28 Weeks Later

As the title suggests, then, 28 Weeks Later takes place around 6 months after the initial infestation of Great Britain, where the U.S army has infiltrated the area and quarantined it. They are now attempting to rebuild, bringing in citizens that had been evacuated from their homes. There are still sections that have not been stabilizing, although all infected should have died off from starvation with no humans left. Meet Tammy (Imogen Poot) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton), two children being reunited with their father, Don (Robert Carlyle), after leaving the country on a school trip and luckily missing the epidemic. As they set up camp in a heavily-protected town, Don tells the story of how the children's mother, Alice (Catherine McCormack), was killed during an infected attack on the cottage they were hiding out in, but when Andy and Tammy decide to take a trip into a quarantined section of town to their old house, they find their mother - alive and well, figuratively speaking. Alice is taken into the military's medical base, where she is examined by Scarlet (Rose Byrne), who concludes that Alice is in fact infected but is only a carrier of the virus.

Oh, but you can bet your bottom BUTTON that Don is both surprised and in a bit of a snare - he just told his kids that their mom was dead and he couldn't help her, and now here she is, alive and holding the secret to his cowardice as he ran away and left her to be eaten. He sneaks into her quarantined cell, hoping for redemption, and instead Alice spreads the disease to Don, where he decimates most of the military base and causes all sorts of havoc around the city. The military immediately calls CODE RED, shutting everything down and trying to take out the infected, but in the end they resort to elimintating everyone, infected or not, to contain the virus. It is up to Scarlet and a fed-up military gunman, Doyle (Jeremy Renner), to get Tammy and Andy to safety, as their blood could contain a cure to the virus.

First off, one must commend director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo for the direction he chose to take with this sequel. Bringing the viewer back to Great Britain, after the initial infection has collapsed, allows for exploration of new territory while sticking to the familiarity of the first film. Instead of a deserted wasteland like the first film, people have once again flocked to their home - seeming to indicate to a certain extent that humans have a hard time leaving their homes, no matter the circumstances - where they try to pick up their old ways of life. Instead, Fresnadillo lets loose a torrent of violence on the already victimized, which pretty much describes the entire movie's unrelenting nature.

Most of the violence packs a wallop, as an entire scene is devoted to popping both infected and innocent heads in a tour de force of the military's overextending power. Without giving too much away... oh what the hell, it's too cool to not mention - there is a scene in which a helicopter decapitates 30 or so infected people. And the blood flies all over the place, with most killings happening brutally and fast. The effects are great, and most of the gore is excruciating to watch. Don is especially scary, as he is fast, sneaky, and extremely pissed off - and he also has a fetish for eye-gouging.

The atmosphere is bleak and misanthropic, especially as the military succumbs to its weakness against containing the infection and instead literally aborts the whole experiment. Not only are the main characters being targeted by the infected, they are also subject to the military's psychotic attempts to purge the city of any life whatsover. The darkness that permeates the whole film is what makes the plot tense and frightening - the actual infected tend to become laughable as they stumble and snarl. It is the theme of human infection that really brings fear to the forefront, because most of the time it is the military that the survivors are running from. I like this theme, and thought that the film pulled it off well when pairing it with infected and uninfected human villains.

Not all of the film's themes are explored as expressively, however. Cowardice is, to an extent, with Don's refusal to risk his life to save his wife and then his subsequent infection received from his carrier wife. There is the dynamic of hero and coward, as the chief infected pursuer is the coward while Doyle becomes the hero to save Tammy and Andy - it is inferred that this is a strike at Don, where he would not save the children but a stranger would. There is also an exploration of the notion of rebuilding and technology, as it seems that it was not meant for the U.S. to dabble in a place where a disaster struck. History repeats itself, as they say...

While some of the themes are really strong, the plot fails to deliver anything of value. It feels mostly cat-and-mouse, almost like video game checkpoints, where the survivors have to be at a certain place at a certain time. The characters drop out one after another, some rarely significant. As far as the progression to the end of the movie goes, from around halfway through on towards the end, the plot does nothing to distinguish itself from, say, a serial killer thriller.

Besides Andy and Tammy, the characters feel very two-dimensional, and the supporting cast besides Don, Scarlet, the kids, and Doyle are unimportant cattle for killing. I would have liked to have seen more from Scarlet and Doyle besides glorified bodyguards, as I thought their roles would have been more important than they were. In fact, I was a bit dissapointed that Scarlet was as weak as she was, because her character seemed strong-willed and smart throughout most of the movie.

And man, does 28 Weeks Later suffer from some fatal plot holes. First off, it is hard to believe that the military would move in civilians with such a lack of control over the surrounding areas, and their lack of information on whether all of the infected had been eliminated is surprising. Also, it is safe to assume that military security should be a bit more... well, secure - a place where two kids can't sneak past all officers on duty. Or where a man cannot allow himself access to a quarantined medical facility that is vital to containing a virus. Or where secured doors don't bust open with bodily contact.

Yet even so, 28 Weeks Later is an entertaining ride, if only for its pacing and violence. While it doesn't hold up to its predecessor, it does a good job of maintaining the ambience of the first - the sheer emptiness of a normally-populated town seems menacing, even with the vast number of people that we know are running for their lives. It's a claustrophobic experience, but it's not without its share of unbelievable moments, and in the end, the only characters we find we cared about were Andy and Tammy. But we do follow them, if only because we like them and want to see them succeed, and so I give that to the film - it held my attention in this regard. Otherwise, Fresnadillo has crafted only average fare, and coming off the original which did much to further the zombie genre, 28 Weeks Later pales in comparison.