28 Years Later is here and the movie is receiving quite some acclaim from critics. Sitting at over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, the story of a father and son wandering into a “rage-filled” world explores an environment unlike what came before it. While the “zombies” of the franchise are as deadly as ever, there is an aspect of the latest sequel that doesn’t tend to hit the same heights as both 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. The introduction of 28 Years Later takes place in the past and unfortunately, for several reasons, doesn’t seem up to snuff with what audiences witnessed in the past.
Warning. If you have yet to see 28 Years Later in theaters, be forewarned that we’ll be exploring serious spoiler territory in the article below. To start, we need to look back at 28 Years Later’s predecessors and how those horror films excelled in setting the scene. 28 Days Later shows us how the rage virus was first introduced to society, as environmentalists looking to release chimps from their captivity resulted in the end times for Great Britain. In 28 Weeks Later, the sequel upped the ante by focusing on the story of a father who would leave his wife to die at the hands of the infected in a startling display of violence and stellar filmmaking. While the latest zombie film sets up a horrifying premise, it fails to deliver on said build-up.
Teletubbies’ Revenge
28 Years Later arguably has the most uncomfortable, scary premise for an introduction. Rather than focusing on escaped chimps or a husband fleeing certain doom, the horror sequel instead focuses on a room full of children who are bearing witness to the apocalypse. Sat in front of a television with Teletubbies playing, the children are told to remain still as a mother attempts to keep them all safe in the face of a nightmare that cannot be stopped. Viewers are given brief glimpses of the older children coming to the realization of what is happening, unable to hold back their tears, and horrific sounds echoing outside of the world falling apart.
From here, the infected make their way into the room and nearly all of the children are either killed or infected off-screen, with a single boy managing to escape as he dodges the onslaught. Making his way to a church, we discover that the boy’s father is a priest, heralding the infected’s arrival as a wondrous day, believing that “judgement day” has finally arrived. Thanks to the priest’s madness, he gives himself to the rage zombies willingly as the boy escapes to parts unknown. Unfortunately, the intro fails to live up to the previous two films and there are more than a few reasons why.
28 Years Later’s Opening Faults
To start, the premise of this introduction is amazingly terrifying while also somewhat disappointing in how its structured. Witnessing the unfurling apocalypse through the eyes of a room of horrified children is something that we haven’t really witnessed before in zombie media, most likely thanks to just how uncomfortable that fact would make audiences. Viewers unfortunately aren’t really given the chance to fully immerse themselves in this horror thanks to the zombies barging their way into the room and dispatching the children in record time. Following the nameless boy to his father also doesn’t hook audiences as well as it could as, seemingly, he has no role to play in 28 Years Later’s main story.
Both the introductions of 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later had big implications on their respective stories overall, setting the stage for the future events we would witness. While 28 Years Later’s intro does give us a brief and scary reminder of how the world fell, it feels a bit more hollow in that it almost feels separated from the rest of the film structurally. While there is certainly an argument to be made that 28 Years Later surpasses its predecessors overall, I don’t know if the same can be said for its opening sequence. There’s an argument to be made that 28 Years Later’s intro might play into its sequel, it had next to no role here.
Want to see what the future holds for the rage zombies? Follow along with ComicBook.com for the latest updates on 28 Years Later and hit me up directly @EVComedy to talk all things comics and anime.
28 Years Later is now playing in theaters. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is scheduled to release in theaters on January 16, 2026.
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