Rage in full effect
The drum and bass was pounding my eardrums. With every second that the tempo was accelerating, my pulse was keeping pace. I stopped being afraid of horror movies years ago, they’re just movies, and this isn’t real. It’s astounding how the effective soundtrack of 28 Weeks Later can make the move watching experience that much more enticing.
When making a sequel to a popular movie you have to keep two things in mind: Don’t forget your past and bring in something new. Welcome to London England, 28 weeks after the initial infection outbreak. The infected have died out because of starvation and NATO forces led by the American soldiers are cleaning up and bringing the city back to livable standards sector by sector. When the containment is lost, the Americans must eradicate the population to guarantee the containment of the quarantine. That’s when all the shit hits the fan: Kill anything that moves, use napalm and use chemical warfare. As Robert Carlyle, one of the main protagonists of the move explains after the opening gore-fest: “Oh Shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
Of course this movie is not re-inventing cinema, lower your expectations if that is your goal. This is still a genre horror flick with buckets of blood, dismemberments galore and one helicopter scene that does one up on Grindhouse. In the opening scene for example, the use of a handheld camera which shakes in odd patterns as people try to run away or get free from the infected grips is done stupendously well. I felt lost and nauseated by the camera motion and be sure that if that was an infected on your back, you would be pretty disoriented too.
There are some minor plot related cheesiness in the film, but nothing major. What brings this movie down a few notches for me is the lack of proper denoument. Suffice to say that there better damn well be a sequel.
The list of sequels that surpass their predecessors is thin and meager. Aliens following Alien, Godfather 2 over Godfather and Empire Strikes Back overtaking A New Hope are good examples. In my opinion, 28 Weeks later takes all that was good about the first one and give it a shot of adrenaline.
Not convinced? Watch the trailer: