Few films demand sequels less emphatically than Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 2002 28 Days Later, a rather unlikely foundation for a franchise.
Their smart, savvy and occasionally even beautiful horror film ended with finality few in the genre do (With either a happy ending or an unhappy ending, depending on which cut of the film you saw). But more importantly, it set off the current zombie craze that, five years later, is stronger than ever.
In a sense, every zombie movie to follow Boyle and Garland’s has been a sequel to it; even 2004’s Dawn of the Dead and 2005’s Land of the Dead (a remake of and an fourth installment of zombie cinema’s most prestigiously pedigreed franchise, respectively), seemed to be spiritual sequels to 28 Days Later more so than Night of the Living Dead.
The biggest surprise about 28 Weeks Later then is that not only is it not awful, but that it’s actually quite good. It certainly lacks the originality of its predecessor, which benefited from being the only game in town for zombie movies, just as it lacks the creators and cast of the original, but it’s as worthy a successor as could be made, given the superfluous nature of a sequel to 28 Days Later.
We open during the zombipocalypse seen in 28 Days Later, during which “The Infected””–those blood-puking, super-fast cannibals driven mad by the “rage” virus–are ravaging the English countryside, including the house where Robert Carlyle and his wife are holed up, hoping that it’s only England that’s in this state, and that their children away on a trip abroad haven’t been infected by the Infected.
Flash forward to 28 weeks later, when the Infected have all starved to death, a U.S.-led NATO force has journeyed into Britain to declare it safe again, and have begun repopulating the country. (28 months later or 28 years later might have been a safer timeframe, but perhaps they’re being reserved for future sequels). Carlyle has a job in the green zone (Hey, that’s what they call it), and his freakishly photogenic children Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Poots (perhaps the two coolest names of any child actors of all time) join him.
The worried father’s prayers were answered; it really was just England that was affected by the rage virus, and now all trace of it is gone. At least, it seems gone long enough to re-stock London with victims for the next outbreak.
It’s hard not to look for messages and political allegory in the proceedings, what with the words “green zone” and “occupation” being thrown about so often, as well as well-meaning U.S. snipers and pilots finding themselves in the situation of having to destroy a country to save it (If 28 Days Later was a reaction to Western anxiety over terror attacks and disease, 28 Weeks seems to be in reaction to the Iraq War and it’s brutal post-war phase).
The script, by Rowan Joffe, Jesús Olmo, Enrique López Lavigne and director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, is rather slight, more a string consecutive scenes and set-pieces with the bare minimum of connective tissue than an actual narrative, but there is a refreshing moral complexity and realism to much of it, and Fresnadillo is a talented (if showy) stylist, spending an awful lot of time just letting his camera languish on Muggleton and Poot’s faces, and sparing enough for montages of a deserted London.
There are several highly affecting scenes, including the slow-boiling opening attack, the first Infected killing within the green zone (one of the most violent things I can recall seeing on film) and an extremely creepy subway scene shot as if through a nightvision sniper scope.
The structure is strange, and it gives way to a bizarre arcade logic at one point, as the children and a small group try to escape London and face a few video game levels worth of escalating challenges, and Fresnadillo uses a slowly driving, then surging, shoegaze-style tinkling piano and grinding guitar soundtrack to climax scene after scene.
It’s probably not as good as the original, but then, it’s not 2002 anymore, either. It’s certainly much better than it has any right to be, and likely to linger in your mind for days afterwards.