Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday August 10th, 2025
Picking up where we left off
I've loved Danny Boyle since the start. Literally the start of Shallow Grave, when the sound of Leftfield hits you in the chest and the camera hurtles off down the streets of Edinburgh. What an introduction.
I loved him 1as his career exploded, taking him to Hollywood. I loved him as a couple of critical and commercial duds brought him back from Hollywood.
I loved him even more after his absolutely astonishing made-for-tv not-quite-movies.
So when I went to the cinema to see his ultra-low budget, niche-genre, horror film 28 Days Later it felt like there was something at stake, namely his career. It needed to prove to the wider world, people who weren't already on board the Danny Boyle fan train like I was, that he should be given money to keep on making astonishing films.
And that sense of risk was shot right through the film. It was a film that came out swinging, determined to land punch after punch, knowing this could be the last chance its creators got to be this…this much.
But post 2012 Olympics, I’ve found his work…not bad…worse…uninteresting.
-A tepid thriller - Yawn
-Apple Guy : The Movie - Pass
-Exciting young guys are now old and boring - Err, no thanks.
-Rich people : the TV show - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
-What if : Not The Beatles -Absolutely Not
-The Sex PisFUCKOFF!
I haven’t watched anything of his since Trance. Some of it’s probably good but why would I bother when there’s so much more interesting stuff in the world? And what if it wasn’t good? Do I really want to watch as an artist I deeply love slides into mediocrity. No, I absolutely do not.
Boyle revisiting the world of 28…Later was not something I had any enthusiasm for, like a past-it band touring their seminal album on a re-union tour, why would I want to go back to that? Especially as the Zombie/Infected/Undead genre that 28 Days brought roaring back to life has now been thoroughly flogged to death again.
But that trailer though!
So again I go into a Danny Boyle zombie movie with a sense of trepidation, a worry that maybe this won’t work out, a sense that something is at stake. Because failure here means having to admit it’s over, that we’ve drifted too far apart. I’m risking a part of myself just by watching this movie.
Gloriously, this is Garland & Boyle pushing everything as far as they can, trying to be as fresh as possible in a very stale genre. Boyle, my Danny Boyle, is very much back.
Where to start? Firstly, whilst Garland & Boyle understand the genre, they also understand people. Almost all zombie movies and tv shows since 28 Days… have understood the former but not the latter. So here we get people who behave like people, not walking plot devices. 28 Years Later is largely free of the neo-liberal wet dreams of constant, violent individualism that pervades the Walking Dead shows.
Secondly, it’s a British movie. I mean the Brexit analogy is pretty much thrust upon it by default2 but the cutting in of old British movies, the use of actual historical archery techniques and of course, Rudyard Kipling, gives this a heft and feel that’s unique to the genre.
Visually, there’s been a lot of effort put in to just about everything. The movement of the actors playing the infected is particularly impressive. It’s not just some extras running/shuffling around going “aaarrrgghh”. Shaun of the Dead on FFWD, this is not. The motion of the infected is itself grotesque, disturbing and inhuman.
The most commented on camera technique is the use of a bank of iPhones to get a grungy, Matrix style “Arrow-Cam” effect, which is interesting and fun if not revolutionary. However, there’s a scene in a Happy Shopper that is visually stunning. It’s a situation that’s been done a thousand times before but I’ve never seen it shot like this. Shocking, grotesque and beautiful, it’s moments like this that make the film stand out from the pack.
If I have a criticism it’s that I can’t fully form an opinion on the film until I see its sequel(s). This is very much a Part 1 that ends on a To Be Continued… Which means that whilst you would be hoping that the film would wind itself so tight it explodes at the end, that doesn’t happen here. Instead, the film gently, but emotionally, tapers off into the denouement. Which, in a way, is highly atypical of the genre and another reason this film is a bit special. But it does mean that we’re going to have to wait to find out if the early promise resolves into something truly special.
It will be the first Danny Boyle film I’ve been excited about for a long, long time.
1. It’s worth pointing out that Danny Boyle usually works as a team with writer John Hodge (and later, others) and producer Andrew Macdonald. ↩
2. Mainland Britain almost entirely populated by rage-fuelled psychopaths that the rest of Europe want to stay well away from. This shit writes itself. ↩︎