I was slightly worried off the bat because this franchise has set a high bar for opening sequences. The original film with the outbreak and 28 Weeks Later for all its flaws has maybe the best sequence of the franchise with the opening and how things go wrong. For me 28 Years Later did not quite live up to that level with its opening and while parts of it were quite good, the tone just felt off and I think I'll get into the score/music and color filter later.
The movie focuses on 12-year old Spike and the actor who played him was pretty good. First half of the movie is kinda focused on him and his dad and the second half sees him with his mom. Both halves had good stuff in them. The first half is a lot of the trailers with him and his dad on the outside, him learning to hunt and learning about the infected and I thought most of that was pretty good. The Alphas do feel intense and they did bring some new ideas with the infected that were cool. Second half with the mom is more of a personal drama story that still has some tense scenes but is more focused on the emotional journey and I thought it was pretty good. Ralph Fiennes was great in his small role.
For me though this film did not deliver on the horror aspect or that sense of dread from the first two movies (especially the original). Music choice is a big thing and what makes that original so great is the combination of dread captured in the post-rock score, AND the grey tone/filter to go with it. It looks miserable and it sounds miserable - in a good way! 28 Years Later is a very colorful movie that looks beautiful at times but it's also accompanied by more of a traditional orchestral movie score and it did not feel like a good choice to me. I think back to Cillian Murphy walking the deserted streets of London set to East Hastings by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and that scene filled me with so much anxiousness and nothing in this movie really came close to that, sadly. Not saying the score was bad, it just felt like the opposite of what I was hoping for.
Finally I do think tone is an issue. There are moments when the movie gets weirdly funny and some of those felt natural and others, not so much. The Swedish marine soldiers who show up present a dilemma that I guess only really applies to me as a Swede myself, in that the character of Erik who shows up and is a comedic sidekick for a bit becomes a lot more unintentionally funny from my perspective. The audience was laughing a lot and I think it plays differently to an audience from another country. But also at the end of the movie you get the reveal of Jack O'Connell in this franchise and it just felt so random. My words can not even begin to describe what he is wearing or the choice for his character design, but he also shows up with a group (I guess his posse) and the way they dispatch of the infected chasing our boy Spike is comical. It felt like watching a spoof movie.
While I would still say that overall I had a good time with this film and there's a lot to love, I can't help but feel conflicted when it comes to those areas I pointed out such as the score and the tone. It was also slightly weird how Aaron-Taylor Johnson was pretty much gone from the movie almost entirely after the halfway point and he only really shows up again in the closing 'epilogue'. The last issue I had that I will bring up, is one that I was concerned about beforehand. When they talk about a trilogy from the start and they rush into production on the next one, my biggest question was "Will this stand on its own?". And considering how it ends with Jack O'Connell and his gang showing up to comedically kill infected and ending on a bit of a cliffhanger, I feel like I wasn't 100% satisfied with how this film presents itself in isolation from anything else.
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