by Nicholas Cockayne

Created on: June 22, 2007

WARNING: SPOILERS

I've got to say that 28 Days Later, the original title in the sequence is one of my favourite films. So it was with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation that I went to see 28 Weeks Later, hoping that it was capable of living up to the original, worried that it couldn't. I was right to be worried.

In the original film the Rage virus took over the UK spreading until there was only a few struggling survivors holding out against the zombie-like infected. The film opens in what is undoubtedly it's best scene with Don, his wife, and a few other survivors sitting down to a meal in a barricaded farm house. When a small child comes a knocking, you know it's not long before the Infected are close behind, hungry for their meal too. When they break in Don and his wife are trapped in a room, he has to choose between trying to save his wife and certainly dying, or leaving her and running for his life. He runs. And this is what the film is really all about. It's not the zombies, the gore, the special effects, that are the star of the film here; it's the human story of hard decisions. It's a film about telling your kids that you couldn't save their mother, and then having to confront the truth when she is found alive. It's a film about human morality under pressure, of whether you'd shoot a child who may or may not be infected because you're ordered too, of whether you'd risk your life to save others. The Infected zombies create the stage and the situation upon which the film is set, but it is the human dilemma upon which it turns. This film almost punishes you for having ever thought that there are simple heroic characters in cinema, instead of complex individuals like in real life.

Robert Carlyle is perfectly cast as the family man Don, forced to make some horrible survival decisions, and it was to my surprise that he spent half the film as a zombie. Carlyle's acting skill allows him to show all the facial emotion you would expect from someone in his situation, and the scene where he becomes infected should get him an Oscar in my opinion; it's brilliantly acted, and utterly, utterly, horrifying. The rest of the cast isn't bad, especially Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton (what a name!) as Don's children, Tammy and Andy. It's unfortunate that Rose Byrne provides a lack lustre Mjr. Scarlett Ross, and that the American troops are protrayed as nothing more than gungho stereotyes; but with strong acting from the rest this can be overlooked.

Which brings

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