FILM
REVIEW – 28 WEEKS LATER
This sequel to 28 Days Later has had mixed reviews and a few friends who saw it before I did dismissed it as rubbish. I thought it was terrific.
The film begins a few days after the Rage virus first turns people into fast moving zombies. The action shifts to totally new characters than dealt with in the first film. Robert Carlyle and his wife have fled to the countryside and taken refuge in a secluded cottage with an old couple and some other survivors, including a young boy of about ten. Carlyle’s daughters were out of Britain before the Rage virus led to the country being quarantined by the rest of the world.
The cottage is attacked by Rage-zombies. Carlyle saves only himself, leaving the others, including his wife to die.
Flash-forward now to 28 weeks after the Rage erupted on us all. The zombies have apparently starved out. A US United Nations task force have been sent to Britain to help clear away the rotting corpses and to ensure that all is truly safe. They behave like a well meaning, but harsh dictatorship, and declare the Isle Of Dogs a secure safe place for people to live so slowly, Britons who fled abroad start to head home, including Carlyle’s daughters. Carlyle himself has secured a job in the high tech office block they now inhabit.
The girls listen to his story of his wife’s death, and his false claim to have actually seen her die. The girls now decide against quarantine rules to visit the cottage and they find out that their mother is still alive, living on rotten food and half insane. Captured by the army, the girls and their mother are taken to a hospital – the girls are locked in isolation while the Mother is subjected to tests – the army medics discover that she is in fact infected by the Rage, but only as a rare carrier, rather than a zombie. While the army contemplate whether to kill her or keep her alive to examine the virus in her blood for possible cures to future outbreaks Carlyle makes an unauthorised visit to her, and begs forgiveness for deserting her. She lets him kiss her, but the slight exchange of saliva on his lips makes him into the first new rage zombie. The plague is now back with a vengeance. Soon, several soldiers and civilians alike are infected – the army snipers try to kill the zombies chasing the terrified population through the streets, but as the situation gets out of control they are ordered to kill everyone indiscriminately. An army medic who sees the children of Carlyle’s wife as possibly inheriting her immunity, and a sniper who cannot bring himself to shoot children, decide to help the kids escape from London as the army decide to napalm the city and use chemical warfare on the rage-zombies and trapped humans alike.
Aided by a helicopter pilot who uses the copter blades to mow down zombies in droves, the dwindling body of survivors flee for their lives. They discover that the young boy saved from the cottage is a carrier just as the mother had been before her death in the napalm fire (one of the best special effects scenes in a British film for years). There is a clever, very claustrophobic sequence of the rage sweeping through a crowd of people pressed into a long narrow tunnel, heard echoing horribly by one of the daughters who is hiding in an overhead service shaft. The scenes of the army sniping down the zombies and then turning on the panic stricken population are also great, as is the scene shown through a rifle’s telescopic night-sights as the unseeing youngsters struggle through debris in an abandoned underground tube station.
There are a few faults – some scenes use shaky camera work which makes it difficult to see who is attacking who. There is also a glaring error when the army conclude that the Rage virus cannot cross from one species to another. The opening of the first film had the Rage first affecting a laboratory monkey and than being transmitted to people.
There is a great twist ending too – the helicopter pilot (who never seems to need to refuel) takes the survivors across the channel, including the boy who now carries the Rage and may prove to be a cure. We then see the wreckage of the helicopter and see the panic in Paris as the Rage begins to ravage the Euro-Asian mainland.
A great sequel, as worthy as the first film, with many more uses of deserted London streets than before, and some superb twists and turns, notably Carlyle’s cowardice and early reduction to zombiedom, and the ease with which the well intentioned armed forces move to extreme security measures and even chemical warfare as their mission becomes increasingly desperate.
Arthur Chappell
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