Effective and disturbing horror sequel

Rating: 7/10 (22 May 2007)

Five years ago 28 Days Later revitalised the zombie genre. The gap between that film and this should be enough to convince that this is no cheap rushed cash-in sequel. However, with writer Alex Garland, director Danny Boyle and star Cillian Murphy all off making the superb Sunshine, 28 Weeks Later comes from an entirely different team. Fortunately, Garland and Boyle as executive producers have seen fit to hire a director who can bring his own interesting vision to the project, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, whose debut film Intacto was a stylish and unusual thriller.
While it has always been made very clear to us that the Infected are not zombies in the conventional sense, it is hard to view this film and its predecessor outside the zombie genre, especially as, wittingly or otherwise, 28 Weeks Later features aspects of some earlier zombie classics. The clashing ideologies of a medical (find a cure for it) or military (wipe them all out) solution is not only a development of the final third of the first film, but also of Romero's excellent Day of the Dead. Meanwhile the end of the film seems to be a Euro version of the final moments of Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters, after all you can only do zombies and London landmarks for so long.
Indeed, the opening prologue, set during the time of the first infection, is like a Night of the Living Dead influenced zombie picture in miniature, a disparate group of survivors holed up in a remote, rural house with the Infected outside. It also happens to be the finest opening sequence in any horror film you're likely to see any time soon. It starts admirably restrained, starting with just the central couple, Robert Carlyle and Catherine McCormack, looking for food in the dark house, before revealing that there are others with them, and beginning to show the tensions in the group, tantalisingly setting up relationships that the movie doesn't have time to explore as their peace is quickly shattered by a banging on the door and soon the peace is completely shattered by a chaotic moment in which Carlyle makes the selfish choice to preserve his own life at all costs.
Unfortunately, although for the most part the film retains this breakneck pace, it doesn't always maintain this quality. That is not to say that there isn't plenty of interesting things going on here, just that for all Fresnadillo's efforts, the characters are not well enough drawn to be those we care about. In the first film, we viewed the world through the eyes of Murphy's Jim and shared his confusion and fear at the deserted London and the sudden arrival of the Infected, here there is no such audience substitute. For the most part, however, the film is packed with enough great moments to save it from these poorly developed characters.
Although it takes a little while to get going after the skip forward 28 weeks, when Britain, or rather the Isle of Dogs, is being repopulated, Fresnadillo and his co-writers' idea for how the infection returns and begins to spread again is an interesting one that raises some new ideas. Some of his ideas and techniques work very well were others do not so much. The fast running infected shot with shaky hand held cameras become a little annoying as it proves hard to keep track of what is happening and they do not have the unsettling quality of the old slow moving zombies, meanwhile his decision to view scenes through the eyes of an Infected character and to give one of the Infected this extra depth and ability seems ill suited to the genre where the menace comes from the facelessly identical evil of the whole group.
Never the less, other moments are brilliantly effective. As an outsider and a foreigner, Fresnadillo brings a new eye to the first film's disturbing moments of deserted London streets and landmarks and, in setting the whole film in the capital this time, is able to cover more sides to the city, all of them chilling, abandoned and damaged environments. The presence of the US military provides a further interesting threat as well as a very effective if unsubtle critique of the current global situation reminiscent of Romero at his best. One superb sequence features the American snipers unable to deal with the panic caused as the Infected maraud among the civilians desperate to escape. They are given the order to simply shoot down everybody down there. It is a brilliantly realised moment of convincing confusion, panic and desperation.
Fresnadillo also provides two absolute standout horror movie sequences that will be well remembered for a long time by those who see this movie. The first is the already infamous helicopter sequence, a brilliantly gory moment in which a slightly out of control helicopter decapitates and slices limbs off a whole crowd of Infected resulting in a massive pool of blood and severed body parts. The second is more atmospheric, set in a dark tube station, Rose Byrne's Scarlet guides the two children down the dark staircase, helping them to avoid the corpses on the ground with the night vision on her rifle's sight.
The end is rather abrupt and involves a brand new London landmark that surely does not fit with the chronology of the series. Despite this fact, and the lack of characters you care for, 28 Weeks Later is an effective little horror of many fine moments and a worthy sequel to the earlier film. ****