Raaaaaage again-st the Machine: Bloody Weeks measures up to Predecessor

28 Days Later director Danny Boyle often takes offense to that movie being classified in the zombie category, insisting that it’s really more of an ‘infection’ film. While it fits in that category as well, the fact that said infection is transferred through the fluids of mindless, not-quite-living, scary looking, blood vomiting…well, you get the point. The rage virus is as valid a cause of zombification as space meteors, voodoo, and whatever’s in that blue twisty canister in Resident Evil (sorry, can’t say I cared enough to remember).

All that said, the success of the original 28 Days Later brought about a recent resurgence of the zombie genre and brought into the mainstream the concept of the ‘fast zombie.’ If Days was the 00’s answer to Night of the Living Dead then the sequel, 28 Weeks Later is its Dawn of the Dead—larger in scale and budget with slightly more developed characters, arguably better than its successor.

Taking place an unspecified time *ahem* after the original, 28 Weeks Later presents a quarantined London being slowly repopulated with the assistance of the US military. There hasn’t been a sign of any of the infected for weeks and, with a highly-trained soldier on every other rooftop it must have seemed like a good idea to start rebuilding London society. Why let all those buildings go to waste, right?

There’s a point in almost every zombie movie where it seems like everything’s going to be okay. The characters find themselves a nice place to hide out and start building some stability-be it in a farm house, shopping mall, or military base-and the audience starts to hope that they’ll make it, forgetting that they paid their money to see these people get their faces bitten off. Weeks follows this pattern—and it’s a good thing as there wouldn’t be much of a movie if the rage virus didn’t find its way back into London. Soon the military is trying to control the contagion and it doesn’t care who gets caught in the crossfire. The poor London citizens find themselves running from both the infected and rooftop snipers.

Maintaining the visceral energy while abandoning the stark digital ugliness from the previous installment, the film is filled with well-earned jumps and bloody violence. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo provides two ingenious set pieces worth noting: one involving a night scope, the other reminiscent of Grindhouse. A sequel can rarely match the novelty and voice of an original film, so scenes like those two are necessary for a sequel to create its own identity—and they work smashingly.

The film provides conflicted characters with Robert Carlyle’s (Trainspotting) guilt-ridden father and American soldiers Jeremy Renner (S.W.A.T) and Harold Perrineau (Lost), but as interesting as these characters and their decisions can be, since the film doesn’t focus on one main protagonist, the audience loses their connection with the film and its situations that it had with Cillian Murphy’s character in the original. Also, while it’s a horror film and these kind of things are par for the course, there may be one too many poor decisions made (both by individuals and committees off-camera) that ultimately make matters worse. These kind of stupid character moves are expected and mostly forgotten in most horror fare, but when a film is as smart as this one-they stick out like a bitten-off thumb.

This IS a smart horror film and while the social commentary isn’t as sharp as its predecessor (it’s much more socio-political in nature, actually...gee, I wonder why it’s the AMERICANS trying to control things… *sigh*), 28 Weeks Later makes the argument that there can be such a thing as a horror franchise for grown-ups. Let’s hope we get to see what happens months and years later.

8/10

P.S. Zombie fans are encouraged to check out the trailer to Fido linked here.

It seems to be some combo of Shaun of the Dead and Far From Heaven---I'm there!