A bigger, badder, British!, zombie? thriller.

Rating: Null/10 (16 May 2007)

28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007, UK) is the sequel to Danny Boyle's British zombie thriller 28 Days Later (2002, UK). Fresnadillo mixes dark fast-paced chaotic close-ups with huge special effects and tension building periods of eerie quiet in a film that is big on gore and scares.
The film is set twenty-eight weeks after the rage virus swept across Britain and now, still in the midst of a US led clean-up operation, Britons' are being brought back to London for repatriation. Needless to say the virus breaks out again and the film follows two US soldiers trying to save brother and sister Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) and Tammy (Imogen Poots) as they try to escape from the infected.
It is disappointing that after the original distinctively British film the sequel sees the American's wading in to sort out a mess that the British seem to make worse in thirty-minute increments. I suppose that this is down to the American money that was poured into the film and the need to tailor it for a US market.
This hardly detracts though from the blistering camera work that is at its best during the terrifyingly disorientating and frenzied zombie attacks. A dark and desolate London landscape is conveyed through a mixture of voyeuristic high angle long shots and uncomfortably close close-ups that convey both the isolation and vulnerability of the protagonists as they make their way past a series of noticeable landmarks.
The soundtrack uses the same motif from the first film and benefits because of it, heightening the desperate battles for survival that the children have to endure.