Huuuge fan of 28 Days Later, the rest is still decent, without too much scrutiny, but.
28 Years Later has an amazing soundtrack, almost entirely written by the Young Fathers. And they do GY!BE’s East Hastings at the end. So that was certainly very pleasant.
But I couldn’t shake off the feeling, maybe biased by looking at the state of the UK these days, that this is a movie by a dying culture for a dying culture. Which is in its own way poetic and beautiful, considering it’s a zombie movie.
28 Days Later was about people, and how bad (or good) they can be, not about zombies. And in this new one, it’s cool music, and cool camera work, and Ralph Fiennes covered in iodine, but it’s just death, death, death for its own sake. It really stops making sense toward the end unless you’re into euthanasia. Just a strange cult and a memorial to death.
Should I watch 28 weeks later first or can I skip that one?
It’s not necessary, the first sets up the premise and then none of them have any connections - 28 Years Later even has a little bit at the start that sorta says “28 Weeks Later didn’t fucking matter, moving on”.