we just get right into the weird stuff? My impression from talking to people who did not like 28 Years Later is that the final scene of that movie—in which a character named Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) shows up leading a crew of sadistic weirdos who are all dressed like Jimmy Savile, all also named Jimmy, and are all obsessed with the Teletubbies—was just too much to endorse. People in my life made it clear that they could not condone such foolishness, and so I imagine they were disappointed to find out that the plot of The Bone Temple is largely concerned with these crazy Jimmies.
David: To my point about how big the swings are, here, the introduction of these Kappa tracksuit ninja chav machete freaks happens after two hours of extremely harsh and also oddly moving action has elapsed in 28 Years Later. You get to the end of that story, feeling a bit wrung out, and then all these bewigged goblins show up and start wasting zombies while a grindcore remix of the Teletubbies theme plays on the soundtrack. To say “we pick up more or less from there” is both accurate and very disorienting.
Tom: The Jimmies go around the countryside of northern England torturing and killing whoever they happen across, seeking to fulfill the wishes of Satan himself, whom Jimmy Crystal claims as his father. This movie doesn’t really have a classic “set piece,” but the closest it comes is a brutally long scene in which the Jimmies tie up a family in a barn and methodically peel the skin from their torsos.
If you were to just explain to me that this is what the movie is about, I would probably vow to never see it. But it really works. Director Nia DaCosta knows enough about making horror movies to understand just how much gore should be shown and how much should be left to the imagination, and O’Connell’s performance is incredible. Having a lesser actor in that role may have turned the movie into a disaster, but he manages to be absolutely terrifying and charismatic, while also revealing at key moments that he’s a total idiot. It all felt very authentic, as silly as that is to say about a sadistic murderer who lives in a post-apocalyptic wilderness. But he felt like a real guy! Like if Theo Von survived a zombie virus outbreak and became evil in a different way.
David: Yeah, this is something that, beyond giving points for ambition, I really appreciated: how much the films rely on the extremely good actors in the cast to get over what is, on the merits and especially in the abstract, some very challenging stuff. O’Connell is remarkable in The Bone Temple, just as unsettling a presence as I’ve seen in a film in a long time, but the real star performance of the series—and The Bone Temple is basically a showcase for him to do some wild movie star stuff—is Ralph Fiennes, who plays Dr. Ian Kelson. It’s not news that he’s a great actor, obviously, but he was so funny and so commanding in this part in both films, and did the kind of movie-acting magic trick of being so convincingly human that his mere presence in a scene makes it feel meaningful and real, even when the action and story threaten to pull you out of it. And again this is a part that, while we’re laying out the weird stuff, involves him being shirtless, smeared with iodine, and usually being both the most humane and the most obviously daffy character in basically every scene. In The Bone Temple, it also entails doing a lot more dancing and singing along to Duran Duran than I’d expected. Someone will play a sick historical figure and win an award that Fiennes deserves much more; I think it is in its way one of the best movie performances I’ve seen.
Tom: It really is. Another place where the movie could have totally fallen apart is when Crystal and Kelson meet, and work out together that Kelson is not Satan, and so not Crystal’s father. What unfolds from there is essentially the plot of an Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode. The script demands that these two characters say some truly ridiculous things to each other, and then do some even more ridiculous things throughout what counts as the climax of the film, and both of them make it work. I guess I just have to give it up for a movie that was one bad casting decision away from being Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder instead becoming a showcase for some of the best acting I’ve seen in a long time.
David: This is the aspect that made me want to talk about these movies. Obviously I like them, because I think they’re artful but at least in part because this is pretty much exactly the type of thing that I like, and I think we’ve laid out enough of what happens in them to establish whether other people would, as well. I don’t think we’ve really spoiled all that much, either, because so much of what works in both films is in the execution and detail and commitment that the filmmakers bring to all that. But I think a big part of what I appreciate about the sequels, beyond the craft and the various ways in which they are My Type Of Shit, is that commitment to take something that might have been kind of dreary and rote—and probably made just as much money being dreary and rote—and make it into this operatic and uncategorizable other thing instead. I like 28 Weeks Later fine overall, but there’s definitely a way forward from that sequel and its relationship to the original that’s like “one sequel of diminishing quality and increasing grossness every holiday season for five or so years until there’s no juice left in the concept,” and that is just not what happened. I can’t think of any other franchise that has taken its initial concept this seriously, while also being so irreverent and freaky with it. (The Exorcist is the only one that comes close for me, but only some of those sequels are any good and the series is an increasingly reverent mess now.)
Tom: It’s also really impressive to make a zombie movie in 2025 and 2026 that manages to be inventive and surprising, given how bloated the genre has become since 28 Days Later. We’re not even really dealing with particularly novel concepts here. These two movies are playing around in the same “What if man was the real monster?” and “What if there’s something else going with these zombies?” sandbox that many others have spent ample time in, and yet they still manage to feel fresh and vital. That’s largely down to the performances, as we’ve said, but Garland also deserves a lot of credit for finding new, and most importantly fun, ways to get into these old themes. A lot of people have tried to pull off the “These zombies aren’t quite what we think they are!” maneuver, but none of them have done it by having Ralph Fiennes sit in a meadow and get absolutely blasted on morphine with a cartoonishly large and fully nude man.
David: I’m kind of a broken record on this, but I feel like most horror franchises that go on too long start out kind of endearingly nasty and lean and eventually just wind up pompous—it’s a long way from the first Alien to whatever was going on in the last Ridley Scott sequels. Like the fact that the series of films has lasted so long means that they have to Mean Something as a result, and so Michael Myers winds up being Actually About Trauma when the character wasn’t conceived as anything of the sort. The 28 [Unit Of Time] family of films is the only one I can think of that wound up this far afield seemingly on purpose, simply by remaining committed to following the original idea wherever it led. I preferred 28 Years Later to The Bone Temple because it was, for the most part, more concerned with the stuff that interests me—what happens to a society that cuts itself off from everything and everyone else and then sustains itself on stupid lore and paranoia for long enough that it forgets what it was ever notionally about. It’s a Brexit allegory, I guess, but it’s not hard to find some resonance there from my vantage point in our own decaying empire. There’s very little of that sort of social critique in The Bone Temple—although, again, the very last scenes offer some, the substance of which is characteristically three-quarters-smart in the Alex Garland On Politics way, and which represents another switchback at the end of this very long and very brutal shaggy-dog tale. I don’t know that I can really say what the series is about, really, for all the things it kind of gestures at and plays with, but I really do enjoy the admittedly kind of punishing experience of watching it unfold.
Tom: I think what you’re getting at is how obviously liberated the creative process that went into making these latest movies was. You can chart a set of ideas and themes from one franchise installment to the next, but it never feels like the story is looping back on itself, getting more bloated and inert as it demands more reverence from the audience. These movies leave you with the sense that the filmmakers were following their creative impulses without hesitation, allowing the resulting ideas to be as weird, earnest, and fun as they needed to be. That kind of creative process is how you end up with a character, whose main function in 28 Years Later was showing off his comedically large hog, reprising his role in The Bone Temple and delivering some of the most profound moments of the series. More movies should be made like this.
