We Live In The Bone Temple Now

David Roth: I feel like when we have these sorts of conversation blogs on the site, the subject is generally something that everyone kind of likes, but not in a way that they’d fully feel comfortable putting their name on a blog about—your Reachers, or your Wildwood Boardwalks. So I want to begin by saying that I think that both of the recent sequels in the 28 Days Later series are really good, and even intermittently kind of profound-feeling, and that no one throws a regulation-size barbecue grill at anyone else.

Tom Ley: Right off the bat I need to say that I love 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple in a totally genuine, non-ironic way. I just really admire what Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are doing with these latest installments in the series, and I can’t think of any studio movie I’ve seen recently that strikes a better balance between off-the-wall weirdness, gnarly violence, and true profundity. I especially like how these two movies counterbalance each other, with 28 Years Later being this kind of mythical, big-hearted story, and The Bone Temple being this deeply upsetting horror flick that also manages to be really, really funny.

David: This is the bit that I’ve tried and failed to convey to people in explaining how much I have enjoyed these last two movies—they really are, tonally and in terms of basic storytelling choices, completely berserk. Just some of the wildest decisions that I have seen made in a film of this scale since the decline of widespread cocaine-driven decision-making in the industry during the 1990s. None of this was necessarily anything that you’d be able to predict from having seen the (very good) original or 28 Weeks Later, the pretty effective but slightly more disreputable and much less interesting first sequel. What was a very stylish and scary franchise of zombie movies has become, somehow, both a much more commercially successful enterprise and something much weirder than it started out being.