A Digression From The Original

Rating: 7/10 (13 May 2007)

28 Weeks Later has a wonderful beginning. Before anything happens, there is already a quiet tension, a talent being displayed masterfully by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, the director in place of Danny Boyle for this sequel. There is great intensity and great moral conflict presented with Robert Carlyle's character. But then, as the film progresses, there is not much more that can be said about it.
Yes, when the inevitable gorefest begins again, there are some truly intense and disturbing sequences of rage-infected people and their attacks. Without spoiling anything, one of them involves a single bound person and an infected person's singular, fixated brutalization, and another involves a mass of people locked in a pitch black corridor with a growing number of infected people, the attack being in the dark with occasional flickers of light presenting only two or three frames of horrifying images. However, Fresnadillo becomes too reliant on strobing slow motion and grandiose computerized explosion effects, all of which are a bit dull, with the exception of a later sequence involving a helicopter's blades against a field of rage-infecteds.
The violence continues without relief and with a completely morbid atmosphere, and if it were not kicking to the side so many themes and strands, wrapping them up so quickly once the expository portion of the film ended, it would seem handled better. Unfortunately, however, it all grows old and stale after awhile. There isn't much thought given to much of it after awhile. We hear the same dialogue, see the same sort of undeveloped characters, and see the same buckets of blood and gore that we've seen in countless other group-survival-oriented horror and disaster films.
Where is the allegory and paranoid awareness of the underbelly of humanity that the original film had that made it so far above the average sort of film, the genre of which I mentioned at the end of the last paragraph? This one even seems to abandon a part of the plot that is presented early on that seems very important.
The movie is entertaining enough as a gorefest, a very gloomy, depressing one, but if you're expecting a sequel that lives up to the substance of the original, then don't bother. This is probably just going to turn into just another sloppy slasher franchise.