28 WEEKS LATER

a film review by Malik Isasis














We are one manmade or natural catastrophe away from losing our humanity. This is the essence of the post-modern zombie allegory 28 Days Later and its sibling, 28 Weeks Later.

28 Days Later reinvented the zombie genre—instead of slow-moving cannon fodder for protagonists of old, Danny Boyle’s zombies suffered from a rage virus, which turned them into adrenaline-pumped psychopaths, unencumbered by rigor mortis. These post humans are fast and furious and are effective in what they do, which is spreading the virus at an unimaginable rate. The infected don't appear to eat, just infect through biting and vomiting blood on their victims and within seconds, the victim is infected. They have a short life span of five weeks but what they lack in lifespan they more than make up with the rate of infestations.

The zombies are merely periphery, window dressing to the real horror. The real horror is the base behavior that the zombies bring out in the survivors who are consumed with self-preservation.

28 Weeks Later

Like in the first film, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later deals with the breakdown of society after the infection. The film opens where its predecessor left off, with a small band of survivors hiding out in the countryside, boarded up in a cottage owned by an elderly couple. There is a young woman, who is distressed about her partner who went for help and has yet to return; there is a single man who is annoyed at the young woman who ruminates about her lost partner, and then there is the couple: Don, played by Robert Carlyle and his wife Alice, played by Catherine McCormack.

Don and Alice are missing their two children, who were off in a refugee camp in Spain while Britain is under quarantine.

As the small band of survivors gather for dinner in the boarded up and claustrophobic cottage, one can anticipate that the quietness will not last, before I could finish that thought, BANGING and SCREAMING of a child at the door.

The survivors with frayed nerves let the child in. He has been followed by the infected. Soon the house is bombarded with the infected crashing through the boarded windows and laying waste to the survivors. In this film, heroism and humanity are often rewarded with grave consequences.

Don and Alice run upstairs and are separated as Alice pursues the frightened child. Alice realizing her situation calls out to her husband from across the room for help, but they are in a helpless situation. In a moment of sheer terror and a base response to survival, Don shuts the door and leaves his wife in the room with the infected. Don’s decision to leave his wife is painful to witness.

In spite of the huge budget and beautiful production value, Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is able to maintain the frenetic energy of the first film. Interestingly enough, this film seems more intimate than the first.

Within five weeks after the initial outbreak, the infected have all starved to death; and within 28 weeks, mainland Britain is declared free of the infection and the government begins a repatriation effort led by an American-lead NATO force.

The repatriation by the government seemed a bit quick only after 28 weeks of what could turn out to be a pandemic, but it is understandable to want to go back to some sort of normalcy.

It is this need for normalcy which spurs on a second outbreak with maybe some mutations of the rage virus, in the Green zone where the military has set up a false sense of security. It is not long before the American-led NATO force loses control and call for Code Red, that is, mechanized fire bombings, chemical weapons and open season on civilians and the infected. So, here are the choices characters had in the film: death by a sniper's bullet, or burn to death by the fire bombs, or die from your insides being cooked by chemical weapons--oh, it gets better, there's death by having an infected zombie bite your neck. They had a menu of options.

There is no emotional security in this film. All the characters are equally at risk, at all times and it is traumatic and brutal when you've attached yourself to one of the protagonists who meets a violent end.

Code Red

Fresnadillo’s vision of social decay and total collapse of society is reminiscent of all the most recent manmade and natural disasters from September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami and elements of the occupation of Iraq. After all, it is after the disaster that social order begins to break down causing people to respond to their most base instinct: survival; it is when we are at our most destructive.

The human mind can justify anything; there is no need for zombies or monsters--if there is a complete breakdown of society …it will be scary as hell.


Grade: A

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