28 Weeks Later
Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
So what if 28 Weeks Later is superior to its prequel? 28 Days Later isn’t hard to top; it was one of the least imaginative horror movies since The Blair Witch Project. It also marked a new low point in movie professionalism due to trend-chasing director Danny Boyle’s use of darker-than-dark videography that obscured the already predictable action.
(Watching 28 Days Later was torture but also an act of wishing; audiences hoped to see something scary even though they literally couldn’t see anything for most of the movie.) Now, in 28 Weeks Later, Boyle is only the producer and has turned direction over to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, a man with a light meter and half an idea.
Fresnadillo cuts to the quick—the primal-terror essence of horror movies as outward expressions of subconscious terrors. Lead actor Robert Carlyle responds to the first film’s still-ongoing zombie attack with such mortifying fear that he leaves his wife (Catherine McCormack) fighting off a zombie assault in their English countryside hideout and runs for his own safety. This shameful cowardice haunts Carlyle even when—28 weeks later—U.S. military has moved in and, it seems, cleared out the zombie menace. Momentary peace comes to this new, occupied London; Carlyle is reunited with his two children and tells them a bedtime-story lie that their mother is dead. [If you’re afraid of spoilers, maybe you shouldn’t read any more.] His own masculinity is shaken, as is his patriarchal authority. The kids, mischievously exploring London’s desolate streets, return to their quarantined home and discover Mom, miraculously alive.
At this point, 28 Weeks Later resembles the best idea of Almodóvar’s Volver—the suspicion that Mom has returned as a ghost. But Fresnadillo never gets mushy, nor loses his nerve as Almodóvar did with Volver’s contrived naturalism. Instead, Fresnadillo ratchets up the zombie conceit: Mom is infected by what military scientists call the Rage Virus (slowly gestating), and her zombie comeback—and vengeance—leads to the revelation of spineless, immoral, dishonest Dad as the ultimate, monstrous Oedipal threat.
This interestingly contrived plot (only the first few chapters of the movie) jettisons any moral basis. 28 Weeks Later isn’t about good vs. evil or life vs. death; it exists only for sensationalism, but its chills derive from a half-idea (family vs. chaos) that is stronger than the usual dystopian cliché. 28 Weeks Later belongs to the recent movie trend exploiting the end-of-civilization fad as has become overfamiliar in other English-set films like V for Vendetta and Children of Men (where the actors are indeed zombies). The welcome thing about 28 Weeks Later is that it avoids its potentially anti-American, anti-military set-up (handsome, stoical Idris Elba plays the unyielding general in contrast to Jeremy Renner as the compassionate sacrificial sergeant). Instead, Fresnadillo sticks to universal horror-movie scares: The husband-wife reunion between Carlyle and McCormack is full of recognizable spousal anxiety; the children’s shock at seeing Dad’s true, blood-red nature is almost classical. That’s more than Boyle ever achieved.
After the virtually unwatchable 28 Days Later with its indiscernible graphics, the look of 28 Weeks Later is a relief. Video technology has improved, but Fresnadillo pointedly avoids Boyle’s pretense of a new style. This film’s visual clarity also cuts to the quick. You can see that it’s all cheap thrills with the mere gloss of sociopolitical and psychological dread. Above all, Fresnadillo aces what might be called the zombie movie aesthetic: his clear imagery is edited Tony Scott-fast, almost to the point of unintelligibility. Flashy shots, flickering lights, pandemonium rule. Incoherent action means it’s all just for shock. “Ah, man, this is FUBAR!” one G.I. cries when the new Rage Virus sends the military complex out of control. That’s the aesthetic: FUBAR.
Heartless action scenes are all alike whether here, in 300, Spider-Man 3 or Grindhouse. This devolution is measured, almost jokingly, by 28 Weeks Later’s chronological premise, especially in one ought-to-be-classic sequence: With the Rage Virus outbreak, zombies and military personnel charge out of the military hospital (the rampaging zombies sometimes suggest Beatlemania among cannibals) and Idris Elba gives orders for snipers perched outside to waste ‘em all. The stampede turns to slaughter and, as bodies burst or drop on the hospital’s staircase, Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin comes to mind. Only it’s been updated—exponentially and in cold blood. Fresnadillo probably couldn’t help it. He’s a contemporary movie whiz. For him, as with Zack Snyder, Sam Raimi, Robert Rodriquez and Tarantino, cinema is FUBAR.
