28 Days Later (2002)

28 Days Later: Don’t Wake Up | 4.5/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 5/31/2025

An incredibly controversial take, but I love 28 Days Later. It took me ages to watch it because I had been so exhausted by the zombie boom of the ’00s and early ’10s, but by a miracle the entire film was allowed to roll out in front of me without even a single scene having been spoiled for me. I was amazed at how well the story told here seemed to pave the way for the modern era of running zombies as well. It’s hard to watch this without drawing a certain level of comparison to the opening of The Walking Dead, or the frantic running undead of World War Z. Additionally, unlike some originators of common tropes, the story doesn’t feel excessively held down by them in any way. A great deal of this legitimately feels fresh and horrific, even in much of the modern era.

One of the things about this film that has stuck with me every time I’ve seen it is the way it flows. The opening of the film is so surreal that by the time we even get around to introducing real characters who speak, I’ve been surprised each time. So much time is spent alone with Cillian Murphy and a slowly building soundtrack that you forget the film could even be anything else. We wander the empty streets of London alone with Jim and a bag of Pepsi. By the time we even reach Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns), we’ve journeyed through enough of a world that meeting other survivors feels like an equally strong shock to the first time we met Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley). Eventually when we reach Frank’s last held hope of the military group promising a solution, so much of a journey has taken place you are almost surprised that you’re greeted by another forty-odd minutes left to the film. So much has happened, and the story hasn’t even entered the final act.

I’ve made no bones about the fact that I hate the second film, 28 Weeks Later. I found it to be overly hectic with a frustrating plot that I felt added nothing to the story at large. 28 Days Later keeps our focus smaller and where it needs to be. Day zero happened, the worst came to pass, and our protagonist woke up in the aftermath. I don’t need to see the outbreak to know it was an awful experience; the world showed me more than enough in the barren streets of London already. There’s an efficiency to the story that allows some of our more indulgent moments during the travel scenes to show us glimpses into our characters' hearts and souls. It’s an incredibly important atmosphere to establish before we get to the military compound run by Christopher Eccleston’s Major Henry West. Without the moments to breathe in the grocery store, at the gas station, and at the ruins, the horror we find in the compound wouldn’t have the same punch.

As with any good zombie film (though of course these aren’t technically zombies), we keep the focus tight on the human element. It seems trite to say now, but the best zombie stories have always been about the human element. The fact that 28 Days Later manages to keep with that theme and make the soldiers at the end of the film scarier than anything we’d seen up to that point was fantastic.

The greatest tragedy of this film, unfortunately, is the lack of film. 28 Days Later was shot almost fully digitally. In the first half to two thirds of the film, we’re shooting on an incredibly low resolution digital camera. It was quick, mobile, and let them get the shots in London they needed, but regrettably has the side effects of it being a truly difficult film to watch on most modern TVs. While this might not be obnoxiously a problem on a smaller screen, when I saw it on a theater screen it was a little hard to watch at times. Some of the shots of Cillian Murphy in open fields conjure memories of the old jumpscare videos that used to get passed around in the late ’00s. Luckily, the final act of 28 Days Later is shot on film, allowing you to soak in every miserable detail in high definition.

I’m thrilled to have been able to relive this one on the big screen in advance of 28 Years Later. Regardless of any moments that don’t quite live up visually, no number (or lack thereof) of crunchy pixels can take away from the fact that this is truly a wonderfully shot film. Allow yourself to get lost in the story, and the few moments that the lack of visual resolution truly rear their heads will fall away in the building storm that the rest of the film exists as.