28 Weeks Later sucks

Rating: 2/10 (6 June 2007)

28 Days Later, the precursor to 28 Weeks Later, is one of the best zombie movies ever made. Admittedly this isn't saying much, but it develops its story intelligently, builds character, and is suspenseful and incredibly frightening. Although the third act, with the mad soldiers, was something of a let-down, the overall movie-going experience was one that created shivers down the spine.
28 Weeks Later starts out rather promisingly - a confusing, if frightening, attack by the infected on a house of hold-outs in the British countryside (and Robert Carlyle abandoning his wife to the infected) before it switches to what happens six months later when, under the auspices of the US Army, London is being reclaimed.
Carlyle's character, Don, welcomes his children back from a refugee camp in Spain. They are the first children allowed back into the country. All of the infected have been dead several months due to starvation. The children break quarantine to visit their old house, and wonder of wonders, they find their mother still alive. Although she is infected, she seems to have some inborn, genetic resistance to the infection, although she still carries the infection. Carlyle gets in to see her, they kiss - and surprise! Carlyle is now one of the infected. Since the first 40 minutes of the film is spent developing Carlyle as a character, now that he is one of the infected, he is gone as a hero. Who does this leave the audience to root for? His children? Rose Byrne as the heroic doctor? These are characters we barely know, and their plight is handled so badly by the director, I couldn't find myself building any sympathy as they fled the coming chaos.
From this point forward the rest of the film is a waste of celluloid. The actions of the American military make no sense in the face of a new outbreak - they herd all the uninfected civilians into one enclosed area without any weapons and then leave them there - this is possibly the WORST WAY to try to prevent spread of the infection, since if one infected gets into this area it virtually guarantees that everyone there will become infected.
After that happens, the American military again does something remarkably stupid - a blank-check order to kill everything moving. At this point the "protagonists" - and the remaining characters are so thin that it is hard to imagine anyone answering to that description - are now on the run from the infected and also from the US military, which is fire-bombing London. Added to this fact is that the director's idea of shooting action scenes is to turn down the lights and shake the camera during the entire scene, creating a confusing, barfatonic effect to his action while providing no information to the audience as to what is going on and thus destroying suspense. People die, and we have no idea who they are or what they mean. We have to wait for the characters to reach a room with lights to determine who is still alive.
The entire second half of this film is shot in a confusing manner, provides no sense of suspense for the audience, and is emotionally empty. This is one of the worst films I have seen this year. 28 Weeks Later sucks.