(Review)
We open with Alice (Catherine McCormack) and Don (Danny Boyle crony Robert Carlyle), cooking dinner. Then of course, we notice the lights are out and they’re running low on canned goods. And there’s a photo of another family in the kitchen.
London is in the bloodied teeth of the Rage virus, and husband and wife are in a cottage with a bunch of other survivors, all shellshocked and coping as best they can with this unimaginable catastrophe.
We all know this is an idyll, of course, a false one, as fragile as a soap bubble. And yet, when the bubble does burst and the chaos explodes on the screen, it still gets you, by golly.
And thus does Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s
28 Weeks Later grab you by the balls, and never really quite lets go.
Roughly half a year after the events depicted in Danny Boyle’s welcome shot in the arm of zombie cinema,
28 Days Later, England is slowly being repopulated. Civilians are being brought into places like District One, a cordoned-off urban area with electricity and running water (and a pub!), guarded by NATO and the U.S. Army.
Don is reunited with his children, Tammy (Imogen Poots, seen for a bit in
V For Vendetta) and Andy (newcomer Mackintosh Muggleton), who were away on a school trip when Rage first spread into the British populace.
Their arrival meanwhile, has alerted District One’s Chief Medical Officer, Scarlet (Rose Byrne, seen recently in Boyle’s
Sunshine; review in Archive: April 2007), who is concerned about the lack of protocol regarding such young repatriates, a concern poo-pooed by the higher-ups.
And, as kids will be kids, Tammy and Andy sneak off into the quarantine zone to return to their home for one final time.
And Tammy and Andy, apparently never having seen a horror movie before in their lives, are in blissful ignorance of the fact that this is the catalyst for All Hell Breaking Loose.
In a world where zombie films are currently very much one of the horror sub-genres
du jour, and where even the undisputed master’s fourth go-around lacked significant bite,
28 Weeks Later detonates at ground zero and quite decisively raises the stakes for the rest of the zombie lot to follow, among them, Romero’s fifth
Dead film,
Diary of the Dead, as well as a remake of Romero’s
Day of the Dead, by
Halloween: H20 and
Friday the 13th Part 2 and
Part III helmer Steve Miner.
(And yes, technically speaking, the
28 films feature the “infected,” but let’s call a spade a spade, gentlemen. And besides, they also play by the same rules and display the same conventions as zombie cinema. And if any of you still have trouble with that, shall we all agree to “apocalypse cinema,” then?)
And, as with
Days, which featured excellent performances from its ensemble,
Weeks has a good cast across the board.
Byrne, as she did in
Sunshine, brings much-needed humanity to the proceedings (and in apocalypse cinema, that’s indispensable), and you can’t go wrong with Carlyle (one of the very few bright spots, along with Tilda Swinton, in Boyle’s disastrous adaptation of
The Beach). If there are some of you out there who only know Carlyle through
The Full Monty, well, here’s your antidote.
The curiously named kids are great too, as is Jeremy Renner (terrific in Michael Cuesta’s
Twelve and Holding, and soon to be seen in the Brad Pitt-starrer,
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). As Doyle, an Army sniper, Renner is the ostensible physical male lead; the sensible man of action in these sorts of movies.
Heaven help me, even Harold Perrineau is credible here as chopper pilot Flynn. I may not have liked his turns in
The Matrix sequels and thought he was the weak link in the
Lost ensemble (not to mention what he did to Ana-Lucia and Libby), but what Perrineau does here with his helicopter is unprecedented in the annals of horror movies. Utter bloody mayhem!
The canny move Fresnadillo and co-writer Rowan Joffe make here is to present us with a situation where not only do the survivors have to worry about getting infected, they need to worry about the military too. (It’s to the credit of
Weeks that one of the film’s most intense and harrowing sequences is precipitated not by blood-vomiting madmen, but by the threat of bullets raining from the sky.)
The last time war seemed this insane on the cinema screen was Sam Mendes’
Jarhead.* And this
is war, with an infected populace as the enemy. (And where the uninfected are simply
potential enemies, like sleeper agents waiting to be triggered not by code words, but by a drop of blood, or saliva.)
Even District One is nothing so much as an occupied zone, with the military presence undeniable and unmissable.
Ultimately, Fresnadillo and company present us with a grim situation where you can’t even trust the military to be on your side when the chips are down.
As an entry in apocalypse cinema, you can’t go wrong with
28 Weeks Later. Some of the imagery in here is powerful and indelible, from piles of multi-coloured plastic garbage bags, to the black, oily smoke from bonfires burning the dead. And when the fit hits the shan, the frenetic hand-held shots and staccato editing from
Days are here as well, put to good use, placing us in the middle of all the mad, gory action.
The tension is unbelievable in some spots here, and in a lot of ways,
28 Weeks Later plays like the nastier cousin to
Days, uninterested in taking any prisoners at all.
Schizophrenically enough, it also plays like the nicer cousin in some bits.
The emotion is more overtly presented in
Weeks than in
Days, and the central dilemma which faces Don and his family is played out over the length of the film to interesting effect, thus providing an additional layer below the tale of survival which is the visible aspect of the narrative.
All in all, this one’s a keeper.
Boyle and Alex Garland (executive producers this time around) have proven that the
28 films, like Romero’s
Dead movies, have the potential to interest us not with recurring characters (as is the usual rule with a franchise), but with a situation rich with narrative potential.
(I’m still of the mind that the
Alien franchise should have taken a page from that book after Ripley’s death in
Alien3, instead of forcing the issue with Sigourney Weaver in
Alien: Resurrection. But that’s a whole different story.)
So if they can stay on their game, and come up with another story that isn’t “just another zombie movie,” then I’m all for
28 Months Later.
Years, too.
But maybe not
Centuries… That could be pushing it…
* Sorry, not much of a war movie guy. I think
Jarhead was the last “war movie” I saw, and it isn’t really even that. (Not in the way, say, Eastwood’s double whammy of
Flags of Our Fathers and
Letters from Iwo Jima are “war movies,” at least.)
(
28 Weeks Later OS and images courtesy of aintitcool.com.)
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