Danny Boyle
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This movie's funniest moments find Jack “debuting” tunes such as “Let It Be” — or, as a well-meaning listener mistakenly calls it, “Leave It Be” — and “Hey Jude,” which Ed Sheeran, playing himself, persuades him to change to “Hey Dude."
Suddenly, he's trying to remember the words to "Eleanor Rigby" and "Let it Be".
And would such ’60s songs as “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude,” detached from the social revolution of which they were a part, have the same impact in a 2019 universe where hip-hop exists but The Beatles do not?
A Hard Day's Night (1964)
Directed by Richard Lester
influenced Yesterday (2019), Trainspotting (1996)
Themes Visuals
Trainspotting is a modern-day movie about the experiences of some unrepentant Scottish junkies, yet in its opening moments, Trainspotting spiritually resembles nothing so much as the Beatles' careening burst of adrenaline-charged “devil-may-care” in their introductory movies, A Hard Day's Night and Help!
It's a guttersnipe variation on the opening of "A Hard Day's Night," where the Beatles are pursued by their fans.
This movie, with its Coen Brothers/Martin Scorsese camera angles and its scintillating rock underscore by Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lou Reed and others, is, in some ways, a direct descendant of both "A Clockwork Orange" and "A Hard Day's Night."
Perhaps one day, we’ll get a Beatles movie worthy of standing up to the likes of A Hard Day’s Night or even Help!, but Yesterday is nearly as bad as all of its predecessors.
Most of the supposed joy of “Yesterday” is squeezed from the elbow-in-the-ribcage references to the Fab Four, both in song cues and visual references (like when Jack is chased by fans, a la “A Hard Day’s Night”).
Whether it be films they starred in ( A Hard Day’s Night), films about them ( Nowhere Boy) or films inspired by them ( Across The Universe), their influence is undeniable.
The Walking Dead made zombies a weekly ritual for households across the globe.
Eleven seasons of “The Walking Dead” (plus its spinoffs) have taken place since the last time the UK’s “fast zombies” graced our screens…
If some of these things sound familiar to zombie aficionados—or more simply, those who have seen a few episodes of The Walking Dead—it’s because they are, on the whole, things we’ve all seen before from a genre that has been milked dry.
From The Walking Dead to World War Z, or the classics of George A. Romero…
Even The Walking Dead (2012-2022), a show about the importance of building community, spends most of its time creating conflict via wars with other groups, as well as the much-criticized shock value of constantly killing off characters.
The Walking Dead set the standard, and many other titles refined it, like The Girl with All the Gifts, Kingdom, and Train to Busan.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced The Beach (2000), 28 Years Later (2025), 28 Days Later (2002)
Plot Characters Themes
The film takes a turn toward Apocalypse Now territory, as Spike and Isla venture out to find the mysterious Dr. Kelson…
…played by Ralph Fiennes like a sparking livewire who’s channeling Marlon Brando’s mad colonel (the horror! The horror!) in “Apocalypse Now.”
Blockbuster horror films tend not to evoke Ken Loach’s Kes or the Brando scenes in Apocalypse Now…
It's "Night of the Living Dead" meets "Apocalypse Now," and for most of its running time it works, without making one turn away thinking it's just more silly hokum.
Borrowing heavily from both "The Lord of the Flies" and Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (itself based on Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"), the story does have a fair amount of built-in intrigue due quite simply to the time-tested plots.
While it thumped along, I had plenty of time to ponder the other and better movies that it reminded me of: The Mosquito Coast (1986), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979), as well as William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies.
No “Yellow Submarine,” no “Day Tripper,” no “Eleanor Rigby.”
Working with cinematographer Christopher Ross, the screen pops and is brought to life in a similar fashion as Yellow Submarine.
A survey of the greatest hits, it forgets what has made those hits so great despite cheeky references to Yellow Submarine and A Hard Day’s Night .
It’s difficult to get too bent out of shape about reality while you’re humming “Yellow Submarine” or “Strawberry Fields.”
To know that, all you have to do is see the title sequence of “A Hard Day’s Night,” which electrifies you from its opening THRUM!!! , or (in the same film) the Beatles blasting the sonic bliss of “I Should Have Known Better” from inside a train storage compartment, or the sublime melting psychedelia of the “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” flying-damsel fantasia from “Yellow Submarine,” or Paul gazing into the camera as he delivers the hymn-like rapture of the title song from “Let It Be.”
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Directed by George A. Romero
influenced 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Years Later (2025)
Themes Plot Characters
…the genre really broke free from the grave in 1968 with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
With nods to Predator, Mad Max, the zombie plagues of Romero, and, of course, The Odyssey…
The manner in which the virus spreads can occur via a bite—a more traditional means used in films since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968)…
Not to be mistaken for a sequel to the Sandra Bullock drunk drama "28 Days," Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later..." is more a remake--or a nod to, or let's be honest here and call it a complete rip-off--of George A. Romero's apocalyptic horror masterpiece "Dawn of the Dead" (a superior sequel to his 1968 nightmare "Night of the Living Dead").
Unlike the monsters in classic zombie films like 1968's "Night of the Living Dead" and the throwaway copycats that followed, these aren't lumbering, mumbling zombies -- these are twitching, hissing zombies.
With their rotting flesh, blood-red eyes and snarling, spewing, clawing fury, the “infected” owe a debt to zombies of the genre launched by George A. Romero three decades ago with “Night of the Living Dead.”
28 Weeks Later (2007)
Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
influenced 28 Years Later (2025), 127 Hours (2010)
Themes Plot
Neither is the film a nostalgia-infused legacy sequel. No characters return from earlier films. In terms of tone and genre, it does not really match either previous instalment. 28 Days Later (2002) combined the zombie movie with a very British ‘cosy catastrophe’ (its relationship to author John Wyndham sits somewhere between ‘heavy debt’ and ‘blatant plagiarism’). As noted, 28 Weeks Later (2007) adopted more elements of a military thriller: larger in scale, and more muscular in terms of firepower and violence.
A recurrent them in all the 28… Later films have been this sense of a Rubicon.
As cramped and citybound as 28 Days Later and its sequel felt, 28 Years Later is all wide-open vistas and rolling hills.
The title is somewhat misleading as 28 Weeks Later arrived in theaters back in 2007, but why quibble over a few years?
Presumably, the Paris invasion seen at the conclusion of Juan Carles Fesnadillo’s 2007 sequel, 28 Weeks Later, didn’t amount to much.
Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland followed that up with 28 WEEKS LATER, with the Rage virus morphing and spreading to Europe.
Here Are the Young Men (2021)
Directed by Eoin Macken
influenced by Trainspotting (1996)
Themes Visuals
It takes a few minutes to get past the feeling that “Here Are the Young Men” isn’t a simplistic “Trainspotting” homage, some sort of boys-come-of-age, generationally-indulgent wank with an Irish accent.
Say you haven’t seen Mean Streets or Trainspotting or American Pie or Lost Boys or Beats or Reprise or Rebel Without a Cause or frankly any movie in which males bond.
There is an inevitable Trainspotting vibe to the early scenes as the trio indulges a lust for life.
There are noteworthy takes on teen machismo, and its flaws, and at times it's reminiscent of '90s cult favorite Trainspotting.
With its brash stylistic gambits (including frequent cutaways to a satirical faux game show that at one point offers an inexplicable cameo appearance from Noomi Rapace), driving soundtrack and cheekily nihilistic approach, it is pretty clear right from the start that Eoin Mackin wants his film, adapted from Rob Doyle's 2014 novel, to be looked upon as a sort of Irish "Trainspotting."
Mixing together the debauchery of Trainspotting with the youthful disaffection of Skins (the British version, of course), director Eoin Macken’s film Here Are the Young Men, based on the 2014 novel by Rob Doyle, is a cynical look at three frustrated young men during the summer after they graduate from school, circa 2003.
Beatles music is offered in every stripe of venue, from living rooms to small stages to recording studios big and small to a referential rooftop to the film's Wembly Arena climax, but not much has been done to make it fresh with the exception of the desperation and angry energy Patel gives to "Help!" (Nor, for that matter, is any effort made to analyze any difference in reception fifty years would make.)
), Jack in the recording studio performing an amped-up montage of tracks from “Meet the Beatles,” Jack turning “Help!” into a speedy punk anthem, Jack’s running attempt to piece together the lyrics of “Eleanor Rigby.”
And Patel, who does all his own singing, also does these famous songs justice (his rendition of "Help!," taken at punk-rock velocity, is a worthy footnote to the original track).
When Jack straps on an electric guitar and performs a sizzling rendition of “Help!” the feeling is exhilarating.
That the Beatles songs were full of surprises, of pain and doubt instead of just sunshine, is something that Yesterday only acknowledges when Jack performs a live “Help!” that actually has some conviction as a cri de coeur (even if his backing band does make it sound more like a middling Lemonheads number).
Every time we hear “In My Life” or a rocking “Help!” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand” we say, “That sure is a great song” and forget for a moment that the movie is not very good.
A sleek, modern update of such equally improbable hypno-noirs of the past as Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool" (1949), "Trance" also is a puzzle film, in the relatively new tradition of "The Usual Suspects," "Memento," " Shutter Island " and " Inception ."
In terms of its psychiatry-related plot one could compare “Trance” to “Spellbound,” but Hitchcock’s film, while highly inventive for its time, is a model of stylistic restraint next to Boyle’s, which ramps up the director’s customary visual acrobatics to new heights.
Boyle evokes the ghost of Hitchcock with the character of Elizabeth, who immediately recalls Ingrid Bergman’s cool-headed shrink in Spellbound , but this character is almost like an inverse of that one — the more we know about her, the less interesting she gets.
The main body, however, is closer to Alfred Hitchcock’s problematic 1945 picture Spellbound .
As Beatles jukebox musicals with people other than the Beatles singing the songs go- and its flaws notwithstanding- "Yesterday" is a significant improvement over 2007's "Across the Universe."
And unlike its contemporary, Across the Universe , the film never comes off as an attempt to fully recapture the spirit of the Beatles and what their songs truly mean in context.
Instead, I was left confused, thinking of all the songs they didn’t bother including, and asking myself why I suddenly wanted to go home and watch Across the Universe instead.
The Dog Stars (2026)
Directed by Ridley Scott
influenced by 28 Years Later (2025), 28 Days Later (2002)
Visuals Themes
…the ruined cities and dangerous landscapes recalling everything from The Walking Dead to Civil War to 28 Years Later…
The Dog Stars may disappoint viewers wanting an explosive action-horror comparable to I Am Legend, The Last Of Us or 28 Years Later.
Danny Boyle did it better in 28 Years Later, as did Bong Joon-ho in Snowpiercer.
…territory that belongs to a more surreal strain of post-apocalyptic fiction like Fallout or 28 Years Later…
Post-apocalypse horror and sci-fi survival thrillers continue to be all the rage currently, whether it’s The Last of Us, Fallout and Silo on TV or 28 Years Later, its sequel The Bone Temple and The End of Oak Street on the big screen.
…the most recent crop of post-apocalyptic dramas, like The Last of Us and the 28 Years Later franchise, use the collapse of society as a jumping-off point to tell intimate, small-scale stories about human emotion…
The Last of Us made hordes of infected into prestige TV.
Stories like The Last of Us, Train to Busan, and even The Walking Dead video game.
The peak of this genre, especially in the West, is attributed to The Last of Us, which is already struggling in viewership, as it focuses more on the story, and zombies no longer evoke the same shock.
…numerous imitators riding the renewed zombie wave including THE WALKING DEAD and THE LAST OF US.
One can even note the similarities between Spike’s desperation to save his mother and the personal conflicts in The Last of Us (2023-). However, while the latter gives in to the bleakness of its genre tropes…
(Think more Resident Evil than The Last of Us.)
But as in Christopher Nolan's "Inception," the wrinkles between reality and illusion soon become irritating.
A sleek, modern update of such equally improbable hypno-noirs of the past as Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool" (1949), "Trance" also is a puzzle film, in the relatively new tradition of "The Usual Suspects," "Memento," " Shutter Island " and " Inception ."
This isn’t “Inception,” where layers of experience are nested neatly one inside the next, but rather a frittata, its ingredients distinguishable only by the various hyper-saturated colors that seem to define each scene.
Nevertheless, the mounds of cash Inception raked in have mattered—recently we've had The Adjustment Bureau, Looper, and now Danny Boyle's Trance cooking our noodles al dente.
Director Danny Boyle is clearly trying to make his “Inception,” but instead he’s made his “Vanilla Sky.” It’s a lackluster thriller that steals just about all of its ideas from either “Inception” or “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
Oh, this is a stylish enough, mind-bending thriller, a cocktail of "Inception," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and "The Thomas Crown Affair" (the remake).
That “T2" succeeds is a tribute to the way the first film, based on the novel by Irvine Welsh (who repeats a cameo as fence Mikey Forrester), created characters of such vitality that they remain in the actors’ bones to this day.
Eternally a stylist, Danny Boyle returns to the primordial ooze that made Danny Boyle Danny Boyle with T2 Trainspotting , a self-reflective reality check of a sequel, one that dwells on past wrongs and potential paths forward, undercut with themes of addiction and redemption.
T2 Trainspotting , the much-anticipated sequel, opens with McGregor’s trainers pounding away on a treadmill, setting the scene for how much has changed for the four anti-heroes in the two intervening decades.
Two decades after cult hit Trainspotting tapped into the zeitgeist of the 1990s its sequel – the oddly titled T2 – reaches screens, propelled by an overbearing sense of nostalgia.
Also, he blatantly pilfers scenes from "Apocalypse Now" and "The Deer Hunter" -- although Boyle would probably call these scenes homages shaped by Richard's pop-culture mind.
As in the book, Boyle's film draws parallels between the collapsing life on the island and key moments from Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, not because these characters experienced Vietnam, but because they know Hollywood's version of that dark chapter.
While it thumped along, I had plenty of time to ponder the other and better movies that it reminded me of: The Mosquito Coast (1986), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979), as well as William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies.
As a critique of Generation X amorality, vapid pop culture, and Western exploitativeness, The Beach comes off as unintentional self-parody, especially when it lapses into riffs from Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter.
The film indexes Apocalypse Now, and The Deer Hunter, as well as The Blue Lagoon and Ursula Andress's sexy bikini scene from Dr. No, with a little bit of The Lord of the Flies thrown in for good measure.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
Directed by Nia DaCosta
influenced by 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Years Later (2025)
Themes Visuals
Expanding upon the world created by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland in 28 Years Later but turning that world on its head – Nia DaCosta directs 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
…we will have to wait and see how this one ties in and connects the dots from 28 Days Later to the end.
Boyle’s return to the franchise replaced the lo-fi gritty handheld of 28 Days Later with glossy cinematography, extended worldbuilding and sometimes sarcastic directorial flourishes.
It’s through the characters and their morally grey journeys and conflicts that bring The Bone Temple closest to the original film 28 Days Later…
…there are moments that clearly call back to shots from the original 28 Days Later…
The climactic emergence of a roving cult dedicated to an unlikely icon is, I’m sure, divisive, but I will spare my own commentary on it for when I see more of them in next year’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
Director Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting") makes no bones about the fact that his movie is a genre piece that happily rips off not only the Romero zombie movies but such end-of-civilization classics as 1959's "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" and 1971's "The Omega Man."
Yep, you’ve seen it all before with Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth, Charlton Heston in The Omega Man and, of course, in George A. Romero’s “Dead” trilogy.
Fans of movies such as George Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead trilogy and Boris Sagal's 1971 apocalyptic The Omega Man will find buckets of flesh-eating fun in Boyle's hyperactive update of the infernal and always-entertaining battle between the living and the undead.
Let's call it the thinking person's version of "The Omega Man" or "The Last Man on Earth."
A cross between The Omega Man and Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later is a great action/horror movie.
After fizzling with "The Beach", Danny Boyle makes a solid comeback with "28 Days Later" - a film which had all the potential of being just another post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror clone of the likes of "The Omega Man", and while its not deftly original, it is a very engaging and dark little piece which is quite enjoyable.After the pre-requisite intro showing the virus' quite ironic escape the film begins with a nude Jim (Cillan Murphy) waking up in hospital and alone.
It’s important to note that in the right hands, these universal themes of life, loss and overcoming obstacles can be quite moving (the last 10 minutes of “127 Hours” runs circles around most of “Wild”), they are the building blocks of most narratives, but as reduced here they are dull and uninspired.
Watching Wild, I couldn’t help but compare it to other solitary nature movies like Into the Wild and 127 Hours.
But there was no way she was letting go of the lead role in “Wild,” based on Strayed’s 2012 best-selling memoir that recalls other self-induced trials of endurance such as “ Eat Pray Love ,” “ 127 Hours ” and “Into the Wild.”
There’s a lot to be cynical about when you come across a film like Wild: it’s an absolute “Oscar bait” film all the way, from its “civilized person trapped in the wilderness vibe” (see also: 127 Hours or Into the Wild) to the fact that producer/star Reese Witherspoon snatched the non-fiction book up for a film version before the thing was even published; it claims to be about freedom from material things yet also includes frequent and irritating product placements for Snapple tea and REI camping goods; and it talks a lot about life-changing this and brilliant revelation that… but it’s mostly just talking.
Like the Danny Boyle film version of "127 Hours," "Wild" is extremely nervous about boring its audience with its protagonist's aloneness.
…like 2010's " 127 Hours " before it, focuses on a single character and their trials and travails in nature.
Plus, prosthetic penises, Predator-like decapitations, Ralph Fiennes’ boney art installation and addressing the Jimmy Savile of it all.
With nods to Predator, Mad Max, the zombie plagues of Romero, and, of course, The Odyssey…
But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of blood to go around (though the biggest kills are blatant references to Predator, which is surprisingly lazy).
…something more akin to an apex Predator.