Week 28: Extermination.
Written: May 09 '07 (Updated May 12 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Builds upon the original with a fresh story and capable new cast/crew.
Cons: Sequelitis strikes again with bleaker story and more overt gore.
The Bottom Line: Not as smashing as Danny Boyle's original, but 28 Weeks Later... has more bite for your buck than most toothless studio horror films.
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| deadmilkboy's Full Review: 28 Weeks Later |
Zombie movies are a curious beast. Too many recent theatrical examples have been of the video game-adapted variety that favored excessive violence and gore for the subtexts and character investment that actually broke the zombie film in around 1968. Strangely, 2002's 28 Days Later... not only made the world safe for not just a new George Romero film (Land of the Dead, still a potent film), but a remake of Romero fashioned in the image of the zombie film that Danny Boyle created (Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, which impressed me more than his 300). The template, of course, is that these zombies have coped with rigor mortis most conveniently and can lunge at you as fast and relentless as that liquid metal T-1000 cyborg.
28 Days Later..., of course, was not your average zombie movie for two principal reasons: 1) the origins of the creatures was an actual virus that was not merely contaminable by the typical bite; 2) whereas Romero's saga took its time lurching towards mankind's self-collapse, the apocalypse was already imminent in Boyle's film. It began with the release of the disease and cut right to the apocalyptic London setting where the survivors clashed head-on with military authority. It streamlined the first three Romero zombie movies into one beast, and did it with style and substance to boot. Sony and Sega, eat your heart out.
With the recent trend in fright flicks being fast-buck sh*tbomb remakes and sequels/rip-offs of popular franchise starters, the time is right if reluctant for a sequel to Boyle's successful film. The great news is that 28 Weeks Later... builds upon and advances the original film's premise instead of rehashing it through a cheap plot. It gives us new characters/survivors and takes the bleak, disturbing themes of the original to further fruition, mining a grim view of a world where the innocent are seen as expendable as the infected, and placing sympathetic, well-rounded characters at the center of the chaos.
Across the river from London, the United States military has established a safe haven for the reconstruction of mainland Britain. In this community, known as District One, the outbreak has been suppressed enough so much so that children are allowed to populate the new England as well as the adult refugees. Two in particular, teenaged Tammy (Imogen Poots) and younger brother Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton), arrive to greet their estranged father Don (Robert Carlyle), who has security clearance and acts as a watchman for the high rise shelter he and several others occupy. Already, the film draws parallels to the last of Romero's films, but it adds a layer of unpleasant voyeurism by having snipers surround the building, quipping about the private instances they catch through their scopes. Take that, Disturbia.
Don, as it turns out, has to tell his children the story of how he left his wife for dead after their pleasant countryside shelter was attacked by a swarm of rage-infested killers. In the opening moments, which are later edited into a flashback, Don and his spouse Alice (Catherine McCormack) reluctantly helped a young boy who in turn was chased by the zombies who broke into their safe house and caused Don to flee and leave behind his Alice, a move both shameful and tragic. Andy is shaken up by nightmares of his forgetting about his absent mother, so him and Tammy sneak off to find their old home so that he can have a keepsake. They in turn discover a skeleton from their dad's closet which compromises the containment effort and sets off a gruesome chain of events that leads to Code Red: instant on-sight extermination of all people regardless of whether or not they're carrying the virus.
This of course sets up the rules of thumb that the original movie developed, involving the sudden, "death around any corner" urgency of the war-torn surroundings as well as the drama of dealing with friends and family who may be infected (or, in Don's case, those in the immediate path of others who are). A young doctor named Scarlet (Rose Byrne) is convinced Tammy and Andy have some kind of genetic immunity to the disease and decides to rescue them with the help of a morally-conflicted soldier, Doyle (Jeremy Renner). Surely enough, several survive the military slaughter, but what will be left of them? And, for that matter, what of humankind?
With Boyle featured as executive producer and original screenwriter Alex Garland uninvolved, taking over directorial duties is Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who co-wrote the screenplay with Enrique Lopez-Lavigne, Jesus Olmo and Rowan Joffe. A new director and four credited writers would usually cause me alarm, but I was surprised to find that the movie manages to find a consistency even as the carnage builds. The family dynamic accounts for a large part of this tonal fabric. Just like Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns' characters in the original, the four central performers here anchor the movie with heart and soul that tempers several gory, sometimes disturbing but often obligatory set pieces, particularly one that looks cribbed straight from the "Planet Terror" segment of Grindhouse.
Fresnadillo more respectively emulates the formal elements of Boyle's original to greater, subdued effect (the sequel retains the same editor, production designer and music composer from the original, with new cinematographer Enrique Chediak). Whereas most directors use handheld camerawork in as amateurish and gratuitous a way as possible, Fresnadillo applies the shaky-cam only when the action calls for it, and is not afraid to use wide angles and long shots to convey menace just as easily (when a curious-looking zombie pursues young Andy, the image seen as a mere spot in the center of the screen registers as intense as any close-up). A fine example in the film occurs when Scarlet maneuvers children through an abandoned, corpse-riddled subway using night vision sight on an automatic weapon, which at first seems silly (a female viewer next to me was tittering) but is later the pay-off of a brutal attack that finds said green-tinted scope being exploited as the gun pummels the head of a survivor. If only someone could do the same trick with a cell phone.
Aside from the Romero canon, the closest spiritual next-of-kin I would cite for 28 Weeks Later... is Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, but without the anarchic one-take action sequences and considerably cathartic closure. Indeed, the path to safety for the young heroes of this film makes Theo and Kee's look almost like a theme park attraction. They are forced to cope to with the loss of their biological parents not just once and end up losing any surrogate parents to either the American armed cavalry, replete with nerve gas and flamethrowers, or the British zombie brigade, who spew blood faster than you can say "Ebola." The calm that occurs when they frequent a desolate play place, complete with swing set and carousel bearing the visages of old English rulers, is one of crushing loss and doomed reconciliation. Like in many other moments in the film, Fresnadillo finds pathos and suspense from even the moldiest cliches of horror films, and the result is as captivating as it is independent of the mindless pandering of most modern American horror films.
Robert Carlyle is at once cowardly and pitiful in his depiction of Don, not merely emphasizing one over the other and all the better for it. When he undergoes his character's arc, the result is one that is hopeful and redeeming only for a moment, until you realize that he's unknowingly sealed his own fate in a moment of weakness unlike the selfish display he showed to his wife earlier. Catherine McCormack plays the more sympathetic but just as equally unfortunate soul as well as Carlyle. Rose Byrne and Jeremy Renner have enough personality to anchor the movie once the pandemonium erupts, but at its core are child actors Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton, who carry the whole endeavor gracefully and without falsity, especially when one considers just how much trauma the two children endure.
If this movie at times gets wrapped up in the increased action and violence as well as its relentlessly bleak storyline, the main thing is that 28 Weeks Later... is what most straight horror films these days aren't: frightening. When a group of civilians are rounded up into what turns out to be a death trap, you won't know whether to flinch or focus. There are several really strong set pieces just like this one, which ought to be enough to convince any jaundiced horror fiend to grab his friends and go for the late weekend showing. Just don't expect too much innocent escapism. It is, after all, a zombie film.
28 Weeks Later is a Twentieth Century Fox/Fox Atomic release, rated R for strong violence and gore, language and some sexuality/nudity. It runs approximately 99 minutes and opens wide on May 11, 2007.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Scary Movie
Viewing Method: Sneak Preview at My Local Theater
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Plot
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deadmilkboy
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