28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

I remember 28 Days Later coming out and there being a very contentious conversation about whether the "infected" were zombies, and now, a couple of decades on, the conversation is just as uninteresting and meaningless. Because it doesn't matter. Who cares?

That said, I really enjoyed 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later as well. It did a fine job building a mythology and a world that makes sense 28 years after the outbreak. The performances were good, especially by newcomer Alfie Williams, who plays Spike, a young boy traveling the British Isles, which are quarantined.

Ralph Fiennes plays Dr. Ian Kelson, a reclusive and eccentric man who is building a temple made of human bones, because that's something an eccentric doctor might do 28 years into a zombie apocalypse.

Jack O'Connell plays Jimmy Crystal, a kind of end-times leader of a murder cult of young psychopaths that roam the countryside terrorizing survivors. All of these people come together in a particularly satisfying and entertaining way.

This movie was fantastic. I can't remember the last time I grinned like this in a movie theater. Probably Sinners, and before that, Barbie. It's just fun. It's so much fun. There's a sequence that you'll know immediately when you see it, that is like the best metal music video I've ever seen, set to Iron Maiden.

Nia DeCosta is incredible. I wasn't overly familiar with her before, having only seen Candyman and The Marvels (both of which I enjoyed), but this contribution to horror cinema cements her as someone I will now follow from film to film. A vital voice in horror cinema.

I'm definitely going to have to watch this one again, if anything, just to see that Iron Maiden sequence again. Not quite on the level of the I Lied to You scene from Sinners, but up there in the same space. I wish I could watch it again for the first time.

Now I'm pumped for part 3. It's gonna be tight.