Almost nothing in the opening passage of this movie makes sense. Why does a slight 12-year-old need to go kill zombies who are safely separated from his village? Why does his father risk their lives without at least planning to bring back supplies? Why didn’t they bring more arrows? Well-written characters make mistakes, of course, but the ones populating 28 Years Later exist to make idiotic choices inconsistent with their implied survivalist tendencies, solely to move the plot forward and introduce what Boyle seems most interested in…new flavors of zombie.

One thing that set 28 Days Later apart from other movies in the undead genre was the speed and ferocity that propelled its villains, quite unlike the lumbering corpses in Night of the Living Dead. Now, Boyle introduces a breed of squishy, slow-moving Infected, as well as an Alpha, who is “bigger and smarter” than the regular zombies, as Jamie explains to Spike on their outing. For a moment, I wondered if Boyle was exploring the idea of evolution…or a creature we see as monstrous becoming more like us…or the equalizing of predator and prey. Nope. He’s just bigger and smarter. And runs around flaunting his zombie dong.

There are a number of instances in 28 Years Later when it seems like Boyle and Garland are maybe scratching the surface of something, but then they take a sharp left, never to return. They also tend to briefly introduce characters for some attempt at pathos or comedic relief, only to abruptly kill them off. The worst case is Erik (Edvin Ryding), a Swedish Navy grunt who has been woefully deployed to fight the Infected. When Spike and Erik meet on the mainland, Boyle and Garland exploit the opportunity for low-hanging humor that feels unearned and throws the tone of the film completely out of whack. Erik has an iPhone on the verge of dying, so he shows Spike a photo of his fiancée as a gesture of goodwill. Her lips are swollen with filler and her eyes caked in makeup. Spike, who has never seen an iPhone or the wonders of plastic surgery, asks: “What’s wrong with her face?”

The cinematography and editing also mirror this painful tonal whiplash. Anthony Dod Mantle’s lower-grade digital footage in the first film enhanced the tangible sense of fear, and, like The Blair Witch Project before it, gave it the texture of a documentary. But Mantle’s style in 28 Years Later, which was largely shot on iPhones strapped to custom rigs, just feels shaky for the sake of it. If anything, it ejects the viewer from the clutches of fear. Boyle seems more interested in making the viewer feel like they are experiencing the motion of different characters—like a POV shooter in a video game. Jon Harris’ editing is similarly fragmented in a manner that is mostly distracting, as he splices in plenty of archival footage of men across history mimicking the actions of the film’s characters. This is a new trademark of Boyle’s, one he used to tedious extent in his punk mini-series Pistol. In 28 Years Later, Boyle has no penetrating insights into the nature of man. The best he can do is flash historical footage of human behavior and hope we can project meaning for him.