28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Is Glorious

"Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Days Later films (is that what we're calling the series?) began with such images - of an empty London frozen at the moment of the zombie apocalypse - but last year's 28 Years Later, reviving the franchise after nearly two decades, showed us how the survivors of that long-ago calamity tried to forge on in their own ways, combating the "rage virus" with twisted new societies and cults built from history's detritus."

"But it is a more psychologically acute effort. The earlier movie ended with a rather out-there finale that saw its 12-year-old protagonist, Spike (Alfie Williams), encounter a bizarre gang of blond-wigged, tracksuited, acrobatic zombie killers, all answering to the name of Jimmy. Now, we learn more about this little band of wannabe cretins and the twisted pseudo-satanic cult that their violent leader, Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell), has conjured around himself."

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple shifts the franchise toward psychological territory, portraying survivors whose minds remain stuck in a past catastrophe. The film forgoes Boyle's fragmented visual style for a more conventional, yet sharper, psychological focus. A previously glimpsed gang of blond-wigged, acrobatic killers returns, now revealed as followers of a violent leader, Jimmy Crystal, who has formed a twisted pseudo-satanic cult. The leader's aesthetic echoes a notorious real-world television figure, suggesting how charismatic myths and cultural detritus are repurposed and exalted in ruined societies.

Read at Vulture