23 years after revolutionizing the kind of horror by modifying the living dead for regular and rapidly infected moving people infected with a rage virus in “28 days later”, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland returned to the universe of zombies they created with “28 years later” – A film that Stephen King loved but was not afraid.

The two filmmakers have changed a lot during the two decades since their (not a) zombie film, which is “28 years later” a fascinating exercise so as not to try to redo the same thing. Chris Evangelista of the film of the film of the film described it in his criticism, the film is “a kind of sensory overload – the mixture of violence, mixed media and a soundtrack often discordant with a feverish effect”. Indeed, according to his criticism, “28 years later” manages to be both frightening and touching, An impressive, efficient and memorable sequence of horror.

In “28 years later”, we meet Spike (Alfie Williams) and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) almost 30 years after the rage virus escaped from a Bio-Armes laboratory and ravaged the continent of the United Kingdom, which was quarantined by the rest of the world. The father-son duo does not live on a small island connected to the continent via a narrow road which disappears with the high tide. Of course, one of them decides to venture into the continent and quickly discovers a world went down into madness and a virus that has transferred beyond their imagination.

In the years preceding “28 years later”, there were a lot of ideas for what a third film in the series could be. One of them, admits Alex Garland, could have been a disaster – a completely different film in an entirely different language.

After the release of “28 weeks later” in 2007 without Boyle or Garland being involved in the scenario, the fans began to hope that the duo would revisit this universe with more stories. At one point, Garland began to offer potential ideas of new films in the universe “28 days”, even considering the transmission of writing tasks to someone else. It was only after Covid-19 that Garland began to think of writing a script itself for a third film.

Speak with RollerGarland tells one of the first ideas he had for another film. The concept was to follow a group of military commandos that would break the forties and reach the laboratory where the rabies virus was originally created – in order to find a remedy. Except that, once they have reached the laboratory, the commandos would find another group which had already passed there first and tried the virus of armaments. It was supposed to be a film with “shootings and mass attacks and large adventure style sets.” The first group, those who tried to heal the virus, were going to be Chinese special forces, and the film had to be completely in Mandarin and subtitles.

“It was completely and completely generic,” said Garland, laughing, saying that Danny Boyle was effectively making fun of his idea, before helping and trying different ways to make history work. “Finally, we both abandoned it. But curiously, writing something so generic was the liberating element of all our problems. This gave us permission to have a completely empty slate.”

The idea of ​​making a zombie film in the United Kingdom, where heroes are Chinese soldiers who try to cure a zombie virus, sounds, on paper, as an interesting idea. On the one hand, it looks like a great slap in the face of anti-Asian hatred which appeared at the beginning of COVID-19, the more the idea of ​​a film written by Alex Garland and potentially with a great director who was all in Mandarin is a cool thought experience.

However, it is easy to see how a series of a horror film being a great action film with many soldiers would be quite boring and derived, since that is exactly what “Aliens” already did 40 years ago. Instead, the film we got is undoubtedly the best script for a sequel published on 20 years after the original. “28 years later” is a fantastic extension of ideas and the world of “28 days later”, introducing wild concepts for the zombie genre which sometimes even look like a secret adaptation of a classic horror story. The infected here, after so many years, have evolved more, and it seems that they even started to establish communities, which is shocking and also one of the best zombie movie ideas for years.

But even just the main story, although simple (and at least in a way of the intrigue of “28 weeks later”), also hides a rather emotional story to accept death in the face of absolute hell. It is a film on how we will face our inevitable disappearance and how this knowledge transforms certain people into violent madness, others into calm acceptance. There is no zombie film like “28 years later”, and it is because Garland took his time and decided not to go with his first instinct for that.