John Writes Words

So, I’ve been in that downward spiral of thinking that I need to get caught up on posting about all the movies I’ve watched in the past few weeks and how much work that is and who cares anyway and remembering everything I want to say about all those movies ranging from Frankenstein (1931 – great classic Gothic horror) to The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (2007 – still nice after all these years) to How to Train Your Dragon (2025 – nice, but not necessarily an improvement on the original). So I decided to just move on, and tonight I saw 28 Years Later which I’ve learned is the first in a planned trilogy, with 28 Days Later (2002) and 28 Weeks Later (2007) serving as prequels. Those will give the viewer greater context, but if you didn’t see them, you’ll get by in this movie well enough.

All around, this was pretty good. Good writing, good casting, good acting, good cinematography. Interesting manipulation of time and use of montage makes you think beyond what you’re seeing on the screen. The ending is a good bookend for the opening sequence, but the tone undercuts the gravity of the rest of the movie. It’s setting up the next movie, so what are you going to do?

There are image flashes throughout the credits, but they’re all from this movie. No mid-credits or end-credits scenes.

My only gripe is the annoying trope of a tween asserting that he’s not a child anymore and then a) thinking he can deal with the complexity of life that adults deal with with his juvenile understanding and b) going off making juvenile decisions that put himself and other in harm’s way, just like a child, and usually getting other people killed. I will never write a child this way, but that’s just me.