'28 Weeks later,' a bleak, nihilistic film that makes ‘28 Days Later’ look like all unicorns and rainbows equals and sometimes surpasses it’s effective predecessor by checking its ambitions at the door to fashion a straight-laced, nasty “infected” aka zombie genre picture with no shortage of quite literally knuckle-gnawing frenetic sequences.
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, the director and scripter of the original respectively, focused more on reinventing the horror wheel by turning the zombie genre on its head, where it mostly succeeded - they made their zombies not be zombies at all, but the virus “infected” which allowed them the freedom to make their “zombies” chase, gnash and claw with a speed and ferocity usually reserved for only the most lethal of predators.
This novelty (although certainly variations of this take had been seen before) combined with the apocalyptic narrative led to a refreshing horror film – yet with grandiose trappings.
With Boyle and Garland serving as exec producers here and handing over the reigns to Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who made a nice debut with 2001’s ‘Intacto’, along with his team of writers including Rowan Joffe, son Roland, the world has already been established and the trappings can now easily be avoided. A plethora of turgid options could have been pursued for a sequel to ‘28 Days Later’ but thankfully Fresnadillo knew exactly what he wanted i.e balls to the walls horror and Boyle was smart enough to allow him to make it.
A continuation of the original in world happenings only, no characters or mention of from the original carry over. With a prologue that was imagined to keep up with the genre it started (Zach Synder’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’…I’m looking at you), we meet a couple, Don and Alice Harris (Robert Carlyle and Catherine McCormack) scavenging for food in a rural, shadow-infested, and claustrophobic cottage.
Hearing that their kids were rather luckily sent overseas before the outbreak, not much dialogue is established before they come into contact with the house’s owners and then the sudden attack of the “infected.”
An outburst of bloody gnashing teeth, screams and tight close-ups, the sequence evolves into a nasty take on ‘Rio Bravo.’ Carlyle, nicely cast in the role, breaks out of the house in a moment of confusion, fear and weakness and takes off across the field with the infected speeding after only to look back at his wife, her hands pleadingly pressed against the window of the cottage staring at him with a nightmarish realization setting in.
As the camera swoops in and around this rural field as dozens of the infected chase down Don with John Murphy’s pounding, iconic score punctuating every moment, the film starts with a kick-ass momentum. Enter the captions explaining the events of our doomsday up to this point – 28 Days Later: the outrage virus wreaks havoc on the population, Eleven weeks later: U.S. forces enter London, Eighteen Weeks Later: The U.S. presumptuously labels Britain free of infection, Twenty Four Weeks later: A reconstruction begins….which brings us to ’28 Weeks Later.’
As the reconstruction of London begins, a quarantined, fortified area dubbed as District 1 Security Zone becomes the central headquarters to regain some normalcy in life. New arrivals filter in through the airport, registering with the U.S. troops, among these new arrivals being Don and Alice’s children Andy and Tammy (Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Poots) who reunite with their dad in a fascinatingly emotional sequence where daddy tap dances around what happened to their mum.
As the kids escape the security zone to find their home, Don’s guilt will have some heavy answers, as the kids find their mom in hiding. Key to some substantial answers to a cure, Alice is “infected” but appears normal. Doctor Scarlet (Rose Byrne) assumes immunity might be inherent to her blood which could lead to a vaccine. In a devastating turn of events that leads to all Hell breaking loose in District 1, Don begs Alice for forgiveness and Alice confesses her love for him. The ambiguity behind her motives is unclear but the results of emotions such as guilt or revenge are rarely this extreme.
The infected and non-infected alike pour into the streets of London – at first the military commands the rooftop snipers to target only the infected but it soon becomes clear all will need to be targeted. Doctor Scarlet and the Harris children are among the masses on the streets and they soon find themselves accompanied by a sympathetic U.S. sniper, Sgt. Doyle (Jeremy Renner) who got young Andy in his sights and refused to make the shot.
The narrative slows down and the action picks up as this small group makes their away across the deserted locales of London all the while trying to avoid the military and the infected. Some great set-pieces and an increasing build of tension drive the film all the way to the climax with no shortage of nauseatingly unpredictable turns.
An easily guessed metaphor for the recent events of Iraq, luckily the pic never becomes heavy-handed in this area with a wicked script more than able to hold it’s own without too many distractions of parallels. The cast - from the kids to Renner, Byrne, McCormack and Carlyle - all make the most of small and big moments with Carlyle proving particularly adept at both the subtle and the vicious (his role in ‘Ravenous’ making a good prerequisite no doubt).
The nastiness of the gore and its frequency will thrill horror fans with one rousing sequence evoking Jackson’s ‘Dead Alive’ but with a helicopter in lieu of a lawnmower. Gore-hounds will easily guess my meaning. The score by John Murphy reprises some main themes from ’28 Days Later’ and perfectly complements the action. The hand-held camerawork culling from the Greengrass handbook keeps things visceral.
Generous Special Features start off with an audio commentary by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and Enrique Lopex Lavigne that is a competent if not exactly exciting look into the film. ‘Deleted Scenes w/optional Commentary’ offer two scenes with the second seeming to be of slightly more interest as an alternate ending.
A group of featurettes are next with ‘Code Red’ The Making of’, a thirteen-minute standard making-of, ‘The Infected’ a short look into the actors cast as the titular creatures, their background in motion and the choreography, ‘Getting Into The Action’ which focuses on the action in the pic and some visual f/x and ’28 Days Later: The Aftermath: Stage 1 “Development” and Stage 3 “Decimation”, animated shorts that take a page from graphic novels. Some nice artwork provides a nice watch for fans. Trailers for a number of other Fox horror titles finish up the package including trailers for Lake Placid 2 and Wrong Turn 2. Humph.
Although ‘28 Weeks Later’ is not the novelty the original was or quite as epic in scope, I actually found it to be a more effective horror film in ways with a nice combination of solid thesp skills, a tight script, and some emotionally resonant action-horror thrills.
28 Weeks Later is now available at Amazon and AmazonUK . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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