First Ten Minutes Worth Price of Admission - A Classic Scene!

Rating: 8/10 (21 May 2007)

Contains spoiler!
These days if even five minutes of a movie excite me then I feel it was worth the price of admission. The first ten minutes of "28 weeks later" are so emotionally wrenching and inventively exciting that I could have left the cinema a happy man there and then. The grinding darkness and the kinetic rawness reminded me a lot of Lucio Fulci's classic zombie movies. There is such a crushing bleakness about this scene that is becomes a cinematic recreation of the kind of horrible dream from which you wake with a heart wrenching sense of hopelessness - which is in many ways worse that a waking crisis because when you are conscious there is always a glimmer of hope. But not in the dark realms of sleep.
And so this emotionally draining first scene plays out as if directly streaming from our worst nightmare - and that sense of claustrophobic doom is beautifully compounded by a repeated musical theme that gets louder and more insistent as distorted guitar is added and the volume becomes almost unbearable. The re-introduction of this musical theme at moments of peak horror late in the movie is also reminiscent of Fulci movies - particularly as the theme is a full of desperate melancholy which amplifies beautifully the tragic situation that Robert Carlyle finds himself trapped in - forced to abandon his wife to the flesh eating hordes. The camera then follows him across the English countryside as he runs for his life. What a poignant image - the pastoral beauty of the English fields and the dark shadows of the undead. And then we have the sublime editing during the boat sequence as Carslisle fights off the zombies, with the boat spinning round and the music pounding to a head splitting climax. I was left breathless and dizzy.
It was like Zombie Flesh Eaters all over again for the first time. Nothing later in the movie came close to this. I had ten minutes of heaven - worth the price of admission - and if I can take away just ten minutes of revitalizing, vibrant, inspired cinema that's more than I expect from most multiplex movies these days.