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28 Weeks Later


28 Weeks Later(2007)





So I thought I'd watch 28 Weeks Later. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, bloody awful. I liked 28 Days Later, I really did. I was sceptical about a sequel with none of the same actors or characters and with a different director. Turns out I was right to be sceptical.

The meetings for this film must have gone something along the lines of:

"Danny Boyle doesn't want to make a sequel."

"That's ok, Aliens wasn't directed by the same person as Alien. Just get the director to copy Danny Boyle's style a bit, nobody will notice."

"Copy Aliens, ok, got it."

Because seriously, how do you do a sequel to an 'ordinary people caught up in horror' film? Yes, you bring in the wise cracking US military. And a couple of kids in danger. Just like Aliens.

Except that despite this ripping-off-Aliens thing, none of the people involved in the film (characters and/or writers) has ever seen a horror film, clearly, because they think that it’s a good idea to open doors when somebody knocks even though they know full well it could be a zombie, say ‘I’ll be back in a moment’ (yeah, you or your bloody corpse), and approach family members who are clearly infected with the Rage Zombie plague.

The military are so wholly incompetent you wonder how they ever made it through basic training. The whole thing is full of logical problems that make Cillian Murphy’s fantastical transformation from ordinary Joe to skinny Rambo in the first film seem perfectly plausible. Why are there no rats in the underground? Why is it pitch black one minute and then light? Do they really expect us to suspend our disbelief enough to accept that if you fly a helicopter low enough you can cut the heads off an army of zombies and not crash, and still have enough fuel to cross the Channel?

If the film was any good, if the story, characters or acting swept you away then perhaps these small points wouldn’t matter. But sadly the story is lame, the two children at the centre of the story are incredibly annoying. The boy wanders around with apparently no fear of anything, the girl wears far too much make-up, even when she’s in bed or has been on the run from zombies across London. The zombie outbreak is entirely their fault for deciding implausibly to go exploring in un-quarantined areas of the city and you really don’t care if they survive.

There are a couple of good points. It’s not badly filmed, in places. There are a couple of haunting images, such as the grass having overgrown on the pitch at Wembley. The opening sequence isn’t all bad. But having it retold and shown again in flashbacks is overkill. The music is good. But I’ve heard it somewhere before, possibly in the first film. And it’s overused. The ending isn’t syrupy, at least. The moral of the film is: in the event of a zombie plague, make sure your family members are dead.

1.5/5