28 Weeks Later

28 Weeks Later picks up six months after the events of Danny Boyle’s eerie apocalyptic masterpiece 28 Days Later, and sadly has only a fraction of the original’s creativity and originality of vision. In this film, all the inhabitants of London who have avoided being infected by the terrifying virus that turns people into monsters fueled by rage are now housed in a facility run by the American military. The last infected person is believed to have been killed months earlier and now the task at hand is simply to rescue those remaining and clean up the mess of corpses in the city streets. We pick up the story with a new character named Don (Robert Carlyle), an initially interesting anti-hero who leaves his own wife for dead in an attack by the infected. He eventually reunites with his two children (Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton) at the survivor community only to later reignite the virus everyone had hoped was finally finished.

The primary difference between 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later is made evident before a single frame rolls on the new film. The opening logo informs us that the film is a 20th Century Fox production. 28 Days Later came out of Fox Searchlight, the buying house associated with independent films and festival purchases. Whereas that film was a moody indie creeper, this one aims to excite, scare, and disgust with the aggressive, indulgent, consumerist mentality of a major corporation. It’s as if the producers felt that the only part of the original film that audiences really cared about was its violence and bloodshed. What they missed, of course, was that the first film wasn’t truly all that violent. It was largely a suggestive film that used the threat of imminent brutality to terrify its audience. In 28 Weeks Later everyone is dying all the time and the suspense is nil. Why should a single death matter when there are hundreds transpiring simultaneously? How can anyone possibly care for underdeveloped crowds of people simply being torn to pieces in what is ultimately nothing greater than an elaborately staged bloodbath. The infected in this movie don’t lurk in corners and unnerve us with their unexpected arrivals into frame. There’s just a big damn fleet of them constantly chasing everyone. It’s not scary or remotely troubling. All that there is here is endless ugly death and not a single flash of artistic technique to be found.

Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo clearly has talent at capturing beautiful images and offers up enough references to the first film, both in content and in camerawork, that I truly believe him to be a fan hoping to do justice to this unexpectedly franchised concept. It may be that I’m clinging a little too tightly to the original film, but everything about this movie struck me as an aggravating, shrill bastardization of that great movie. Every inch of Boyle’s film felt pitch-perfect from the fuzzy, handheld camerawork down to the way the infected looked and moved. It might be hard to explain on paper, but on sight you’ll see the way Fresnadillo wrong-headedly adapts these techniques. For example, he uses wide, overhead shots of London in a similar way that Boyle did in the first, but where Boyle’s footage was horrifying in the way it made London look like a dying, desolate city, Fresnadillo just simply seems to be capturing the city in bright light and elegant sunsets. It’s not necessarily a more glamorous film, but there is certainly a more forced, grating type of stylization here. Boyle’s film toyed with flashes and rapid editing, but Fresnadillo’s film is so frantic that it’s dizzying, annoying, and even difficult to follow at times. Even the infected seem to lack the haunting edge of those in the last film. Boyle’s monsters were bleeding, menacing bodies being thrust forward by pure rage at a speed that revolutionized the zombie genre. The ones here just look like a bunch of fast runners with bloody faces.

Nothing is remotely scary about this film, the social commentary is obvious and dumb, and most importantly of all, I couldn’t care less about any of the characters. Don strikes a brief chord of emotional significance in the opening scene, but it’s only about 20 minutes before the characters all lose their relevance and just become part of a mass slaughter. Honestly, the only thing I wondered about during the whole film was where the characters from the original film wound up. They were vibrant, flawed, funny, realistic people that you cared for and hoped would overcome the threats at hand. I think of scenes like the one where they all loot an abandoned grocery store, and remember how strangely warm Boyle’s film could be. That was why it was so good. It was a science fiction satire that felt true in a way that genre films rarely do these days. It’s certainly not the same with 28 Weeks Later. Everything here is done in excess and to the point that it loses all effect. The first was a minimal, intimate affair. This is a massive, overdone, utterly stupid cash-in on a great idea. I hope that weeks don’t become months and Fox doesn’t go through with yet another shallow, bloodthirsty sequel.

Grade: D+