28 Weeks Later, 2007. Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, written by Fresnadillo, Rowan Joffe and Jesus Olmo. Starring Robert Carlyle, Mackintosh Muggleton (a J. K. Rowling creation?), Imogen Poots, Amanda Walker, Rose Byrne, Catherine McCormack, Jeremy Renner, Idris Elba, Emily Beecham, and Harold Perrineau.
Now showing in theaters around town.
Writing about the movies can be more edifying than, say, writing about baseball or maybe automobiles (I’ve written of the first, not the second), for every now and then film critics get to address serious moral issues. Like the Iraq war or a possibly stolen election. And not just when we take in a searing documentary that tackles such heavy subjects head-on, but in regular feature films like 28 Weeks Later, the new ‘zombie’ film, a sequel of sorts to 28 Days Later. It helps, I think, in a critic’s life to have some political gravity to chew on, such as the themes of 28 Weeks Later… after all, how much can one say about Spider-Man and Shrek?
The problem occurs when you go into 28 Weeks Later armed with a pencil and a sense of righteous indignation against this president’s disastrous war, and you expect to be able to write both review and polemic, but what unfolds onscreen is not just a failure, but a relatively boring, poorly acted film that is fraught with gaping plot holes, irregularities and contradictions. So now, suddenly, instead of writing a pointed review of a movie and an indictment of the Bush Administration, not to mention doing our part to get the masses out to see something that will challenge them (though what this will do for society at-large eludes me), we are now faced with simply another review of a mediocre film.
For 28 Weeks Later is a mediocre film. In many ways, however, it is very much like its predecessor, the equally praised 28 Days Later, a movie I’ve always considered over-rated, yet viscerally thrilling. Both flicks, however, begin brilliantly, though in opposite locales. Days began in an empty London, and moved into the countryside; Weeks starts in the country and, much more quickly, finds itself in the heart of London. Both were better where they began, each director oddly enough showing themselves masters of the original locale. Director Danny Boyle–the more talented of the two–had a brilliant grasp of this empty London, of the menace lurking in the tunnels, in the streets, down the alleys and in shrubbery that blankets the suburbs. Once he ended up in the mansion in the country 28 Days Later quickly grew claustrophobic. The countryside of Weeks is sunny and frightening, the Rage-infected loonies eventually racing after a terrified Robert Carlyle is one of the great openings I’ve seen since, well, since Zack Snyder’s undervalued Dawn of the Dead.
28 Weeks Later begins in a country cottage that is utterly dark. Trying to fashion a dinner of canned chick peas and pasta, found wine, and candle light, Alice and Don (Catherine McCormack and Carlyle) are a husband and wife team whose children are out of the country and ostensibly safe. They are joined by an old couple, a woman who’s going batty, a young man and, suddenly pounding on the door, a young kid (the wonderfully named Beans El-Balawi). Alice, distraught over her children, allows this urchin into the home–he was being chased by the crazies in bright daylight (turns out the house is so fortified it’s pitch black). Of course, the home is invaded, and Don commits an act of cowardice: while Alice tries to save the child, he deserts them, racing out of the home and across the brightly-lit field to a boat in a stream. Turning, he sees Alice begging him to save her. But he doesn’t, he can’t, for the zombies are upon her.
Cut to London, 28 weeks or so later. Under the care of the U. S. Military, the people of England are being returned, slowly, to the Isle of Dogs, a section of London. Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton, again, an awesome name) and his sister Tammy (Imogen Poots) have been brought in, reunited with their father Don, and are readying themselves to try and begin life anew. And all hell breaks loose.
And does so in an alarmingly fast and slipshod fashion. Andy wants a photo of his mom (Alice, the one left behind by Don), and with Tammy scampers across a pipe, out of the safety zone and into a contaminated section of London. They do this with ease, despite snipers and helicopters. Oh, yes, a sniper sees them, but no one is able to apprehend our sneaks before they find… their mother, who happens to be the only human who can be infected but not go rage-crazy.
What? The question is begged: how the living fuck did she survive? It’s not so much that’s she’s somehow immune, but my God, the woman was beset by literally dozens of raging lunatics who don’t just simply bite, they rip and tear and bite and gouge. Maybe she can get the virus and not be affected, but how does she fend off the zombies?
Thus begins a series of ridiculous coincidences and goofy plot elements. For instance, Don gets infected (somehow, as a building caretaker, he has security clearance everywhere, including to his quarantined wife), and is the one who brings the zombie element back into London. The U.S. Army is implicated for being as cruel and inhuman and incapable of order in Iraq, and having individuals who rebel and pay the price. But it’s a wonder these guys can do anything right: once the outbreak occurs, they do all that is possible to screw up containment.
What about these Londoners, the ones who are being led around by their noses? These are survivors of the original zombie attack, don’t you know, so why are they acting like fools, willing to be herded up into containment areas that will, of course, be invaded by the infected? It makes no sense whatsoever.
The original 28 Days Later had a scene that haunts me to this day: one of the survivors speaks of being caught in a busy train station when the infected came in and began killing. It was insane, beyond belief, people clawing and climbing, dying, trying to get away, turning into the zombies, terrible. What makes that scene so intense is how the story was being told, and how it tapped into each viewer’s worst case scenario, as dictated by the dark corners of their imagination. We never actually witness this scene, but the telling is enough to send chills down the spine.
Well, in 28 Weeks Later, we get that scene played out in front of us, and it’s a stunning disappointment. The director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, has a jittery camera and no sense of where to point it–the chaos in many of his scenes builds no tension but only confuses the viewer. When the infected attack this crowded room, you can’t see anything, the sound effects are blurred by an overloud soundtrack (imagine what fun a sound effects guy would making his audience squirm at the gorging of zombies on this cattle-pen).
Furthermore, Fresnadillo relies on the old horror trick of the evil killer who just won’t go away. Like Jason or Freddy or Mike Myers in Halloween, Don the Dad is everywhere in this movie. Once infected, he is not content, like all the other infected, to kill at random, no, he has to chase his kids all over London, to the point where I and a number of the audience were laughing outright. There are a dozen other marvelously funny parts, including a scene where everyone climbs into a car and closes the vents to save them from chemical weapons (what?), and a scene right out of Grindhouse’s Planet Terror, with a ‘copter using its blades to chop up the zombies. That’s fine for the ridiculous Planet Terror, but for 28 Weeks Later, supposedly realistic, one can’t imagine a soldier risking his life bringing his chopper blades so close to the ground, or flinging buckets of infected blood hither and yon.
For a movie that bears the responsibility of criticizing the U.S. Military and making a serious zombie film, I was struck by the fact that the principals here are all white and good-looking. Apparently no blacks were allowed back into London, nor Pakistanis or Indians. The military doctor is the usual babe (give Boyle credit in Days for peopling his England with unattractive types), the army man a hunk, and the kids a pair of beauties.
28 Weeks Later’s greatest failing is that it is simply a bore. There’s nothing wrong with critizing our involvement in Iraq–in fact, I welcome that. But it must be in service to the story, just as character quirks, sex scenes, etc. must. This is, after all, a summer’s entertainment, 28 Weeks Later and not Iraq in Fragments (though that film was much more compelling than this one). Fresnadillo drops the ball entirely, wasting his tense opening in a film that has little to carry you through to its predictable ending (and one that is borrowed, in mood, from the superior, though criticized for its lack of meaning, Dawn of the Dead).
But it says volumes about our involvement in Iraq. For us liberals who argued against the war from the beginning, it’s nice to see our concern dribbling into the movies. But this is the best we can do? A simplistic and yawn-inducing horror film? Between 28 Weeks Later and the lauded Land of the Dead (yet another failure that was regaled for its criticisms of Bush and Co.) there’s a pair of bad movies elevated only by their loathing of this president. Perhaps that’s the secret to making a critically acclaimed sequel: join the zeitgeist and pad a weak script by critiquing current failed policy. This is hardly bold–by now it is de rigueur to say that we’re failing in Iraq. But if it makes critics and filmmakers feel better about themselves…
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