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28 WEEKS LATER (***) |
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Movie Review by:
Jim "Good Old JR" Rutkowski
Directed by: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Written by: Eugene Lopez-Lavigne, Jesus Olmo, Juan Carlos
Fresnadillo
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineau Jr, Robert Carlyle
Running time: 91 minutes
Released: 05/11/07
Rated R for strong violence and gore,
language & some sexuality. |
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"...this is a bleak
cinematic likeness of what is, I suspect, our most
potent of contemporary suspicions: that to give in to
compassion, to humanity, to love is a death sentence."
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And so as the world seemingly renews its
dedication to taking itself straight to hell, even our horror movies
suddenly seem less like mere entertainments and more like real-life
fever dreams, reflecting back to us our own ugliness, our own shock
at how everything has reeled out of control, our own arrogance in
thinking that we can control the deep complexity of everyday chaos.
Call it 28 Weeks Later, but it’s the five years on from the
horrifying 28 Days Later that have made all the difference: we are
all immeasurably more anxious and on edge post-Katrina, mired in
Iraq, nervous about tainted spinach and poisoned pet food and dying
honeybees and April heat waves (as our friends in Europe just
endured). And all that gnawing fear and nervous unease is roiling
through this chillingly matter-of-fact nightmare of a movie, like a
CNN breaking-news report that just hasn’t broken yet.
It’s six months after the Rage virus has been eradicated in England,
or so humanity’s overblown sense of superiority over sneaky and
capricious Nature is quick to believe: as if something so
inherently, depressingly human as anger-gone-viral could ever be
destroyed. The last of the ferocious, mindless Rage zombies has long
since died of starvation in the quarantined U.K., and now a NATO
force has moved in to start the massive cleanup -- burning millions
of bodies, for starters -- and prepare the way for British refugees
to start returning home.
There’s no messing around in the snappish, clipped pace director
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo takes up, taking over from 28 Days Later’s
Danny Boyle (though Boyle remains onboard as a producer). Folks
start arriving home in “District One,” a safe zone established on
the Isle of Dogs in London. Engineer Don (Robert Carlyle: Eragon,
The Beach), who survived the Rage plague in ways that haunt his
sleep, meets his kids (Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton) as
they return from Spain, where they’d been fortunate enough to be
vacationing when infection broke out; the family reunion is uneasy.
Army doctor Scarlet (Rose Byrne: The Dead Girl, Marie Antoinette) is
deeply troubled about what she’s seeing in the blood samples in her
microscope. American soldier Doyle (Jeremy Renner: The Heart Is
Deceitful Above All Things, S.W.A.T.) is uncomfortable with this
strange duty babysitting returnees in this desolate city.
Oh, didn’t I mention? That NATO force is headed up by the American
military, and
Fresnadillo (who also cowrote the script with a handful of other
writers) doesn’t beat around the bush -- or around the Bush -- with
his potent imagery of American uniforms swaggering through a foreign
city, and later -- as everything starts going to hell, the Rage
virus springs up again, and containment measures must be taken --
shooting wildly and randomly into crowds of civilians. Now, this is
not an anti-American thing but a cold, bald recognition of the
terrible fact that distinguishing between friendlies and enemies is
not so easy as perhaps it used to be (especially when the
battleground is one of our own engineering), whether in a
Rage-plagued London where running people may be either escaping mad
zombies or mad zombies themselves, or in an England in which the
young men who turn bus-and-subway-bomber are the young men who live
next door, or, you know, elsewhere. The desperate unknowableness of
whom to trust, and the sad authenticity of how fragile trust is to
begin with, and how we so typically are the cause of its loss: this
takes even more devious twists here, 28 Weeks Later, than it did in
the first film. Five years later, this is a bleak cinematic likeness
of what is, I suspect, our most potent of contemporary suspicions:
that to give in to compassion, to humanity, to love is a death
sentence.
For among Fresnadillo’s startling, all-too-familiar imagery --
soldiers with gun in airports; the utter eeriness of major city
deserted and garbage-strewn -- is what may be the most unsettling
moment of the film. It’s a kiss, a simple kiss, one of the most
ironically compelling screen kisses ever: in this world of
blood-and-saliva-borne infection, it becomes a thing of horror,
taking away the most simple, most necessary comfort we can take when
the world goes to hell. It’s the most dreadful, most unforgettable
moment in a dread-inspiring, haunting film. |
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28 WEEKS
LATER © 2007 20th Century Fox Distribution
All Rights Reserved
Review © 2007 Alternate Reality, Inc. |
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