Best Movie Choice Tonight: ’28 Weeks Later,’ the Sequel to ’28 Days Later’

One interesting aspect of the new Danny Boyle-directed sequel 28 Years Later, to his horror classic 28 Days Later, is that it is a rare quasi-legacy sequel that requires minimal preparation work. The film introduces a fresh set of characters and circumstances without any carryover characters from the original. The essential premise that Britain was overrun by a fast-spreading “rage” virus and quarantined from the rest of Europe, with the storyline unfolding 28 years later, is all the background information needed. While prior viewing of the first movie may enhance the experience, it is not mandatory.

Moreover, part of the appeal of the 28 series is the ease of catching up with the entire franchise. The initial film, released in 2003 in the U.S. and previously unavailable for streaming, can now be rented digitally. Additionally, the lesser-known sequel 28 Weeks Later from 2007 is more accessible, currently streaming on platforms like Hulu and Tubi. This accessibility offers the opportunity to delve into the series with minimal effort.

Before delving into the quality of the film, its ties to the original, or any unofficial continuations, there is a unique pleasure in revisiting a movie that retroactively boasts an ensemble cast of well-known actors. The original 28 Weeks Later from 2007 notably excluded Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris, leaving their characters’ outcomes uncertain, while featuring Robert Carlyle, a favorite in Boyle’s work but directed by someone else. In 2025, the cast is now filled with familiar faces, adding another layer of intrigue to the viewing experience.

The story begins with a harrowing sequence (apparently guest-directed by Boyle himself!) set during the initial “rage virus” outbreak where a husband (Carlyle) panics and leaves his wife to die at the hands of marauding zombies. (Their children, they’ve just revealed, are safely traveling in another country.) The movie initially follows Carlyle’s character reuniting with those kids, you guessed it, 28 months later, after the virus has seemingly been beaten back and England is re-opening after a long quarantine. There’s a grim, almost George Costanza-esque surprise waiting, however: The wife he guiltily thought he abandoned is actually alive, and able to tell their shocked and disgusted children the whole story.

It turns out, the wife has the rage virus, but is mysteriously immune, which explains why she is both alive, and able to (whoops!) keep that zombie virus spreading, baby! As we saw in the first film, the infection moves with terrifying speed, transforming its host within minutes. And that’s one of the weirdest things about 28 Weeks Later: It’s a sequel structured as if it’s picking up from status-quo ending of the previous movie, figuring out how to bring the virus back after it was defeated. But that’s not how 28 Days Later actually ends, so the movie expends a lot of energy explaining that now the virus is mostly gone, and then explaining how it came back, all of which leaves the movie… more or less in the same spot as if it had picked up the genuine status quo of the earlier film. It’s weird!

But it’s also compelling. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo takes a different stylistic approach than Boyle’s smeary digital video, shooting on celluloid for a decidedly different texture, and tells a different kind of story, intersecting the Seinfeld-ish familial mishap with U.S. military personnel who have come to help supervise England’s re-population efforts. (It may be sketchy, but it’s less sketchy than the repopulation plan attempted by army guys in the first movie.) That’s where the movie introduces Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, and Idris Elba, all before they were as famous as they are now; Imogen Poots is also on hand to play one of Carlyle’s kids, and Harold Perrineau (probably best-known, then and now, for Lost) appears as a pilot.

And as a ticking-clock action-horror movie with a name cast, 28 Months Later is quite good, with the benefit of not being quite as familiar as 28 Days Later. It’s scary and exciting, and most of where it falls short of the original is in an area that’s difficult to control: Boyle’s movie somehow feels nearly as current today as it did two decades ago, accidentally evoking all kinds of real-life horrors, from 9/11 to COVID-19 to social rage. 28 Weeks Later brings up some thorny interpersonal issues with Carlyle’s storyline, and has moments clearly reminiscent of then-current various U.S. occupations in the Middle East in its back half, but it doesn’t dig especially deep on any of it. It feels, to some degree, of its time rather than timeless.

That probably explains why it’s more of a footnote in the apparently developing series mythology; the new movie doesn’t decanonize anything from 28 Weeks Later, but it walks back the movie’s bleak ending to some degree. (Basically, it amounts to an undoing of an undoing of an undoing… something like that.) But then, that also allows this half-forgotten middle film to stand more on its own. It’s not required viewing to understand 28 Years Later; it’s curiosity viewing for fans of horror, zombies, and/or Jeremy Renner.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.