28 Weeks Later
(2007)
review by Died with Boots On

Big, open fields have never felt so claustrophobic.  Just the other day, two friends and I drove into the heart of the countryside with nothing but pub food and fresh fruit and had ourselves a picnic.  The weather was perfect, though it was a tad humid.  One friend plugged her iPod into the lighter in her car, turned on “The Cranberries”, and cranked up the volume.  As I was looking out toward the horizon, the song “Zombies” came on.  Thanks to “28 Days Later”, the next few words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with the blueness of the sky, or the crispness of the air, or the sweet smell of apples from the tree we sat under.  No.  As I sat there and looked out across that field and listened to that “Cranberries” song, I said, “This would be a great place to shoot a zombie movie.”

Let me start by saying that I love “28 Days Later”.  Writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle have reinvented the zombie movie with their rabid, methamphetamine-abusing infected, and they did it on a shoestring budget.  Alex Garland and Danny Boyle kept themselves on as executive producers, but the writing and directorial torch was passed on to Mr. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, the not-so-famous director of “Intacto”.  Unfortunately, because “28 Days Later” has such cult status, “28 Weeks Later” reeked of a bigger budget.  I was hoping to see Boyle’s 5,000$ standard-definition video cameras with the grainy film stock, but no such luck.  That’s not to say I didn’t like this movie.  On the contrary, I liked it quite a bit, for different reasons.

Don (Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) and four others are waiting out the Rage epidemic in a boarded-up farmhouse in the British countryside.  While preparing rigatoni pasta and canned raspberries, Don and Alice imagine what would have happened if they hadn’t paid for their children to go on some trip.  Right as they are about to eat, there is a frantic knocking at the door.  A little boy is heard screaming for help on the other side.  After much hesitation, they open the door for the little boy.  They ask him where he came from, and he says he’s been running for several miles.  They ask him how many were chasing him.  His response: “Loads.”  Just as he says this, one of the Infected comes crashing through the wall.  Alice grabs the boy by the arm and the two run upstairs.  Don follows.  Three of the others run into the barn.  The Infected follow them upstairs.  Alice and the boy run into a bedroom and hide behind an opened closet door.  Don signals for Alice to follow him into another room, but she won’t leave the boy.  An Infected comes into the bedroom and corners Alice.  Don looks at her, apologetically, and then shuts the door and escapes through a window.  A dozen of the infected notice him and begin taking after him.  As he runs, he looks back at the bedroom window where his wife was, and he sees her get bitten.  He sees one of the others trying to start a motorboat.  He runs to the dock and jumps in.  His friend falls out and gets attacked.  Don starts the motorboat and takes off, beating his infected friend off of the back and grinding him up in the propeller.  He made it.

Twenty-eight weeks later, Great Britain is ready for repopulation.  A U.S.-led NATO team commanded by General Stone begins bringing people back into the country, starting with the Isle of Dogs, known as District 1.  Snipers and machine-gunners are positioned all over London, keeping the new arrivals quarantined.  Among those being brought back into the country are Don’s two children, Tammy (Poots) and twelve-year-old Andy (Muggleton), the youngest person in the whole country.  A doctor examines Andy, and comments on his one blue eye and his one brown eye.  He says that his mom had one blue eye and one brown eye, too.  Don takes his two children to a high-rise apartment building where he tells them how their mother died.  He assures them that there was nothing he could have done to save her.  That night, Andy tells his sister that he is afraid he will forget what their mother looks like, that he doesn’t even have a picture of her.  The next morning, Andy and Tammy sneak out of the quarantined district to find their old house.  They find a moped and speed through the post-apocalyptic streets of London.  Once at their house, Andy ventures upstairs.  Behind an upset table is his mother, except she isn’t dead.  She is alive, but there is something terribly wrong with her.  She grabs Andy in an embrace, but she hurts him.  Andy wriggles out of her arms and runs out of the house.  A helicopter has landed outside, looking for them.  Back in the Isle of Dogs, Alice is quarantined.  One of her eyes is noticeably bloodshot like the Infected, but the other is not.  Major Scarlet (Byrne) conducts a blood test and concludes that she has been infected with the virus, but seems to have a natural immunity.  In other words, the virus doesn’t affect her, but she can still transmit it.  Meanwhile, Don sneaks into the quarantined room to ask his wife forgiveness for abandoning her.  She says that she does, and he kisses her.  Before you can say, “We’re fucked,” Don is writhing around on the floor and banging his head on the bulletproof glass.  He notices Alice, and attacks her.  A couple of soldiers sent to exterminate Alice are bitten, and become infected.  Scarlet is concerned with rescuing Alice’s two children to study their genetic traits.  She thinks that she can develop a cure if either of them have their mother’s immunity.  Pretty soon, everyone on ground level is a target because containment has failed, and snipers are given the order to kill everyone.  Great Britain is, once again, FUBAR.  Code Red.

I’ll keep my complaints short and sweet.  The movie felt too short.  It was about an hour and a half long, but it just ended too quickly.  Also, there is a scene where Andy dreams about his mother, and she just stares straight ahead at the camera, and rips her face off.  It was an effective scare, but it reminded me too much of the transition scenes used in “The Descent” where the little girl blows out her birthday candles.

Something else that I’m not sure I loved or I hated was the fact that the U.S. military was much more dangerous to the main characters than the zombies.  From a synchronic standpoint, I don’t like that the zombies are upstaged by an even greater antagonist.  I think Fresnadillo should have just let this movie be a piece of cult-status fiction without weighing it down with dense social commentary.  On the other hand, I think it’s admirable in a George A. Romero sort of way that he can take this kind of subject matter and say something with it, the ultimate irony of course being that even when they’re trying to help, the U.S. still fucks everything up, and even more so than a zombie plague ever could.  The U.S. Army General is depicted as an ignorant asshole who is too confident and self-righteous to even consider that something might go wrong.  In the end, it’s this tragic flaw that causes the re-outbreak.

And now for the things I like about the movie.  I love the music!  Muse’s “Shrinking Universe” is used in the trailer, and, I don’t know if that’s any indication that Muse did the music for the actual movie, but there are definitely Muse-esque instrumentals used all throughout.  As I said before, I was a little disappointed that Fresnadillo didn’t use standard-definition cameras or Boyle’s $9.8 million budget, but the camerawork is still impressive.  There is lots of shaky camera movement, and lots of the shots are dark and shadowy and use a fast-shutter, strobe light technique.  I was a little nervous when I found out the main character was played by a debuting child-actor, but don’t worry, the acting was brilliant!

“28 Weeks Later” is a cool film.  It’s not as good as “28 Days Later,” but sequels never are.  Danny Boyle has announced a “28 Months Later,” which just confirms my suspicion that this movie was more of a transition piece between “Days” and whatever they have planned next.  I do recommend this movie, though.  It has one of the most satisfying endings since, well, all of “28 Days Later’s”.