In 2002 visionary director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary) brought a frightening new twist in the zombie movie genre to the big screen.  Pulling real world influence from biological experimentation and telling the story of a fictitious ‘rage virus’, 28 Days Later took the horror film world by storm with an apocalyptic approach to a jaded genre.  And the result was something extraordinary.  No longer did the zombies slowly lumber toward their prey or make dim-witted decisions.  Instead the zombie inducing rage virus would infect you via blood, saliva, or a bite and turn the victim into a spitting-mad (literally), bloody, violent and (most frightening) fast moving cannibalistic killer.  The film followed the journey of Jim (Cillian Murphy) who wakes up twenty-eight days after the highly infectious virus breaks out, and his attempt to navigate through the chaos of an abandoned London and into the surrounding countryside populated only by the hungry rage victims and a few survivors.  The sequel, 28 Weeks Later, was released in 2007 to slightly less fanfare but is equally deserving of praise.  In fact I would go so far as to consider it a worthy successor to 28 Days Later, if not a superior film overall. 

The movie begins with Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) holed up in a cottage in the countryside with a few other survivors.  You get the sense we’re picking right up where the previous film left off, with the majority of the population cut off from society and barely surviving on what meager supplies they can scrape up.  A quiet, somber hiding place is

predictably soon ripped savagely apart by the rage zombies who follow a small boy into their midst and, in an intense and heart racing series of scenes, rip apart and devour our few survivors.  The cinematography here is excellently handled; with the intense up-close violence displayed via traditional shaky-cam style, but interspersed with enough set cut away scenes so that you’re able have a clear view of what’s happening.  Poor, frightened Don is forced to make a choice between saving himself or sacrificing his life to maybe save his wife, and he makes the cowardly (yet, I couldn’t help but sympathize with him) choice and runs to save his own skin.  It becomes fairly clear as his escape goes on that, had he tried to save her, he would have joined her in becoming a rage zombie victim.  But awww… poor protagonist, wracked by guilt, right?  A perfect setup for the emotionally damaged survivor one would think eh?  Just you wait…

.
Cut ahead to twenty-eight weeks later (I knew they got that title from somewhere) and NATO, spearheaded by an American military outfit, has entered the country after all rage zombies have apparently died out.  They reestablish a base camp in London and set up a Green Zone (Iraq anyone?) where, now that they feel its safe enough, they begin to bring back in the natives who made it out uninfected.  Among them are Don’s two children, Tammy and Andy.  These two troublesome scamps decide, in what is really the film’s only loose string in the plot sweater, to high tail it out of the Green Zone so they can swing into their old home and snag a few pictures of their dearly departed Mom.  Little do they know they’ll actually be finding dear old Mom, looking a little worse for wear and bearing the trademark rage virus red-eye, but still more or less herself, holed up in the attic.  To give credit where credit is due, the loose plot string is soon neatly snipped off by a fast responding military that arrives at the home shortly after the children do, only to bring kids and newly found Mom home to the Green Zone.

The plot movement monster strikes again and it turns out Alice is a carrier.  As viruses tend to do according to our resident Talking Crow doctor, the rage virus has found a victim who is actually immune to the effects of the virus, but can carry and pass it on just as easily as can be.  And here’s where the film takes an interesting turn.  You of course expect the virus to break out again and wreak some mad havoc in the Green Zone.  You darn well expect the military to go ape -shit wild and start gunning the

people down.  And you certainly expect a few people that are along for the ride are going to die.  But what you don’t expect is who they choose to mow down.  I won’t give anything away, but suffice it to say that any expectation you will have by this point (and you will have them based on the red herring screen-time they use to set this up) is pretty much shattered by what happens next.  Combine this unexpected body count with some awesome firepower, well filmed and excellently done suspenseful scenes, and an awesome helicopter blade playing blender on a group of zombies, and it turns out we’ve got ourselves a fairly good action/horror film here.

To avoid spoilers we’ll stay away from a plot outline for the second half of the film.  But beyond the meat and potatoes of the story there are also some powerful themes at work here.  The first movie had a latter half plot going on about a rogue army camp that had more or less gone off their rockers.  There

were some heavy thematic lines drawn about who’s really the monsters here?  This sequel takes that one step further, blatantly dropping our would-be survivors smack dab between the unflinching brutal logic of the military and the viciousness of the bloodthirsty rage zombies.  It certainly conveys the message when, in thinking back on the film, the military probably racked up at least half the amount of kills the zombies did.  Again you may find yourself asking: who are the real monsters?  Or are we simply the more adaptive side of the fight?  Perhaps another way of looking at is that we are seeing the humans become monstrous because you simply can’t fire with anything other than fire.  Certainly more of a philosophical angle than you’d get out of your typical Romero film.

The end of the movie of course sets us in a prime position for the foreseeable 28 Months Later.  At first these two disjointed films with no consistent protagonist might seem jarring to the conventional viewer.  “Who am I sympathizing with here?  How can I just

connect?”  But as you dig deeper, even just based on the two films presently out and not speculating on a third, you might realize as I did who the real protagonist is.  The virus.  These films are a story about the virus.  We follow it from, in the beginning of 28 Days Later, its first release from a lab; then all the way to its almost extinction and then inevitable resurgence halfway through this film.  The human race, we pitiful and fragile humans, are merely the fodder.  And yet, what entertaining fodder we can be.  If you haven’t seen the first film I would recommend you pick it up to view prior to this one, especially in that it’s a great film in its own right.  But even if you haven’t, 28 Weeks Later is an excellent follow up and second act the series, while at the same time being a damn good scare and a gruesome ride all on its own.  I’m hopeful we’ll get to the climactic third act in this wonderfully bloody story of the rage virus, and I expect you will be to after seeing them.