Review of 28 Weeks Later (2007) by Aaronk. — 09 May 2007

After rewatching 28 Days Later and remembering just how much I liked it, I was thoroughly thrilled at seeing its sequel. I had high hopes for the follow-up to the original's smart, subtle, and engagingly human story of people thrown together by horror, trying to manage something more than sheer survival.

The trailer for the new film offered intriguing visuals - hazard-suited workers pressure-washing S.O.S. messages off of London rooftops, military camps dedicated entirely to incineration of infected bodies - and the very interesting prospect of a rigidly controlled, meticulously planned and executed repatriation effort.

That that effort had to be doomed to fail to make the movie work didn't matter - the consideration of just how humankind (and specifically, the American government and military) would handle such a situation and task (and its failure) is terrifically full of promise as a story element.

Even as the inevitable outbreak began, we would get to see the multiple layers of contingency plans going into effect, each posing increasingly difficult challenges to the humanity of characters crafted with all of the care of the orignal's Jim, Selena, Frank, and Hannah.

Surely the film would follow its predecessor's style and include the intriguing and humanizing stretches of relatively safe down-time, where the lack of immediate threat allowed the characters to become almost bored and to start to wrap their heads around the new reality.

We were in for another strangely, compellingly quiet zombie movie, right? Yeah, you know where this is going. This is not an appropriate successor to 28 Days Later. Gone are the first film's subtlety and humanity.

Gone are the carefully crafted characters and deliberate pacing. Gone is the well-written, internally consistent story and universe. In their place, we're given uninteresting, unsympathetic characters whose tiny hints at backstory and deeper motivation serve only to remind what the film should have been.

The larger budget and profile of the film allowed for more and larger shots of abandoned, desolate London, but this time out, but like so many other elements of the film, their inclusion seemed more about "Look what we got to do!" than about conveying.

.. well, much of anything at all. The gore and splatter have been ratcheted up by several orders of magnitude, yet both the original's creeping dread and flat-out run-for-your-life terror are nowhere to be found.

Zombie movies are all about things spiraling out of control quickly, but in 28 Weeks Later, there's never a sense of control to begin with. Things just keep happening, with only the loosest sense of logic or reason to string them together.

I'm sure a case could be made for the overwhelming incompetence of the military handlers of the situation as commentary on the competency of the U.S. government that so hugely bungled the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the repsonse to Hurricane Katrina, but the same commentary could have been managed in a way that didn't feel so much like "The Three Stooges Meet the Zombies.

" Where the first film made the viewer care intensely for the protagonists and feel their anguish and fear, this film's characters seem like excuses to string together more pointless carnage.

See characters. See characters run. Run, characters! Run! See characters get mutilated in increasingly gruesome and over-the-top ways. Rumors have been flying about the "28" films becoming a franchise.

I won't say that I'm dead set against ever seeing another film in this series. In the right hands, the next could still be interesting. I will say, however, 28 Weeks Later took all of my fondness and excitement for the first film and knocked it into a cocked hat.

I went in chomping at the bit for more and came out feeling like the free screening had cost too much. The film is an inelegant, thoughtless mess that leaves all of its interesting possibilites unexplored and all of its huge potential lying dead in the streets of London.