All jagged visual chaos and capricious fury, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later is a successful invocation of the futile, violent militaristic zeitgeist and a surprisingly fresh product from the inevitable movie-world sequel mill.
28 Weeks Later opens with a tour de force sequence in a boarded-up English farmhouse housing several survivors of the Rage virus outbreak that was the subject of the first film. The survivors holed-up amid the infected countryside include Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack). The arrival of an uninfected kid triggers the release of Rage-hell as hordes of the infected descend on the farmhouse, leading to a cowardly desertion by Don who saves his own skin and turns up later as a high-level caretaker in the ‘green zone’ of London (one of the many references to the Iraq War).
Thus begins the main thrust of the plot, the reconstruction and repopulation of Britain after the infected have starved to death, supervised by a NATO force headed up by the U.S. Army. Don welcomes his children into the green zone, a heavily-fortressed safe area guarded by the army, including Special Forces snipers stationed 24X7 on the rooftops. The desolate feel of Cillian Murphy wandering the dead streets of London is captured here in a startling shot of the bright lights of the green zone as an island amid the empty blackness of the surrounding decay. The militaristic repopulation effort seems under control, an illusion that shatters upon the discovery of the still-alive Alice, who appears to be an uninfected carrier of the Rage virus. The virus, of course, is unleashed, people become the raging zombie infected, and the shit hits the fan.
When it does, Fresnadillo simulates shocking, confused, ground-level chaos through his use of staccato images captured in turbulent, non-cohesive, handheld camera, in a style consanguineous with Cuaron’s Children of Men and war-time photography. Particularly effective is a sequence set in a shelter packed with civilians that captures the utter animalistic terror as an infected enters and spreads the Rage virus through the panicked crowd.
Parallels with current military misadventure and occupation are undeniable. It becomes impossible to discriminate infected and uninfected (terrorist and civilian?), with the virus spreading faster than the ability to kill the infected. The military’s response quickly collapses and the army stops discriminating its targets, leading to the shooting, fire-bombing, and chemical gassing of the civilian population. The film then morphs into an extended chase sequence, with empathic military sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner) leading a group of civilians out of the hell of the infected green zone and to a chopper piloted by a pal.
Though the chaotic directorial style is overdone---with a couple of sequences particularly seizure-initiating---and lacks a strong central character to pull you through the story, 28 Weeks Later is an exciting, subtextually rich, visually interesting thriller, in many ways the equal of its precedent. In the 2007 summer film season of bloated blockbuster bores, it is a welcome surprise.
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Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Written by Rowan Joffe and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo & Jesús Olmo
Starring:
Robert Carlyle...Don
Rose Byrne...Scarlet
Jeremy Renner...Doyle
Amanda Walker...Sally
Shahid Ahmed...Jacob
Harold Perrineau...Flynn
Catherine McCormack...Alice
Garfield Morgan...Geoff
Emily Beecham...Karen
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Special Bonus Feature: 28 Days Later Review
Through the grainy colours of a digital camera, 28 Days Later takes you on an eerie journey through an empty landscape made desolate by a viral apocalypse. The first scenes of the film show how the apocalypse is unleashed, by a trio of animal activists who break into a research laboratory in Cambridge, England, to liberate the chimpanzees caged there. Bad mistake: the chimps are infected with a genetically-engineered virus called “Rage” that turns its victims into crazed, mindless brutes driven to attack and kill with ferocious strength and speed. As if that isn’t bad enough, the virus acts within twenty seconds. One of the chimps attacks and bites an activist, who quickly succumbs to the infection and turns on her compadres, and we fast-forward 28 Days Later, when injured bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a hospital bed wondering where the heck everyone went.
In a series of startling shots, which must have required incredible logistics, Jim wanders through a completely deserted London, shouting “Hello!”. Though Jim doesn’t know it, this is perhaps not the best thing to do. In a spooky scene reminiscent of George Romero’s zombie movies, Jim has his first encounter with “the infected” in a deserted building, mistaking them for corpses. Unlike the aforementioned zombie flicks, however, these “zombies” move with startling speed, glaring with scarlet red eyes, slashing at the air with their hands while emitting a cross between a hiss and a roar. Luckily, Jim runs into Selena (Naomie Harris), who has hardened herself to the point that she is a bitter, merciless, relentlessly driven survivor, though wondering exactly why the hell she is bothering to survive.
The contrast and byplay between Jim’s somewhat naïve hopefulness and Selena’s embittered cynicism is what drives the story forward in its early stages. We want to believe Jim, but suspect that Selena is right. Jim and Selena eventually find two other survivors, Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). In search of the source of a recorded radio broadcast, they head North in a car, on their way travelling through a dark tunnel partially blocked with wrecked cars, leading to one of the creepiest scenes in the film, which I will not describe. I will also not reveal what happens to them from here onwards. The film’s climax does include, though, a weird reference to Apocalypse Now, which seems fitting as screenwriter Alex Garland’s first novel The Beach included characters that were obsessed with that classic war film. Very subtly, the film hints that perhaps the Rage virus is merely bringing out something that is lurking in all of us.
28 Days Later is hardly original. There have been many films and books dealing with humanity crumbling or the planet emptying due to some vast disaster. George Stewart’s novel Earth Abides, Stephen King’s book The Stand, Richard Matheson’s classic novel I Am Legend, the New Zealand science-fiction film The Quiet Earth, and George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead are just a few examples. However, the idea of being suddenly alone on the Earth and the society we know and depend on gone is a resonant one, and director Danny Boyle, writer Alex Garland, and the excellent cast expertly bring the film to life and reinvigorate the concept. Moreover, the digital photography, sparingly-used special effects, and the matter-of-fact acting brings a documentary-like immediacy that is compelling.
28 Days Later is at heart a story examining the classic Hitchcockian situation of ordinary people dropped into extraordinary circumstances. Having awoken from a coma and not knowing what has happened to the world he knew, Jim is our way into this story, and we see the film mostly through his eyes. The way that Jim and the other characters react to the horror that has overtaken their lives makes sense. There are no moments where they do something simply because the plot mechanics require them to. Their motivations as ordinary people trying desperately to survive connect with us, the audience, rendering the film all the more believable. And all the scarier.
Very gory at times, and so not for those with squeamish constitutions, 28 Days Later is a well-mounted, intelligent, genuinely scary science-fiction thriller.
28 Weeks Later opens with a tour de force sequence in a boarded-up English farmhouse housing several survivors of the Rage virus outbreak that was the subject of the first film. The survivors holed-up amid the infected countryside include Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack). The arrival of an uninfected kid triggers the release of Rage-hell as hordes of the infected descend on the farmhouse, leading to a cowardly desertion by Don who saves his own skin and turns up later as a high-level caretaker in the ‘green zone’ of London (one of the many references to the Iraq War).
Thus begins the main thrust of the plot, the reconstruction and repopulation of Britain after the infected have starved to death, supervised by a NATO force headed up by the U.S. Army. Don welcomes his children into the green zone, a heavily-fortressed safe area guarded by the army, including Special Forces snipers stationed 24X7 on the rooftops. The desolate feel of Cillian Murphy wandering the dead streets of London is captured here in a startling shot of the bright lights of the green zone as an island amid the empty blackness of the surrounding decay. The militaristic repopulation effort seems under control, an illusion that shatters upon the discovery of the still-alive Alice, who appears to be an uninfected carrier of the Rage virus. The virus, of course, is unleashed, people become the raging zombie infected, and the shit hits the fan.
When it does, Fresnadillo simulates shocking, confused, ground-level chaos through his use of staccato images captured in turbulent, non-cohesive, handheld camera, in a style consanguineous with Cuaron’s Children of Men and war-time photography. Particularly effective is a sequence set in a shelter packed with civilians that captures the utter animalistic terror as an infected enters and spreads the Rage virus through the panicked crowd.Parallels with current military misadventure and occupation are undeniable. It becomes impossible to discriminate infected and uninfected (terrorist and civilian?), with the virus spreading faster than the ability to kill the infected. The military’s response quickly collapses and the army stops discriminating its targets, leading to the shooting, fire-bombing, and chemical gassing of the civilian population. The film then morphs into an extended chase sequence, with empathic military sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner) leading a group of civilians out of the hell of the infected green zone and to a chopper piloted by a pal.
Though the chaotic directorial style is overdone---with a couple of sequences particularly seizure-initiating---and lacks a strong central character to pull you through the story, 28 Weeks Later is an exciting, subtextually rich, visually interesting thriller, in many ways the equal of its precedent. In the 2007 summer film season of bloated blockbuster bores, it is a welcome surprise.---
Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Written by Rowan Joffe and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo & Jesús Olmo
Starring:
Robert Carlyle...Don
Rose Byrne...Scarlet
Jeremy Renner...Doyle
Amanda Walker...Sally
Shahid Ahmed...Jacob
Harold Perrineau...Flynn
Catherine McCormack...Alice
Garfield Morgan...Geoff
Emily Beecham...Karen
---
Special Bonus Feature: 28 Days Later Review
Through the grainy colours of a digital camera, 28 Days Later takes you on an eerie journey through an empty landscape made desolate by a viral apocalypse. The first scenes of the film show how the apocalypse is unleashed, by a trio of animal activists who break into a research laboratory in Cambridge, England, to liberate the chimpanzees caged there. Bad mistake: the chimps are infected with a genetically-engineered virus called “Rage” that turns its victims into crazed, mindless brutes driven to attack and kill with ferocious strength and speed. As if that isn’t bad enough, the virus acts within twenty seconds. One of the chimps attacks and bites an activist, who quickly succumbs to the infection and turns on her compadres, and we fast-forward 28 Days Later, when injured bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a hospital bed wondering where the heck everyone went.In a series of startling shots, which must have required incredible logistics, Jim wanders through a completely deserted London, shouting “Hello!”. Though Jim doesn’t know it, this is perhaps not the best thing to do. In a spooky scene reminiscent of George Romero’s zombie movies, Jim has his first encounter with “the infected” in a deserted building, mistaking them for corpses. Unlike the aforementioned zombie flicks, however, these “zombies” move with startling speed, glaring with scarlet red eyes, slashing at the air with their hands while emitting a cross between a hiss and a roar. Luckily, Jim runs into Selena (Naomie Harris), who has hardened herself to the point that she is a bitter, merciless, relentlessly driven survivor, though wondering exactly why the hell she is bothering to survive.
The contrast and byplay between Jim’s somewhat naïve hopefulness and Selena’s embittered cynicism is what drives the story forward in its early stages. We want to believe Jim, but suspect that Selena is right. Jim and Selena eventually find two other survivors, Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). In search of the source of a recorded radio broadcast, they head North in a car, on their way travelling through a dark tunnel partially blocked with wrecked cars, leading to one of the creepiest scenes in the film, which I will not describe. I will also not reveal what happens to them from here onwards. The film’s climax does include, though, a weird reference to Apocalypse Now, which seems fitting as screenwriter Alex Garland’s first novel The Beach included characters that were obsessed with that classic war film. Very subtly, the film hints that perhaps the Rage virus is merely bringing out something that is lurking in all of us.
28 Days Later is hardly original. There have been many films and books dealing with humanity crumbling or the planet emptying due to some vast disaster. George Stewart’s novel Earth Abides, Stephen King’s book The Stand, Richard Matheson’s classic novel I Am Legend, the New Zealand science-fiction film The Quiet Earth, and George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead are just a few examples. However, the idea of being suddenly alone on the Earth and the society we know and depend on gone is a resonant one, and director Danny Boyle, writer Alex Garland, and the excellent cast expertly bring the film to life and reinvigorate the concept. Moreover, the digital photography, sparingly-used special effects, and the matter-of-fact acting brings a documentary-like immediacy that is compelling.
28 Days Later is at heart a story examining the classic Hitchcockian situation of ordinary people dropped into extraordinary circumstances. Having awoken from a coma and not knowing what has happened to the world he knew, Jim is our way into this story, and we see the film mostly through his eyes. The way that Jim and the other characters react to the horror that has overtaken their lives makes sense. There are no moments where they do something simply because the plot mechanics require them to. Their motivations as ordinary people trying desperately to survive connect with us, the audience, rendering the film all the more believable. And all the scarier.
Very gory at times, and so not for those with squeamish constitutions, 28 Days Later is a well-mounted, intelligent, genuinely scary science-fiction thriller.
