Review: 28 Weeks Later (DVD, widescreen)
28 Weeks Later is directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and stars: Catherine McCormack, Robert Carlyle, Amanda Walker, Shahid Ahmed, and Garfield Morgan.
Basically, 28 Weeks Later is a sequel to 28 Days Later. The movie starts with a couple hiding in a house with an elderly couple and a young woman and young man. It looks like their running low on food but they’ve managed to stay away from the infected. That is until they hear a young boy calling for help outside their door and they open to let him in. He’d been chased and the infected break in — attacking everyone. When the infected get between the husband and wife, he takes off leaving her. All done in a thrilling chase and the same newsreel-ish documentary jerkiness that was a hallmark of the earlier film. Then suddenly, it’s after the infected die off and there’s an American contingent in London helping to clean up the bio-hazard (bodies) and slowly allow the refugees to come home. One island is cleared and safe and they’re working on the rest of the city. It seems the husband/father has survived and the children (older daughter, young son) had been in Europe during the epidemic and now they’ve returned.
Good basis. As the first movie dealt with strangers coming together to make a family — beginning to trust and hope — as they deal with the loss of all they knew, this film deals with a family trying to make sense of what has happened and to move on. There’s surprises and a few plot twists to keep things interesting.
However, it’s also basically a zombie film so we know things are going to go horribly wrong. Where this film fails is in not having a cohesive and solid plot. Yes, there are all the elements necessary but with holes you could drive a truck through. Most of the action/danger occurs because information is not shared, people with expertise and experience are not listened to, and so on…. In other words the plot goes forward based on people being idiots. Now, I will admit that with the kids some of the idiocy is simply due to them thinking as most kids do that they know better than the adults and that the adults are just being overly cautious (a deleted scene in the Special Features section makes this abundantly clear but it was deleted so watching the movie you don’t know this).
On the other hand, the action of the armed forces were unbelievable. I don’t believe for one minute that in a possible infestation that they would take all their civilians, cram them into a tunnel, turn out the lights and forget to lock the doors. Really? I know we all make jokes about the military mind but really — these are professionals.
So while it was a great concept and the action was pretty much what you’d expect for a sequel to 28 Days Later, it lacked the internal consistency and believability that the first movie had going for it. I mean this is a zombie film, the audience is expecting to suspend belief just to watch it, but that suspension only goes so far. While some people acted as you’d expect under pressure and especially after having survived the first infestation — most just didn’t do more than scream and run and become zombie fodder.
While I loved 28 Days Later and it’s part of my zombie training films library of films, I won’t be buying 28 Weeks Later. It was a great action film but not something with enough redeeming qualities to make it a film I’d want to watch over again and again.