28 Weeks Later (2007) Review
7/10
A handful of survivors are hiding in a cottage when the infected reach it. A man makes a decision in about four seconds, gets out of a window, and runs across a field while his wife is still inside calling his name. The 7 is for a sequel with a superb premise and a structure that abandons it. The first act is about a man carrying a lie into a rebuilt world, and the rest is a pursuit picture where American soldiers shoot civilians in the street.
That first twelve minutes grabbed me harder than anything in the original, and I spent the rest of the film wishing it had stayed that brave. I like this movie a lot. I also think it throws away the best idea it has, and every scene after the outbreak makes that loss worse.
What it gets right is the opening, the sound design and one helicopter sequence that nobody forgets once they’ve seen it. It’s also a rare sequel willing to be nastier and less hopeful than the original it follows five years on, and it takes full advantage of the permission.
The Cold Open
Twelve minutes, almost no dialogue, and it establishes a marriage, a betrayal, a world and a running style that the original film only implied. The decision is the scene. Don has perhaps four seconds, the door is coming apart, and he chooses himself. The film doesn’t stage it as cowardice or as calculation, it stages it as a body moving before a mind has ruled on it.
Carlyle plays the aftermath in the same sequence. He gets out, he keeps running, and the camera stays with him while he’s visibly refusing to look back, and none of it is dramatized.
John Murphy’s In the House, In a Heartbeat plays over it, and the track was written for the first film and used better here. It’s the best marriage of music and action in either picture.
The track builds from a repeated guitar figure into something enormous, and the film starts it before the danger arrives and lets it run through the entire flight. Music that anticipates instead of accompanying is the reason the sequence feels inevitable while it’s happening.
Open with the decision your whole story will be about, and let the reader watch it made badly under pressure. Everything afterward is a character living with something the reader saw him do. That’s a much stronger position than a confession delivered later. Remove the deliberation. A choice made in four seconds is more honest than one made over a page, and readers understand panic better than reasoning.
Never editorialize on it. The film doesn’t tell the audience whether he was a coward. That means they spend the next ninety minutes deciding for themselves.
The Lie
Don is reunited with his son and daughter in a secured zone on the Isle of Dogs and tells them their mother died and he couldn’t reach her. That’s the film’s real engine and it’s very good for about half an hour.
The children going over the wall is what breaks it open, and the film is careful to make the reason ordinary. They want to fetch photographs from their old house so they can remember what their mother looked like. That’s about the least apocalyptic motive anybody could have written down, and it ends up destroying an entire city.
Newly arrived from abroad, the children have no idea what happened, and their father is a man with a job, an apartment and a story he’s had months to rehearse. Carlyle plays somebody who has decided to believe his own version. Then the mother is found alive, asymptomatic and carrying the infection, and the film has assembled something strong. A man has to face the person he abandoned and she doesn’t know what he did.
The scene where he visits her is the best in the film after the opening. He apologizes, she forgives him, and he kisses her, and the kiss is both a real act of love and the thing that restarts the apocalypse.
That kiss is the moment I think about most. Carlyle and McCormack play it straight, and the film lets a real act of love be the thing that kills everyone. That’s cruel in exactly the way I want a horror sequel to be cruel. Catherine McCormack does an enormous amount with very little screen time. Alice is asymptomatic, restrained, and entirely without anger toward the man who left her. That’s worse for him than any accusation would have been and the film knows it.
Then It Becomes a Chase
After the outbreak the film turns into a pursuit across London with two children, a sniper, a medical officer and a helicopter pilot.
Everything specific about it is gone. The lie stops mattering because Don becomes infected, which converts a character with a moral problem into a monster with a personal grudge, and the film loses its subject. Turning Don into a monster lets the writers off the hook, and the film loses me with it. I’d much sooner have watched him keep lying to his kids with the city falling apart around them. The film stages the pursuit competently and the London locations are superb, with empty streets and an unsettling sense of a city that was cleared instead of destroyed. It’s not the film that began twelve minutes earlier.
The film also turns the children into a plot device instead of people. Andy is a carrier. That makes him valuable, and from that point the film is about protecting an asset instead of about a family that doesn’t know what its father did.
Rose Byrne and Jeremy Renner are both better than the roles they’re given. Scarlet is a medical officer who works out the genetic problem and then exists to carry a child through tunnels, and Doyle is a sniper with a conscience and about six lines of interiority.
Don’t resolve a moral problem by making the character a monster. Infection removes Don’s ability to choose. That retroactively ends the story the film was telling. If your protagonist’s dilemma is interesting, protect it. The temptation to escalate is what kills more second acts than anything else. A child who becomes valuable stops being a child in the story’s terms. The moment a person is an asset, every scene about them is logistics.
Ask whether your second half is still about what your first half established. If a synopsis of the opening no longer describes the film, something has been abandoned.
The Firebombing
The military response is the film’s other strong idea and it’s delivered without any editorial framing. Containment fails, the order goes out for selective targeting, the snipers can’t distinguish infected from civilians in a crowd, and the order becomes to shoot everybody.
The sequence from the sniper’s scope is the most uncomfortable in the picture. Jeremy Renner watches through a rifle sight while people who are clearly not evil kill people who are clearly not infected. The film gives him a choice, he makes it, and he spends the rest of the picture as a deserter.
The scope sequence is the hardest thing in the film to watch and the part I respect most. Renner gets a view through a rifle sight and an order, with no speech to soften either one, and that disturbed me more than any of the infected did.
What follows is the firebombing of the district, and then gas, and the film shoots the escalation as procedure. There’s no villain in a room ordering atrocity, there are officers following a contingency that was written down in advance.
That’s a considerably sharper piece of political filmmaking than the film gets credit for, arriving in 2007 with American forces administering a reconstruction zone in a foreign capital. The zone itself is well imagined. Returnees are processed, assigned apartments, given identity cards and told the district is safe, and the film spends enough time on the bureaucracy to make the collapse feel like a system failing instead of a plot beginning.
The Helicopter
A pilot lowers his aircraft into a field of infected and uses the rotor blades, and the sequence runs for a good while.
It’s the most-remembered shot in the film and I can’t decide whether it’s the best or the worst thing in it. It’s enormously effective and I enjoyed every second, and it’s also exactly the kind of set piece Boyle’s film would never have staged.
That tension is the film in miniature. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is a considerably flashier director than Danny Boyle was on the first one, and the flash produces images nobody forgets and a picture that means less.
The ending is the correct one and the film doesn’t soften it. The children reach France, the infection reaches France with them, and a shot of Paris establishes that the containment has failed entirely.
That shot also answers the first film. The original ended with a handful of survivors spotted by an aircraft and the suggestion that the rest of the world was intact, and this one closes that door in about four seconds of silent footage.
A set piece that everybody remembers can still be the wrong scene. Ask what it costs the tone you established. The test is whether the moment could appear in a different film with a different subject. If it could, it’s a spectacle instead of a consequence. Directorial flourish and thematic seriousness are usually in tension. Choose deliberately and accept the trade. End on the failure. Reaching safety and bringing the thing with you is the strongest available conclusion for any story about containment.
Should you watch 28 Weeks Later?
Yes. The first thirty minutes and the military material are as strong as anything in either picture, and they’re the reason it gets a 7 from me. It loses the rest because it takes a man with months of rehearsed lies, lets his wife forgive him, and then turns him into a chase monster so the second half can become somebody else’s action movie. I’d take the film the opening promised over the one it turned into.
