terrific as a balls-to-the-wall act of scary, nihilistic horror/action

Rating: 9/10 (11 May 2007)

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo may not be Danny Boyle as far as re-inventors of a sub-genre- the plagued civilization horror movie- but considering it's only his second feature it's pretty damn impressive. He's carved out a sequel that doesn't skimp on heavy moral, and even political, implications on the subject matter, and has a hell of a time getting his masses of crowds and main characters running for their lives. 28 Weeks Later is stylized in some similar ways to its predecessor- even if, as mentioned, Boyle and his crew still has the upper hand at being a master at crafting a perpetually doomed atmosphere through production design, music, editing and cinematography- and provides some chilling scenarios to be played out in claustrophobic environments, wide-open spaces, and decaying streets. As the title suggests, we see that now London has been cleared of the infected, who've starved off, and now re-population will soon begin; soon, because there is still a process to bring people back into the fold.
Enter Robert Carlyle's character, who at the beginning of the film escaped from a horde of infected- leaving his wife behind in a farmhouse- who now has much security now (this is never explained, not the only unnecessary ambiguity or fault in story logic)- and is reunited with his kids. The kids, however, go out into the emptied London city, find their house, and lo and behold, their mother, who they were told by their father was gone, is there. But this leads to something much worse, leading to the three steps of "code red" enacted. Meaning, basically, all bets are off, by the way of the military's 'shoot to kill' scenario enacted for infected *and* uninfected, leaving the two kids on their own, almost. Fresnadillo sets up the characters well enough, and like the Romero zombie movies (maybe not quite as much as the predecessor but close) sets up a personal edge to the movie; the audience can imagine themselves in a situation like this, to the extent that morality would have to be 100% compromised. How this is also dealt with in an intriguing way- which may open up some room for exploration in the sequel- is the factor of a "carrier", who can be bitten but not completely absorbed by the virus. This ambiguity works much better, and the open-ended ending adds a good dosage of irony that won't be lost on much viewers even as the last big national monument comes into view.
Fresnadillo as director, meanwhile, does something that I usually dislike in movies, which is that ultra-frantic, hyper-active use of the camera and editing machine where everything is rapid fire in action scenes. It comes about a hair's edge at being the trashy side of Tony Scott, but somehow the filmmakers keep it very tight in execution, making things always on the verge of danger and dread for the characters. Only sometimes are there fully engrossing angles or set-ups like in the original, but nevertheless a sequence like the breakout of the quarantine- where all of the lights are off except for lighters and flashlights as infected swarm over a hundred people trapped in a basement- and the sequence that follows with the extermination out in the court via snipers, are staggering displays of tension and ture, fist-clenching horror. The many scenes of running, and more running, as chases go on and more infected spread, and bodies become torn in pieces, are still engrossing, but it's when Fresnadillo and company get in the close-confined areas, the dark tunnel with green sniper-vision as example, that are reminiscent of not just the best parts of 28 Days Later, but are some of the scariest scenes of the decade.
So why not a masterpiece? It may be for some, especially die-hard genre fans. The characters, being children, do edge off into the conventions that become irksome, though that will have to be a given in order to continue onward. The kids, however, are pretty good at their parts, and as the script hurdles them through one big cluster-f*** after another they stay firm in what is in the subtext quite the wretched coming-of-age story for them. Overall, 28 Weeks Later is a rough but rewarding large-scale plague movie with keen craftsmanship and is better than most of what's called 'horror' today.