{"id":33489,"date":"2025-09-20T16:35:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-20T16:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/33489\/"},"modified":"2025-09-20T16:35:03","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T16:35:03","slug":"28-years-later-is-finally-streaming-on-netflix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/33489\/","title":{"rendered":"28 Years Later is finally streaming on Netflix"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not always what happens during the zombie outbreak that proves important, but what happens afterward. George Romero\u2019s re-envisioning of the risen-undead concept in Night of the Living Dead was pioneering, yet part of what has allowed that vision to endure was his willingness to revisit, revise, and update it over the decades that followed. It\u2019s a tradition that zombie innovators Danny Boyle and Alex Garland uphold as their long-awaited sequel, 28 Years Later<\/a>, arrives on Netflix, presumably to an even broader audience than its summer 2025 theatrical run.<\/p>\n

Horror sequels are practically obligatory. Rare is the financially or culturally notable scary movie where a followup isn\u2019t at least considered, if not outright rushed into theaters. 28 Years Later itself already has a sequel locked and loaded, with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple<\/a> set for January 2026, and another movie to follow if Bone Temple does well enough. But back in 1978, Romero\u2019s Dawn of the Dead was more of an outlier in that respect. Remember, this was the same year as John Carpenter\u2019s Halloween. Slasher sequels barely existed, and the Universal monster series had been dead for decades. In this environment, Romero made a decade-later sequel to Night of the Living Dead with new characters, zombie gore rendered in vivid color rather than more austere black-and-white, and newfound social satire by following survivors holed up in a shopping mall, where the undead shuffled along, half-remembering their consumerist routines from previous lives. 1985\u2019s Day of the Dead<\/a> pivots again, even more focused on humanity\u2019s failings. It\u2019s a particularly jarring movie to watch right after Romero\u2019s funniest zombie outing.<\/p>\n

28 Years Later may have taken some audiences even more by surprise, because audiences have become more accustomed to legacy sequels that pay tribute to their long-standing fandom. The original 28 Days Later, released in 2002 in its native Britain and 2003 in the U.S., became one of the most popular and influential zombie movies since Romero\u2019s prime thanks to the early-2000s equivalent of documentary-like black-and-white: early digital video that gave the movie a realistic immediacy and, at times, an uncannily beautiful found-art look.<\/p>\n

A sequel, 28 Weeks Later<\/a>, followed in 2007, already featuring a different aesthetic and cast of characters (without much involvement from the original film\u2019s creators). But director Boyle and screenwriter Garland reuniting for 28 Years Later makes it feel like a \u201ctrue\u201d sequel to the original, even though this movie also employs a decidedly different visual approach and follows a completely new set of characters. It\u2019s a legacy sequel that explores the legacy of the original\u2019s world, rather than catching up with old-pal characters.<\/p>\n

\"Cillian
\n Credit: 20th Century Fox<\/p>\n

Set, well, you know, the story picks up with an island colony that has established itself in the wake of Britain\u2019s quarantine from the rest of the world. (The zombie infection\u2019s spread to mainland Europe, depicted in the closing moments of 28 Weeks Later, is walked back.) Through rigorous discipline and commune-style living, this group protects its members, including 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Wiliams), who lives with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and mysteriously ill mother Isla (Jodie Comer).<\/p>\n

Boyle and Garland make Spike their anchor, and initially, 28 Years Later looks like a father-son story, as Jamie takes Spike off the island for his first zombie kill \u2014 a ceremonial occasion, not an actual necessity. The island\u2019s children are trained to defend themselves with bows and arrows, and traveling ashore to kill a zombie or two is a rite of passage. Though things go wrong, as you might expect from a horror movie, Spike\u2019s encounter with the infected doesn\u2019t have the expected outcome for him or the first-time viewer. Just as Romero pivoted his zombie series between movies, Boyle and Garland shift gears multiple times over the course of 28 Years Later, right up until its unexpectedly sequel-baiting and culturally specific final scene<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some audiences found this all quite disorienting well before the film\u2019s bizarre gambit of an ending, perhaps in part because, while 28 Days Later\u2019s outbreak setting made it a clear modern analog to Night of the Living Dead, the new movie doesn\u2019t follow specific Romero leads. Though it has some funny moments, 28 Years Later isn\u2019t as satirical or irreverent as Dawn of the Dead. It\u2019s also not as bleak-minded about humanity as Day of the Dead. In fact, the newer movie has a contemplative section involving an infection-free human nonetheless living in the zombie-infested wilds that the movie primes to be an example of man\u2019s zombie-like inhumanity. Instead, it stands as a beacon of, if not exactly hope, at least some empathy.<\/p>\n

\"A
\n Credit:\u00a0Image: Sony Pictures<\/p>\n

Boyle\u2019s film does share a little bit of common ground with Romero\u2019s later revival Land of the Dead (which arrived, probably not coincidentally, in the wake of 28 Days Later, back in 2005). There, Romero jumped ahead to depict a society attempting to rebuild in the wake of the zombie outbreaks, with protected outposts built on rigid class divides \u2014 positioning the exiled zombies as the ultimate underclass. Boyle and Garland don\u2019t seem particularly interested in the economic metaphor, but they do approach the question of whether the zombies might be evolving toward something more recognizably human, especially when Spike and other travelers come across a pregnant zombie who gives birth to an uninfected baby.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the sort of swerve that might feel, at first, as if 28 Years Later is compiling scenes Boyle and Garland cooked up during the many years that the series remained dormant, without regard for a sustained tone or single developing storyline. Yet this material does come together beautifully, as a coming-of-age story that has the dizzying ups and downs of adolescence. That\u2019s something Romero\u2019s classics don\u2019t really cover: the experience of growing up in a zombie-infested world, and how it might affect an adolescent\u2019s growing understanding of death, the othering of unknown people, and how best to live in a world apart from your parents\u2019 worldview.<\/p>\n

With that in mind, the amped-up clarity and sometime frenzy of the movie\u2019s imagery makes a lot of sense. 28 Days Later used its digital video to resemble consumer video or surveillance footage, with the footage\u2019s smearier qualities sometimes turning abstract or briefly painterly amid the realism. 28 Years Later, shot largely with iPhones that have far more image-processing power than old DV cameras, is more hyperreal: bright colors, crazy angles, instant-replay loops. Watching it, your senses are heightened; there\u2019s a feeling of hormonal-emotional discovery that fits the protagonist.<\/p>\n

It adds up to a surprisingly open-hearted, even moving, dispatch from a zombie-infected world. Though Romero could be sincere in his despair for humanity, he was also frequently sardonic in his observation of raffish characters banding together for survival. Despite starting with a community, 28 Years Later focuses much more on an individual journey. And like Romero\u2019s best work, it offers an often-dazzling reminder of what zombie movies can do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s not always what happens during the zombie outbreak that proves important, but what happens afterward. George Romero\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-33489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}