28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Review

A Gnarly and Bone-Crushing Tale that Lacks the Style and Emotional Depth of Its Predecessor

By: Marc Kozak

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

A Gnarly and Bone-Crushing Tale that Lacks the Style and Emotional Depth of Its Predecessor

By: Marc Kozak

The announcement that director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland would return to the post-apocalyptic world of 28 Days Later after 22 years was surprising enough, but more than one eyebrow was raised with the reveal that there would be three new sequels, all written by Garland and set 28 years after the events of the original. The somewhat surprising smash success of last summer’s 28 Years Later (included as one of The Filmologist’s best movies of 2025) only heightened anticipation and expectation for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the second installment of the new trilogy and the first directed by Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels).

DaCosta doesn’t necessarily get the juiciest material to work with, tasked with a relatively simple story that serves as an interlude between the two Boyle-directed projects, but she does an admirable job of putting her own stamp on the franchise, providing several truly spectacular moments of gnarly chaos that will have audiences clapping in astonishment. If anything, it’s Garland’s script that feels a bit shallow this time around, once again attempting to delve into philosophical questions within the confines of a genre, not quite managing to move beyond a surface-level exploration of faith in a world long since abandoned by any kind of God.

The result is a movie that carries an effective (and entertaining) level of tension due to its intermittent bone-crushing violence but lacks the kind of emotional weight that elevated the first movie in this new trilogy. There is no hero’s journey here — there are hardly characters at all — it’s simply an unsubtle intellectual exercise punctuated by moments of well-orchestrated mayhem. But then again, this is a zombie apocalypse movie – maybe that’s for the best. Still, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a noticeable downgrade in the scope and execution of the previous chapter.

" DaCosta doesn’t necessarily get the juiciest material to work with, but still provides several truly spectacular moments of gnarly chaos that will have audiences clapping in astonishment. "

Picking up right where its predecessor left off, The Bone Temple follows the disillusioned young Spike (Alfie Williams) after he leaves his protected village to wander the quarantined and zombie-infected British Isles. It doesn’t take long for him to get rescued/kidnapped by the Fingers gang, a roving group of violent youngsters led by their cultish leader Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell, deliciously reprising the psychotically charismatic tendencies he displayed in his role as the vampire antagonist of Sinners). After Spike unexpectedly wins a fight to the death, he reluctantly settles for safety in numbers as a member of Jimmy’s gang, even if he detests everything about them.

Sir Lord Jimmy was first seen as a young boy in the opening minutes of 28 Years Later as his minister father welcomed his own death-by-zombie with rapturous acceptance. The traumatized Jimmy twisted those events into the belief that his father must be the lord of the undead, leaving Jimmy with the mission of traveling the land to deliver “charity” to any remaining uninfected humans, which in this case means torturing and killing them so they can serve as members of his father’s ever-increasing undead army. As far as belief systems go, it’s certainly one of them, and for reasons not completely explained, he’s managed to sell his story to a small group of young survivors who gleefully do his violent bidding.

On the other side of the spectrum is the gentle and educated Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), introduced in the previous installment as a man with his own mission, namely one of honoring those who have been killed by adding them to his enormous temple of bones. Fiennes continues to prove that he’s one of the best actors alive, carrying the first half of the movie with his electric presence and eccentricity. His early scenes are incredibly funny, as we watch him go about his work while singing to himself and blasting Duran Duran on a record player in his underground bunker.

Dr. Kelson is also curiously visited repeatedly by Samson, the enormous (in more ways than one) alpha zombie that seems attracted to the doctor and his bone temple. The two eventually develop a bizarre and hilarious understanding, in which the doctor gives Samson morphine to temporarily ease his pain, and the two get high together while dancing around the light of the moon. It’s an utterly fascinating dynamic, as the two unlikely friends discover that humanity might not be completely gone from this place, reconnecting through the magic of perception-altering drugs. The good doctor starts to suspect that the rampaging virus that infected millions can possibly be reversed (more to come certainly in the third movie of the trilogy), but his progress is halted by a lack of supplies and the untimely arrival of Jimmy and his gang.

The final third is a showdown of differing philosophies, as the atheist scientist Dr. Kelson trades stories with Lord Jimmy and comes to a very different kind of understanding – namely that Dr. Kelson must convince Lord Jimmy’s followers that he is the devil (his skin is stained red from iodine after all) and back up Lord Jimmy’s mission, or else, you know, Jimmy will kill him. As always, it’s humans who are the real monsters while the monsters show the most humanity, a well-worn trope that has been used in countless zombie tales. It’s interesting that at this point in the franchise, the zombies roaming the countryside are rarely viewed as a threat at all – they are often dispatched with annoyance rather than fear – Garland is much more interested in telling a story of cracked faith versus rational science, casting religion as something to be more feared than bloodthirsty zombies.

Unfortunately, these messages feel a bit soulless when there isn’t any kind of emotional center to latch onto. Spike’s journey in the first chapter was full of real pathos, but here he is pushed almost completely to the background, mostly huddling in fear with one of the other gang members who shares reservations about Jimmy’s ways. If Dr. Kelson and Lord Jimmy were supposed to be battling for Spike’s soul, they mostly forgot to include Spike in the conversation. The movie’s coda sets up an intriguing final chapter for Spike, but this felt like more of a pit stop along the way to a more significant journey later on.

Still, DaCosta and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt manage to squeeze a decent amount of fun out of what they were given. Their approach is far less visually bombastic than Boyle’s, possibly hampered further by the fact that they really only had two or three sets to work with, including the need to spend a significant amount of time at Dr. Kelson’s bone temple, a very interesting location but one that we had already seen before. The fact that this was shot back-to-back with its predecessor allowed the filmmakers to keep the actors and general energy, but something was definitely lost in returning to the same sets.

Garland’s recurring fascination with whether humanity is fundamentally good or evil remains a compelling hook to explore in a genre setting, but his allusions don’t work quite as well this time around. The film lingers too long on the sadistic excesses of Lord Jimmy’s cause, rendering him so cartoonishly evil that any philosophical debate becomes hopelessly one-sided and far less interesting. There is undeniable fun to be had watching Fiennes and O’Connell chew scenery – these are two men who have found very different reasons to persevere in a world almost completely bereft of anything resembling hope – but their conflict lacks any kind of subtlety, resulting in a visceral but ultimately shallow experience.