Ordinary World

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple makes its transcendent predecessor into something all too familiar

Last week, my wife and I had a friend over to watch 28 Years Later—their first time, our third. As the film pressed on, they become more and more astonished by it, bowled over by its formal gambits and sentimental power. Afterwards, they told us that they thought our months of talking it up indicated that it was merely an especially effective horror movie and nothing more. This, clearly, was something more, something unexpected, something (given what the average legacy sequel looks like nowadays) entirely unlikely.

Unfortunately, “unlikely” is the last word I would apply to the sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Shot back-to-back with Danny Boyle’s prior film by new director Nia DaCosta, the new film eschews all the formal choices that made Boyle’s film so enthralling. No more hyperreal iPhone cinematography, no more ultrawide aspect ratio, no more fractured editing to create both dialectical and emotional impressions. It would be going too far to say that The Bone Temple looks like a TV show. More accurately, it looks like one of those new prestige streaming shows where the showrunners got a little too big for their britches. Shooting back-to-back with the last film means working with the same sets and costumes and locations, but what was previously rendered beautifully now looks cheap and ordinary. The Bone Temple feels like a fanfilm of the original. Not a bad fanfilm, per se—I enjoyed myself quite a bit—but necessarily derivative and lacking imagination.