Copy/Paste Fast Zombie

Rating: Null/10 (14 July 2007)

Movie franchises are an alternately compelling and trifling study. They can be attempts to contain an entire universe (the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter stuff), to establish disparate visions from one picture to the next (the Batman and Alien pictures), or to invest the dynamics of the imagined world in the characters instead of an external cosmology, and maintain a passing continuity through self-contained films (the Spider-Man series). But whatever the goal, generating money is paramount.
I liked "28 Days Later," but with it, Danny Boyle introduced something people hadn't seen before in zombie films, a kinetic movement in the zombies that superseded the George Romero shuffle-shuffle movements of the past three decades and translated into a fierce, fresh energy.
I had seen the "Dawn of the Dead" remake from a few years ago (where that newfound kinetic motion was immediately duplicated) before getting around to "28 Days Later," so it wasn't that aspect of the film that caught me, but the long final act in which the military compound is introduced. We saw it first in the guise of a safe haven, then as the sinister trap it was bound to be. Anybody could recognize the metaphors about our society's paranoia over the military establishment functioning in those scenes, and it must come across even more pointedly now than during the film's debut back in 2003. Which is one reason we now have this.
The other reason (besides money) is murky and troublesome. That first film was about motion, not about creating a contained universe. It wasn't about the characters or the acting, either, so now we have a new group of faces. The fabric is kept pretty much consistent with what we've already seen, right down to recycling of the original score, so even though we also get a new (hispanic) director, a reinvented vision is not realized as with the Batman and Alien movies. What does that leave us with? Why, amplifying the motion, of course.
In this case, you know to just forget about plot. It's simply the last forty minutes of the first film played out in a larger context with a heightening of the Military As Your Best Friend/Executioner metaphor, working towards a logical end result. What we're looking for here is the escalation of the threat conveyed in a cinematic way. The best this director musters is a sequence that stands out as a mini masterpiece, in which the anticipated reprisal of the outbreak reaches a delirious crescendo, infected and uninfected alike rush into the streets, soldiers in rooftop sniper positions eventually lose track of everything, and are ordered to fire indiscriminately on the crowd. This is so simple, the attention-deficit video game crowd it indicts could catch the symbolism. Of course, they'll ignore it. Occupying American force cuts down the local populace to the same effect as though it were a video game. Exceedingly simple. Yet well done. Yet the bottom line is that we can't do anything with it and really don't need it. Oh, and, uh, the helicopter flying low to chop up a field of zombies is a neat bit of grossness I hadn't seen before.
That's it. The rest is nothing to write home about. You may be mesmerized by that momentary increase in the already-established kinetics, as I was, but I'd say "28 Months Later" is bound to be very, very dull.
Blake's rating: 2 (out of 4)