You know, there’s something about the modern movie theater experience that always gets me in the mood for cruelty, blood, mass carnage and death - and a high body count, starting with the really stupid people. So I should have been in the perfect state of mind to enjoy the return of the Rage virus in “28 Weeks Later”.. but after watching it now three times (once in a theater, twice not), I suspect that it’ll be a far better film on DVD.

This review is going to be heavily spoiler-laden, so if you haven’t seen the movie and want to be surprised, don’t click through.

In case you haven’t seen Danny Boyle’s excellent film “28 Days Later” (2002), the back story centers on a deadly virus in England. At the Cambridge Primate Research Centre, scientists experiment on apes to discover the root cause of anger, violent personality disorders, etc., with the ultimate aim of creating a drug to “cure” antisocial anger. As part of the research, the researchers create “Rage”: an “inhibitor” that renders its subject permanently, absolutely, blindly psychotic - mindless, cannibalistic, and insanely violent. As one of the researchers says in the original film, “In order to cure, you must first understand.”

All goes well until a group of animal activists break into the center to free the apes, not knowing anything about Rage. The virus is set loose into the public, and in the next 28 days decimates Britain - resulting in sixty million people either infected or slaughtered by the infected. The story of the first film centers on a small handful of survivors in a deserted (except for infecteds) London, not knowing whether the epidemic was worldwide or confined to England, struggling to survive and make sense of their horrific isolation.

“28 Days Later” ends on a number of bittersweet notes. By the end, we know that it’s not worldwide - that civilization continues beyond Rage, and that Britain was likely quarantined by the global community. We also know that the “answer to infection” is very simple: starvation. These aren’t undead zombies here - they’re diseased, but very living, people who need food and water to survive, and who no longer have the rational capacity to raise livestock or grow crops or even effectively forage for food. When ready food runs out, the clock on Rage will start ticking.

“28 Weeks Later” actually starts about two weeks before the first film, in a country cottage sheltering a half dozen or so barricaded Rage survivors. A very Anne Frank situation, these people are running out of food and time as the world comes apart outside. Don and Alice, a married couple whose children were in Spain when the outbreak began, are lamenting their fates when a horde of infected find and slaughter the group. Only Don survives, by running like hell and abandoning his wife to death or infection.

The story then picks up six months after the end of the first film. An American-led NATO operation controls what’s left of Britain, cleaning up the mess (as you can imagine, a mass open-air graveyard of diseased corpses is a giant biohazard situation) and trying to make London habitable again. The last healthy survivors of the epidemic (presumably including Jim, Selene and Hannah) were located, rescued, quarantined and released two months ago; the last known infected starved to death four months ago. And now Britons caught overseas when Rage happened are coming home, relocated to “District One” - a tightly-controlled military sector in the heart of London (ala Iraq’s Green Zone), the safe zone and staging area for cleaning up the rest of the city.

Don, now a building manager in District One, is trying to build a new life - an effort greatly helped by the arrival of his daughter Tam (Imogen Poots) and son Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) from a refugee camp in Spain. Of course, they want to know what happened to their mother. He buries his secret by telling them that he saw Alice killed by the infected, a story that holds together.. until she turns up. Alive.

Alive, sane, reasonably healthy - and carrying Rage in her bloodstream. And very capable of transmitting it.

Before long, the second Rage outbreak begins, complete with all the blood and carnage and death of the first one. London once again descends into complete chaos as the military repeatedly tries and fails to contain the situation. Meanwhile, the chief U.S. Army medical officer (Rose Byrne) must get Tam and Andy - who may have inherited their mother’s resistance to Rage - out of London before the military completes “Code Red”, the scorched-earth failsafe plan for preventing the disease from spreading beyond Britain.

Okay, enough of that crap.

I didn’t really walk into “28 Weeks” with particularly high hopes. Sequels don’t usually have great track records for quality, especially sequels to surprise hits. No one seriously expected “28 Days Later” to be the hit it was - a relatively low-budget sci-fi/horror indie film with a cast of unknowns, done by the director best known for “Trainspotting” - but not only did it make a lot of money, it won a half-dozen awards and launched the career of Cillian Murphy (Scarecrow from “Batman Begins”). Surprise hits usually happen because the films were allowed to be great; little pressure, pet projects, freedom to take risks. But when sequel time comes around, the thing’s a financial investment vehicle instead of a film. So I just hoped that the accountants and lawyers didn’t screw the film up too badly.

None of the cast of the first film came back, but that doesn’t hurt the story. After all, sixty million people were affected by the Rage epidemic; there were plenty of other stories to tell than Jim and Selene’s. The story of Don and Alice makes for a deeply compelling and chilling film opening, a different angle on the “what it takes to survive” theme. “28 Weeks” starts in exact counterpoint to the ending of “28 Days”: where Jim nearly sacrificed his life to return for Selene and Hannah, Don ran away and now lives with his cowardice. Both films are fundamentally about human nature stripped to its core, making the first few minutes of “28 Weeks” one of the best horror sequences I’ve seen in years.

There are plenty of good things to be said about “Weeks”. For the most part, it’s well-written; it has some plot problems (I’ll get to that in a minute), but the characters are well done and the pacing is solid. The story doesn’t lag. The general setup is believable. If you can get past a handful of absurdities, the first hour of the film is a lot of fun.

The Babe Quotient (BQ) of “28 Weeks” is fairly high, simultaneously one of the best and worst aspects of the movie. Rose Byrne does a wonderful job playing tough-Army-chick-with-a-hint-of-vulnerability Scarlet, the chief U.S. Army medical officer in Britain. And at the risk of sounding like a pervert, I thought Imogen Poots (as Tam) was simply stunning - yeah, she was born the same year I graduated high school, but her eyes are incredible. That girl’s going to grow up into a gorgeous woman.

The rest of the cast does a great job as well, from Robert Carlyle as guilt-ridden father Don and Catherine McCormack as Rage-carrier Alice, to Jeremy Renner as an Army sniper who goes AWOL during the collapse of London rather than opening fire on uninfected civilians as ordered. What’s wrong with “28 Weeks” has nothing to do with the actors or characters.

A major factor that kept “28 Days Later” from being a George Romero rehash was that the infection/zombie threat wasn’t the story, but only the context. The story was a touching human one between Jim and Selene, interspersing action sequences with real human emotion and conflict; “28 Days” was the story of people forced to confront their basic natures, and to either succumb to despair or surrender to hope. The characters grew and changed and relationships formed and developed. It made the film worth watching.

“Weeks”, on the other hand, starts going down that road and then gives up and becomes a go-go-go action chase. After the second outbreak begins, no personal conflicts are examined or relationships developed. No deeper themes (such as that with the soldiers in “Days”) are penetrated. It’s just a straight “get them out of London or else” plot, dependent on a long sequence of succeeding situations that leave the characters with no time to stop and think about what they’re doing or why. The characters of “Days” had nothing but time.

The other major problem in “Weeks” is the plot. The more I think about it, the more I think that different writers wrote the beginning and end of this script. The first act introduces a handful of basic and compelling human conflicts, which develop up to a certain point.. and then it seems as though the writers painted themselves into a corner. Suddenly the story takes a totally different tone and much of the first-act buildup gets jettisoned. Many of the plot turns from that point forward are built on points ranging from implausible to utterly ridiculous:

• Rose Byrne is beautiful, but she’s 28 years old; she plays the commanding NATO medical officer onsite at the worst medical/biological disaster to hit the human race since the Black Death. She looks very much out of her depth. It wouldn’t have been so bad if her relative inexperience had been addressed - in fact, that could have been a wonderful subplot - but no one seems to notice or care that they’re taking orders from someone barely old enough to be a hospital resident intern. (Early on, she comments that no one told her that children were being admitted into London. That could have *so* easily been developed into a highly effective “I have to defend my authority” story point.)
• While the reinfection vector (carrier Alice) is totally plausible, the actual method of reinfection was just plain stupid. Again, worst biological disaster in centuries, possibly all human history. Heavily guarded, military-controlled medical center. The first survivor found in months, known to have the virus and to be contagious, strapped to a gurney and sealed in the highest level of quarantine. Even so, a civilian with no official military access whatsoever waltzes right in and gets close enough for physical contact. Give me a break.
• At one point, the characters are hit with some sort of unnamed chemical weapon and hold their shirts to their noses and mouths to protect themselves. The whole point of this whole military exercise is to kill everyone and fast - that’s nerve gas, something a bit more potent than can be shielded against with a house fire smoke remedy.
• Later in the film, for just a few moments, we get a shot of an infected who has been massively injured. His right side is completely ripped away. Yet he’s still on his feet and running: huh? These aren’t zombies, people - they’re not undead.

And the less said about Don’s ultimate fate, the better. The other points simply irritated me, but that one insulted me. Patently ridiculous and by far the worst plot hack in the entire film.

These little points start cropping up at about the halfway point, which is why I think a different writer took over for some reason. Maybe they couldn’t figure out a plausible way to reignite infection (though I can think up a few ways right now). Or maybe an early draft of the script wasn’t “safe” enough (i.e. “youth oriented”, action-driven, etc.) to satisfy the studio money men. Who knows?

Again, not an awful movie. But not a particularly good one, either. The impression I got was that the writers looked over all the reviews for “28 Days Later” and tried to come up with a movie that mimicked what people seemed to think about it.

Tons of blood and violence? Check! Eye gouging? Check! People saying “It’s all fucked”? Check! Shaky camera? Oh, you know that’s a big check! Women and children in jeopardy? Check check check check. Lots of closeup of infected eyes? SUPERCHECK! Volume cranked up to ridiculously high levels, even louder than the original? Hot damn, that check goes all the way up to eleven!

More than anything else, though, what amused me about “28 Weeks Later” was the ending. Not the very ending, mind you - the last shots were very predictable, surely setting up the third film (”28 Months Later”). No, I’m talking about the final climax.

The surest sign that a writer has run out of ideas is that the female protagonist victim-in-waiting finally gets her hands on a gun in the third act. It’s the hallmark of cheap melodrama everywhere. When the plucky lass, throughout the story defended by gallant manly men against unimaginable evil, finally gets her hands on a gun, you know that the lights will probably go out and she’s going to go all Clarice Starling/Buffalo Bill. It’s one of the great modern dramatic cliches - the plot device the writer uses once all hope is gone from his heart. (I say “he” in the hope that most women writers would know better.)

And that’s exactly what happens in “28 Weeks Later”, right down to the pitch darkness and unearthly green night vision. The plucky lass gets a gun and goes to town.

The great cliche is the best the writers could come up with.

It sounds like I hated the movie, I know. I didn’t. Not really. I wasn’t even really disappointed, because I expected it to be worse. So you could say that I was marginally pleasantly surprised that I didn’t suffer a lot more.

I’ll probably watch “28 Months Later”; it has the potential to be a great film, making “Weeks” the awkward transitory second act. Second acts tend to be clunky and primarily functional (see Back To The Future 2, Empire Strikes Back, etc.) compared to first and thirds, so in the context of the full story arc “Weeks” may seem a lot better than it does today.

In the meantime, for me at least, “28 Weeks Later” helps me better appreciate “28 Days Later” - a far superior film, made when lower expectations permitted the writers the luxury of building a truly intelligent story.

Posted by Rob on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 10:11 pm.