I went to the cinema on Friday to watch 28 Years Later: Bone Temple. Was it good? I no longer feel qualified to comment. Modern film alienates me. Nothing about it - character development and motives, narrative, dialogue, in-world physics, pacing - seems plausible to me. I’ve felt this way for so long I can’t remember the last time I watched a new film and was genuinely immersed in it - maybe The Wolf of Wall Street? This is not to say I do not find them entertaining in their own way. But I find it impossible to unplug my brain and accept their aggressive stupidity.

28 Years Later: Bone Temple was not too bad in the aggressive stupidity stakes, although there was a lot about it that left me dissatisfied. And it was at least trying to do some interesting things with its completely incredible (in terms of human motivation) plot. In this regard, I would say - and this is high praise coming from me, let me make clear - if you go to see it you will probably say the experience was somewhat better than having your testicles flogged with a knotted rope. The experience may even be improved with the addition of a pint and some high quality salt and vinegar crisps.

Anyway, three themes stood out for me in a kind of meta-analysis of the film and what it was trying to do, and these struck me as potentially being of broader significance - particularly for post-apocalypse RPG gaming (of which I am a fan). They are - NO SPOILERS - as follows:

1 - The mechanism of an apocalypse is the least interesting thing about it. I remember the original *28 Days Later. *It was a bit of a tour de force directorally (I like Danny Boyle’s approach to film-making) and its ‘fast zombie’ idea was no doubt rather revolutionary at the time. But ultimately the vector of apocalypse - whether it is zombies, a disease, nuclear war, whatever - is not the stuff of long-term interest. The makers of the *28 Periods of Time Later *franchise seem to be aware of this. Hence, now that *28 Years Later: Bone Temple *has rolled around, the zombies have become a rather minor sideshow; the interest revolves around the society and the human interactions that have evolved in the apocalypse’s aftermath. This is an important lesson to learn, I think.

2 - The generational experience of the apocalypse is rarely adequately thought-through. If you were an adult when it happened, the before-time would remain vivid in your mind and would still be formative of your character. If you had been born after it happened, your entire experience of the world would be post-apocalyptic. Your motivations and values, then, would be extremely different. 28 Years Later: Bone Temple does play with this idea, but nowhere near adequately enough. If you had been born after the zombie apocalypse and had made it to the age of 25, your psyche would be utterly different to a person who had been 25 when it happened and could remember civilisation. In the same way that when you were growing up you heard adults going on about ‘the 60s’ or ‘the war’ and just let it wash over you because you had no experience of it, young people in the post-apocalypse just will not care about how the pre-deluvian world was except perhaps in a vaguely academic way. And their characters will have been forged on the crucible of hardcore ‘fantasy fucking Vietnam’ survival mode. The idea that they will be ‘relatable’ is therefore not, to my eye, very credible unless the apocalypse is so far in the past that a genuine fresh society or civilisation has been able to emerge.

3 - At the end of the day nobody wants the apocalypse to be undone. The setting of *28 Periods of Time Later is atheistic; the zombie plague is caused by a virus. And one can clearly see that the arc of the series bends towards a final outcome in which They Discover A Cure. This, though, is not what the audience wants. The human drama of dealing with the fallout permanently is just way more interesting. If and when they make the third part in the series what we want to see is a grand thought experiment that plays out what kind of society would eventually emerge from the wreckage of the plague. What we don’t want to see is ‘They found a cure and then in a final coda we find out that everybody learned important lessons about love and kindness and caring for the natural world, and mourned the dead.’ What I would want in fact is 28 Decades Later, *when Scotland is ruled by various petty kings who have found ways to enslave zombies for deployment as warrior-slaves, and seek the help of Satanic druids to manufacture anti-psychotic potions to dispense to their followers to manage the effects of the disease - and nobody entertains the daft notion in their heads that any of this could possibly end.