28 Weeks Later (Fresnadillo, 2007)

[ozzylogic]

I watched this y-day, and considering it was a horror sequel (and IMHO, horror sequels usually suck), it blew me away. I don't think I've ever cringed so much in any movie, save for 28 Days Later and Descent.

Plot: Six months after the rage virus was inflicted on the population of the British Isles, the US Army helps to secure a small area of London for the survivors to repopulate and start again. But not everything goes to plan. (from IMDB)

Though a bit short, it exceeded all my expectations. It's what Resident Evil should've been. Like the earlier film, it'll grow on you. The movie, not the virus.

[fizz]

Has the most intensely jolting opening sequence I've seen for a movie in a long, long time. Fucking brilliant!

[kaytee]

So is this out in Dubai today? 28 Days Later was brilliant, so I guess with the good reviews this one should be a must watch too.

[fizz]

So is this out in Dubai today? 28 Days Later was brilliant, so I guess with the good reviews this one should be a must watch too.

It was out last week...on limited screens. Should have been a bash film. Its a bloody good time.

[ozzylogic]

Yeah, but on Cinema 11 in it's 2nd week...WTF? It would've been shit scarier if watched on a larger screen

[theoddball]

Yeah, but on Cinema 11 in it's 2nd week...WTF? It would've been shit scarier if watched on a larger screen

Tip: Sit closer to the screen.

Saw it last night with a couple of friends from work -- bloody brilliant (no pun intended, of course).

[ozzylogic]

Yesm, good idea! It was bloddy fucking amazing boyo!

[kaytee]

Excellent movie...went for it yesterday, yes I made time for it from my busy schedule...Man was the movie a shocker...Straight to the point, no screwing around with the viewers, gory, bloody, sniper shots - what more can a guy ask for.

I say bring on another sequel.

[fizz]

A sequel is in the works:

Spoilers follow:

In March 2007, plans were announced by Danny Boyle to create a "third chapter" of the film franchise, which may be given the title 28 Months Later, thus creating a trilogy. The action will presumably take place in France, picking up where the second film left off (ref: L'écran Fantastique, a French magazine about horror and fantasy films).

[ozzylogic]

I hope the 3rd part won't become a comedy (RE2, Alien Resurrection, etc.) and ruin the whole series.

[fizz]

As long as our man Boyle has some role to play...I really doubt the series will falter. Fingers crossed.

[shariqq]

Although 28 Weeks Later was a good movie, it didn't come close to how good Days was. This movie was essentially a Zombie film and only that. I liked the flashy fast shaky scenes with the zombies adding to the manic rage of the infected, and the girls were cute  

Days had that excellent layer of psychological horror: Our survivors had even humas to fear! That was the crowning factor that made Days a lot better. Weeks just plays the zombie part, and although it plays it very well (loved it on surface), left me a little dissapointed.

Stopping comparisons, I liked some scenes a lot for the beauty of the executions. The end of the opening scene, the bombing of the city, the Helicopter Massacre were really good. And a typical yet wonderful closing scene.

If there is a sequel in the works to make this a trilogy, it (if it is even half as good as Weeks) could make these the defining Zombie trilogy from our generation.

[ozzylogic]

and the girls were cute 

That sounded like some OTHER member here

*Major Spoiler Alert*

It's a chain reaction...if the girls hadn't been the reason for their mom's discovery as the only survivor, she would never have been captured in the first place...which means no smooching, no virus passing...

And had the soldier never rescued them...they'd never make their way till the stadium to the Chris Rock-wannabe 'copter dude, and eventually spread the virus in France.

Lesson learnt...don't let kids outta your sight. I found that bit to be flawed. How did 2 girls make it outta the place in Splinter Cell/Metal Gear mode? And why did their Dad not turn to ash when the flames engulfed the city?

Having said that, they couldn't have made a better and fitting sequel.

[madali]

28 Weeks Later... (Fresnadillo, 2007)
IMDB Link


When “28 Days Later…” was released, it was a neat little surprise. Bits aren’t known for their horror, much less zombie horrors, but “28 Days Later…” turned out to be quick cult classic, raising the genre from the dead (see how atmospheric my reviews are?).

No one expected much of its sequel, especially considering the people on board were all different.

I don’t know if “28 Weeks Later…” surpasses the original or not (probably not), but it is a great sequel. This was the biggest surprise to me since “The Hills Have Eyes”, a remake that similar to this sequel, was not expected to be that good. Remakes and sequels being good? What is going on!

What was interesting is that while I hate shaky cams, here the director was able to use it perfectly, to create not fast-paced, “realistic” action scenes that director’s usually use it for, but to create a chaotic and maniac atmosphere. When the infected people attack, there is no warning, just quick flashes of movements and screams. And anyone who is bitten doesn’t have time to contemplate what has happened, as they get affected instantly. The horror scenes become a rapid succession of shrieks, violence, and gore, the characters panic because it all happens so fast, and we panic with them.

The movie falters a bit when it focuses on two young children, rather than adults, which I always think weakens a horror film. This was especially annoying considering that the movie started off with character Don being forced to leave his wife, even while she begged for him to save her. This decision, to abandon a loved spouse, in a desperate attempt to survive, is unique in the horror genre, and would have been more interesting to focus on, rather than have the movie shift from him, to his children.

Looking forward to “28 Months Later…”, and I would certainly not mind a campy “28 Years Later…” set in a space station.

4/5

[fizz]

This movie challenges what it means to be an American

Sunday, June 10, 2007

BY CHARLES TAYLOR

The British zombie thriller "28 Weeks Later" suggests just how much the world fears and mistrusts America right now. For American moviegoers it's a thoroughly uncomfortable experience (not that it's particularly comfortable for anyone else -- the movie is brutal, bloody and terrifying).

But "28 Weeks Later" winds up suggesting that the self-hatred we are tempted to by our current de graded state is a moral copout, a way of ignoring the basic truth that no one who has ever hated his country has changed it.


The ugliness of the radical right's redefinition of America as a state in which torture and the denial of due process are business as usual and access to government depends on the whims of those in power has found a consonance on the left. The Bush regime and its partisans see that state of affairs as how America should be. Looking at the same set of facts, many on the left see them not as an aberration but as a revelation, the unmasking of America's truest, darkest self.

It should be obvious that the first casualty of such an environment is politics, which always involves the ability to make distinc tions, to make choices even when none will leave you feeling clean, and the sense of engagement that demands you recognize a moral and emotional connection with your country and your countrymen -- even when you despise their choices, even when you despise the current incarnation of the government.

The chief innovation of Danny Boyle's 2003 "28 Days Later" was that it gave its flesh-eating zombies (in the movies, is there any other kind?) demonic speed to match their ravenous appetite. These monsters didn't clump relentlessly forward as the zombies in George A. Romero's "Dead" tetralogy do -- they zoomed in for the feast and the kill.

In this sequel, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, the rage virus that turned Britons into monsters has died out -- largely because the rampaging zombies have nothing left to eat. The U.S. Army now controls mainland Britain, and American soldiers have gathered the sur vivors into a rigidly patrolled Green Zone where they're joined by their countrymen who are starting to re patriate.

Of course, it all goes to hell, and the Americans learn that their might and determination can't maintain an arbitrarily designated perimeter of safety while a threat remains outside.

From that description, I couldn't blame anyone for thinking that "28 Weeks Later" is a cheap, obvious appropriation of real tragedy for the purpose of a shriek show. When you watch the early scenes of American soldiers standing night watch, using their telescopic rifle lenses to peep on their charges -- Americans as leering voyeurs in the aftermath of destruction -- the movie's pulp sensibility seems to be an almost exact mirror of what many other coun tries think of America right now.

The actors have been directed to play the soldiers in a joshing gung-ho mode that, to Europeans, invariably signifies American boorishness. It's equivalent to depicting Frenchmen in striped jerseys and berets, or Englishmen in bowlers and monocles, the difference being that this stereotype is always ac cepted as the truth.

If you're an American, you might want to protest the reductiveness of the portrayal. You might want to bring up our unassailable good intentions. But then you remember things like the hear ings on Abu Ghraib, and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) expressing outrage that anyone would be outraged at what the photographs of torture and humiliation showed. After all, Inhofe said, it's not like the prisoners of Abu Ghraib were guilty of traffic violations. (He was right -- most weren't guilty of anything.)

Or you might think about the moment in the upcoming documentary "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten" in which somebody tells the story of how the Clash frontman wrote "Rock the Casbah" to protest the Ayatollah Khomeini's banning of music and was then heartbroken to see film of American soldiers writing the phrase on bombs used during the first Gulf War.

So the easiest thing for an American watching "28 Weeks Later" to do is to accept this combination of sadism and boosterism as all we can ever hope to be, to insist that it has nothing to do with us, to place ourselves in the moral and political equivalent of the quarantine in which the movie's survivors are insulated.

But Fresnadillo is too fiendish, too pitiless to allow us to remain there. At the heart of "28 Weeks Later" is a family drama that makes the worst psychic nightmares Ingmar Bergman dreamed up seem like "Cheaper By the Dozen." In the horribly upsetting opening scene, we watch as Robert Carlyle's Don, too terrified to save his wife, Alice (Catherine McCor mack, who has a nakedness of expression that seems like a rebuke), leaves her to rampaging zombies. Later Don is reunited in the Green Zone with his son and daughter. When Alice is found alive, the kids realize their father's tale of their mom's death was a lie, and they reject him.

Don is a good man, but he can't bear the shame he feels for succumbing to fear and abandoning Alice. And that shame turns into the rage everyone believes has been banished from this safe zone.

A portrait of good intentions turned back on itself to produce only horror and guilt and destruc tion might be enough of a metaphor for anyone right now. But it's a measure of the guts Fresnadillo shows here, the unwillingness to assign easy villains, that he arranges the movie so that it puts us in the position of identifying with those whom it seems so eager to paint as villains, namely the soldiers.

As the virus breaks out and the killing starts up, Fresnadillo shows us the soldiers having to pick their targets from a mass of fleeing people. We feel the horror of not being able to tell friend from foe, and then the worse horror of being given an order that renders the distinction moot.

In what seems like seconds, the movie shatters the sense of distance from the soldiers, shatters any smug impulse to separate our selves from them, to imagine our selves as better then they are, or to say the country they represent has nothing to do with us. Whatever you think were the reasons we invaded Iraq, you should be able to accept that our soldiers believe in the stated purpose of bringing democracy to that country. "28 Weeks Later" makes us feel that ideal, which can seem so phony in the midst of chaos, as something real and overwhelming when we are put in the shoes of soldiers forced to betray it.

"28 Weeks Later" is made with almost brutal effectiveness. (At times you can't tell if its power isn't just a case of wearing you down.) As thrillers go, it's no fun. But the discomfort of the movie isn't the gore (all of it seen in slivers, thanks to Chris Gill's razor-sharp editing). Nothing in the movie is so ruthless as the way it dissolves the reassuring barrier between us and them.

"Them" being not just the people we see turn into monsters, but the people whom we've made monsters. Of all the ways back to loving your country, none may be as hard as the one "28 Weeks Later" offers: The chance to watch it at its worst and think, My God, that's me.

Charles Taylor is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.