28 Weeks Later (2007) [REVIEW]

Does anyone else remember speculating that when 28 Days Later… was a success that we’d sequels like this? Not that the film at all needed a sequel, but it’s just in Hollywood’s nature to see something that turns a profit and try to exploit those profits for as much as they could get. Although Danny Boyle and Alex Garland were involved, they served as executive producers as opposed to any writing or directing involvement, and what the fuck do executive producers do anyway? I assume they sit around counting money and telling the filmmakers to do things without spending as much money, but I’m willing to have someone prove me wrong. In addition to the two of them, the composer from the first film, John Murphy, was involved in this sequel as well, which was a good sign, especially considering how much the music added to the whole experience of the first movie. But considering the original had “days” in the title, you just KNEW that these sequels would start going with the “28 ____ Later” motif. From weeks to months to years to decades to centuries…now THAT’S a movie I’d like to see. 28 CENTURIES LATER. There’d probably be a lot of robots.

Robert Carlyle running frantically through a field would have been all the more terrifying had he gone the full monty.

During the initial infection, there’s a farmhouse on the countryside of survivors trying to avoid the rage-filled maniacs (remember, they’re not zombies, they’re crazy idiot maniacs). Unfortunately, the maniacs break free, and when faced with survival or saving his wife from maniacs, Don (Robert Carlyle) chooses survival. The opening credit sequence informs us that the disease was contained on the island of England, that it was quarantined, all infected people starved to death, and it was a time to rebuild the city under supervision of the American military. Don is one of the individuals in charge of rebuilding the city designated as a “Safe Zone”, which means he is allowed to have his kids come back as the first children being reintegrated. While doing a physical on Don’s son, as is done with all people brought back, military lady Scarlet (Rose Byrne) mentions how he has two different colored eyes, and the son mentions that’s something he got from his mom, which is a completely casual piece of dialogue that foreshadows absolutely nothing that will happen in the rest of the movie. Once his son and daughter Tammy (Imogen Poots…..HA HA HA HER NAME IS POOTS!) move back, Don explains that he saw their mother die, and since they don’t have a photo of her, they escape the safe zone the next day to go back to their house. Once their, they find their mom living like a freak, but then the military brings the kids and their mom back to the safe zone. They find that despite showing no signs of infection, she is indeed infected, but there is something about her that prevents her body from manifesting the rage-maniac inside of her. When Don finds out she’s still alive, he goes to where she is quarantined and thinks the best thing to do is to kiss her, which transmits the virus to him, which now means there’s a maniac on the loose inside the safe zone! How could this have possibly happened?!

Bet you wish you had some trick maniac killing arrows in that quiver of yours, don’t ya Hawkeye?! (he was Hawkeye in that Avengers movie)

Once Don the Maniac starts killing people, the military goes into “Code Red” mode, which has nothing to do with the Mountain Dew soft drink. Instead, it means corralling all the survivors into closed areas and shutting the lights off. Don finds his way into that area and starts infecting more people, and when the military realizes they can’t separate infected and non-infected people, the military is ordered to shoot everyone they can see. Military guy Doyle (Jeremy Renner) isn’t okay with that, and when he sees that Scarlet has taken Don’s kids under her wing, he meets up with them to help them escape. They aren’t trying to escape just the maniacs, but also escape the military people who are ordered to kill everyone, which luckily Doyle and company are able to do. Once out of the city, Doyle contacts his helicopter friend Flynn (Harold Perrineau) to pick them up, but as soon as they’re about to be picked up, they become surrounded by maniacs, and then Flynn uses the helicopter blades to dispatch the horde of zombies, which is easily the best scene in the whole movie. They then decide on a different rendezvous point, but unfortunately, the military intervenes and sets Doyle on fire. Scarlet and the kids escape, but unfortunately Don has found them, so he kills Scarlet and wounds his own son (the one with the arbitrary eye color mutation), but Tammy is able to pick up a gun and kill him. Tammy and her brother, who isn’t showing signs of infection, meet Flynn and he takes them away, and the movie ends with a shot of people running around like maniacs with the Eiffel Tower int he background. I wonder if that means the virus has spread? Meh, probably not.

Rumor has it that originally it was Rose Byrne’s character that was supposed to be set on fire, but then they realized she was hot enough already. OH DAAAAAMN! No I’m just kidding, I just had a hard time finding pictures.

Some people don’t think you should compare sequels to the movies they’re based on, but I think in this case, it has to be done. One of the biggest strengths of the original was its cast, and luckily, they got some really good people involved with this movie. I had no idea who Jeremy Renner or Rose Byrne were when I originally saw it, so to see them doing as good of a job as they do now with more mainstream films, it definitely made this movie more enjoyable. John Murphy was able to make another compelling score that was able to be similar to the original without just using the same exact music as he did in the first one. Although this film wasn’t shot with the same cameras and didn’t have to rely on Boyle’s Guerilla film making techniques, they were able to emulate that gritty style to show a city trying to rebuild itself. Although the original wasn’t incredibly gory, it was pretty intense with its violence, and although a scene where a helicopter is chopping people in half is pretty silly, I would say the gore and special effects were just as good as in the original and that “silliness” almost made those effects better. Although the overall story showed an interesting take on military involvement, similar to Day of the Dead, and you connected with the characters, the fact that the entire movie is based on insane and illogical ideas that make no sense, and completely take away from the logic in the first film.

Rather than post a single scene of action, here’s another close up on a dirty face. This time it belongs to Imogen Poots….HAHA! POOTS!

It was a bold move to highlight one of your main characters in a way that shows him being cowardly husband and father who was only interested in his own survival. One thing that bothered me, however, was the fact that he could fucking chase his goddamn kids ALL over town?! The idea of having one maniac more important than all the others, without any reason of why all the focus is on him, is insane. In Day of the Dead, the story focused on Bub for a reason, to train a zombie, so it made sense when we see what he does when the zombies are let loose. Don wasn’t smarter or have any sort of mutation himself to make him capable of quelling his urges of killing anything in his path to go DIRECTLY to his kids. Speaking of kids, this whole movie WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED had the military just stopped the kids from escaping the safe zone. Sure, they followed them to see what they were doing, but had they said, “Why are you doing this? A picture? We’ll go get it!” then a lot of things could have been avoided. Even after recovering the mom, why the fuck would Don KISS someone who is in quarantine? And then when an outbreak occurred, why would “Code Red” still result in everyone being in a confined space, the lights shutting off, and none of the access points being guarded so it only took ONE maniac to break through? Unfortunately, there are even more things that made me angry that I am forgetting right now, and all those things combined is what the downfall of this movie was. Although it has a good cast and the tone of the whole thing is similar to the original, there were too many compromises in the logic of the plot to say this movie was anywhere close to being as good as the original.

Wolfman Moon Scale