28 Days Later

28 Days Later was an ambitious film that had a great first half and a deadly dull second half, and in the Alien vein, its sequel was the same idea dumbed way down but made more enjoyable as a result. The film was all explosions and quick shocks, with cute kids chucked in to make everything that bit more perilous, but in cerebral terms, the most stimulation you’d get would be wondering how much of the ‘Americans take control of a city and then gun everyone down when the people started to threaten them’ angle was a criticism of foreign policy – though it’s worth remembering that while see-the-big-picture American military policy is more a threat in this film than the flesh-eating zombies, it’s also two Americans disobeying orders who are the most heroic figures.

Seeing London in a film is always a pleasure, and the Isle of Dogs has never looked so futuristic, but there was none of the brooding, creepy atmosphere of bewilderment and bleakness that Alex Garland did well to imagine in the first film. Instead there were the cheesy clichés of a group getting picked off one by one, a heterochromatic child having immunity to a virus and one character who, when turned into a brainless zombie, happens to be able to survive anything thrown at him by the military and be able to track the heroes of the story to the most unlikely places. But embracing these cheesy parts, the film was a lot of fun.