28 Weeks Later (2007) Review

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.

What it gets absolutely right is the opening, the sound design and one sequence involving a helicopter that nobody who has seen it has forgotten. It is also the rare sequel that is willing to be considerably nastier and considerably less hopeful than the original picture that it has been asked to follow on from a full five years after the fact, 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 whole thing. Don has perhaps four seconds, the door is coming apart, and he chooses himself. The film does not 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 is 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 is 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 is happening.

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 could not reach her. That is the film’s real engine and it is 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, which is about the least apocalyptic motive anybody could have written down, and it ends up destroying an entire city.

The children have arrived from abroad, have no idea what happened, and their father is a man with a job, an apartment and a story he has 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 genuinely strong. A man has to face the person he abandoned and she does not 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 genuine act of love and the thing that restarts the apocalypse.

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, which is 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.

The pursuit is competently made and the London locations are superb, with empty streets and a genuinely unsettling sense of a city that was cleared instead of destroyed. What it is not is the film that began twelve minutes earlier.

The children also become a plot device instead of people. Andy is a carrier, which makes him valuable, and from that point the film is about protecting an asset instead of about a family that does not know what its father did.

Rose Byrne and Jeremy Renner are both better than the roles they are 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.

The Firebombing

The military response is the film’s other strong idea and it is delivered without any editorial framing. Containment fails, the order goes out for selective targeting, the snipers cannot 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 infected are killed by people who are clearly not evil. The film gives him a choice, he makes it, and he spends the rest of the picture as a deserter.

What follows is the firebombing of the district, and then gas, and the escalation is filmed as procedure. There is no villain in a room ordering atrocity, there are officers following a contingency that was written down in advance.

That is 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 is the most-remembered shot in the film and it is either the best or the worst thing in it depending on your tolerance. It is enormously effective, it is also exactly the kind of set piece the original 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 does not 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 quietly 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.

Should you watch 28 Weeks Later?

Yes, for the first thirty minutes and the political material. A man who abandons his wife and has months to rehearse a lie, an army administering a reconstruction it cannot control, and a second half that becomes somebody else’s chase film.

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