Cinema review
Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineay, Catherine McCormack
Release date 11 May 2007

28 Weeks after the outbreak of Rage, the virus has been contained with survivors sealed off inside a military-controlled ‘green zone’. But the arrival of a woman who carries the virus is the catalyst for a new outbreak…

With Danny Boyle and Alex Garland having traded in flesh eaters for space larks in Sunshine, it is up to Intacto director Fresnadillo to breathe new life into the walking dead. Anyone uneasy about the change in writer and director can rest easy; 28 Weeks Later, while flawed, actually emerges to be the better film.

There was no way that Fresnadillo could hope to match 28 Days Later’s haunting first 20 minutes in which Cillian Murphy awoke in a strangely deserted London, and thankfully he doesn’t attempt an inferior copy. But the Spanish director does manage to deliver an effective pre-credit sequence that is claustrophobic and, when the action bursts free of a rural cottage, also disturbing in its skilful transposition of horror on to an everyday mundane reality. It is this willingness to break free of the original template that is the mark of most great sequels, and the plot mostly develops in new, unexpected ways.

Early scenes, with its gun-toting American soldiers and nattering about the ‘green zone’ suggest that we could be in for a rather heavy-handed parallels to both Iraq and The War on Terror. Yet this is a film that is cleverer than at first appears. It goes on to pose a constant stream of moral dilemmas about the importance of the individual against the survival of the species, and in a way it does for horror what Battlestar Galactica has done for science fiction – this is an intelligent, topical yet accessible piece of genre film-making.

There’s no skimping on the set pieces either, with an onslaught of shocks that are alternatively distressing (the implementation of the military’s ‘Phase 3’) and crowd-pleasing (zombie decapitation by helicopter blades). Happily, the second half goes on to offer much more of what was good about the original – namely working London landmarks into its plot – and so we get skyscrapers used as apartments, zombies scuttling across the Millennium bridge and a car speeding around the city’s empty shell.

Fresnadillo lends his film an urgent, frenetic energy – all handheld cameras and high shutter speed action. But, aided by another poignant score by composer John Murphy, he doesn’t forget the human drama, with Imogen Poots and the fantastically-named Mackintosh Muggleton giving a convincing depiction of two children struggling to cope in extreme circumstances. It’s a film in which even the quiet moments are powerful.

So why only 8 out of 10? Well, the story is unfortunately blighted by some rather jarring gaps in logic. There are times when the film places a huge reliance on coincidence, with at least one character that improbably keeps popping up long after he should have been finished off. It’s a shame, because if the script had been tightened up a little this could have been one of the greatest horror films of the last decade.

Still, this is horror movie as social commentary, something we don’t see nearly enough of, and it creates a convincing depiction of a society that has lost control. Someone greenlight 28 Months Later immediately! Matt McAllister

VERDICT: 8/10
A flawed but horrifyingly believable sequel.