One cool thing about 28 Years Later, the new Danny Boyle-directed sequel to his horror classic 28 Days Later, is that it’s the rare quasi-legacy sequel that requires almost no prep work. The movie features no characters carrying over from the original; the opening cards informing you that Britain was overtaken by a fast-spreading “rage” virus (basically newfangled viral zombiefication), strictly quarantined from the rest of Europe, and now it’s (yes) 28 years later, is really all you need to know, as the movie introduces a whole new set of characters and circumstances. You’ll probably get more out of it if you’ve seen the first movie, but it’s by no means necessary.

Then again, isn’t some self-assigned movie-watching homework kind of fun? Something else that’s cool about the 28 series is how little it takes to catch up with the whole thing. There was an original film released in the U.S. in 2003, and long out of circulation on streaming, now available to rent digitally again; and 28 Weeks Later, a little-remembered sequel to that film released in 2007, which is even more accessible. It’s currently streaming on Hulu (which means, yes, if you have a Disney+/Hulu bundle, there are zombies on your Disney+) and on the people’s streamer, Tubi.

First, before even getting into the film’s quality or its connection to its predecessor or unofficial follow-up, there is that rare older-movie pleasure of watching something that now retroactively has an all-star cast. Back in 2007, the most notable thing about the 28 Weeks Later cast list is that it didn’t include Cillian Murphy or Naomie Harris, leaving their characters’ fate relatively ambiguous, and that it had Boyle favorite Robert Carlyle (Begbie from Trainspotting) in a leading role, even though Boyle didn’t return to direct. In 2025, it’s packed with familiar faces. But we’ll get to that.

The story begins with a harrowing sequence (apparently guest-directed by Boyle himself!) set during the initial “rage virus” outbreak where a husband (Carlyle) panics and leaves his wife to die at the hands of marauding zombies. (Their children, they’ve just revealed, are safely traveling in another country.) The movie initially follows Carlyle’s character reuniting with those kids, you guessed it, 28 months later, after the virus has seemingly been beaten back and England is re-opening after a long quarantine. There’s a grim, almost George Costanza-esque surprise waiting, however: The wife he guiltily thought he abandoned is actually alive, and able to tell their shocked and disgusted children the whole story.

It turns out, the wife has the rage virus, but is mysteriously immune, which explains why she is both alive, and able to (whoops!) keep that zombie virus spreading, baby! As we saw in the first film, the infection moves with terrifying speed, transforming its host within minutes. And that’s one of the weirdest things about 28 Weeks Later: It’s a sequel structured as if it’s picking up from status-quo ending of the previous movie, figuring out how to bring the virus back after it was defeated. But that’s not how 28 Days Later actually ends, so the movie expends a lot of energy explaining that now the virus is mostly gone, and then explaining how it came back, all of which leaves the movie… more or less in the same spot as if it had picked up the genuine status quo of the earlier film. It’s weird!

But it’s also compelling. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo takes a different stylistic approach than Boyle’s smeary digital video, shooting on celluloid for a decidedly different texture, and tells a different kind of story, intersecting the Seinfeld-ish familial mishap with U.S. military personnel who have come to help supervise England’s re-population efforts. (It may be sketchy, but it’s less sketchy than the repopulation plan attempted by army guys in the first movie.) That’s where the movie introduces Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, and Idris Elba, all before they were as famous as they are now; Imogen Poots is also on hand to play one of Carlyle’s kids, and Harold Perrineau (probably best-known, then and now, for Lost) appears as a pilot.

And as a ticking-clock action-horror movie with a name cast, 28 Months Later is quite good, with the benefit of not being quite as familiar as 28 Days Later. It’s scary and exciting, and most of where it falls short of the original is in an area that’s difficult to control: Boyle’s movie somehow feels nearly as current today as it did two decades ago, accidentally evoking all kinds of real-life horrors, from 9/11 to COVID-19 to social rage. 28 Weeks Later brings up some thorny interpersonal issues with Carlyle’s storyline, and has moments clearly reminiscent of then-current various U.S. occupations in the Middle East in its back half, but it doesn’t dig especially deep on any of it. It feels, to some degree, of its time rather than timeless.

That probably explains why it’s more of a footnote in the apparently developing series mythology; the new movie doesn’t decanonize anything from 28 Weeks Later, but it walks back the movie’s bleak ending to some degree. (Basically, it amounts to an undoing of an undoing of an undoing… something like that.) But then, that also allows this half-forgotten middle film to stand more on its own. It’s not required viewing to understand 28 Years Later; it’s curiosity viewing for fans of horror, zombies, and/or Jeremy Renner.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.