The Big Whatsit

If there’s one horror movie that is pretty much sequel-proof, it’s 28 Days Later. Not only does the film have a very clear climax, its premise is one of absolute simplicity - there’s this virus that spreads across the population really quickly; once infected, the carriers are rage-fuelled zombies, who will kill mindlessly again, and again, and again. That’s about it. I thought it was an excellent little flick, stuffed with visceral thrills and a sly sense of humour, not to mention the fact that the infected were damn scary. Forget George A Romero’s lumbering automatons - these cats ran their bleeding hearts out for the chance to sink their teeth into you. Given the rate at which the virus spread, the odds were stacked against you, which is what made the first film so relentlessly exciting.

Clearly, I was wrong. 28 Days Later’s sequel takes the only logical path it could ever follow, and tells us the story of what happens next. Ditching Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris, 28 Weeks Later bears a kind of similarity to another sequel - Aliens, with its tale of an American military force occupying the area devastated previously by a seemingly unstoppable foe. Much like in James Cameron’s classic, the soldiers, armed to the teeth with weaponry, soon realise they’re no match for what’s out there and simply take their chances. Fans of allegory would also see a similarity with the USA’s occupation of Iraq, and I guess there’s something in that if you choose to look for it. For the rest of us, 28 Weeks Later is a timebomb of a film. We know that at any given moment, things will explode into bloody action, and there are various false starts before it finally happens. Needless to say, up until then it’s a really good movie, working on the fear and confusion of almost everyone thrust into this nightmare of a scenario. Afterwards, it isn’t too bad, though it takes enough liberties with its own plot and internal logic to rely rather heavily on the viewer’s goodwill, along with of course the scenes of the infected attacking humans being something we’ve all seen before.

28 Weeks Later has one of the best prologues I’ve ever seen in a horror film. Robert Carlyle, his wife, and a number of other survivors are holed up in a house, making dinner by candlelight, knowing the horrors that are taking place outside but utterly without a clue over what to do about any of it. Their progress takes place in near pitch black, illuminated only by the occasional candle, and there’s a blinding moment of horror when they have to open the door, and it turns out to be a sunny day. Everyone’s waiting to be attacked, and naturally they are, with the usual ferocity and lack of mercy we’ve come to expect from the infected. Carlyle’s character, Don, has the narrowest chance to save his wife, and instead he legs it, exclaiming ’shit, shit, shit’ as he is in turn pursued.

The action then moves to, er, 28 weeks later. The infected are believed to have all died, leaving Britain devastated and under conditions of extreme quarantine. The US Army that is tentatively clearing the streets has earmarked London’s Isle of Dogs as the starting point for repopulation. As soldiers look down from rooftops, civilians trickle back into the city. Among them are Don’s kids, the first children to return to Britain, and full of questions about what happened to their mum. Helped by kindly, if naive doctor, Scarlet (Rosie Byrne), the effort is to start again.

For a short time, a sense of uneasy peace settles over the movie. Don tearfully lies to his kids about seeing his wife become ‘one of them’ and then turns a blind eye when they somehow escape the heavily guarded living quarters, in search of their old house. What they find there turns out to be the catalyst for Rage to make its return, albeit in a way that defies all logic. The moment when this does happen is nasty, gritty and primitive, and within two minutes of the first infection, the carefully watched colony is on red alert. It takes no time at all for the virus to spread. Soon enough, people are fleeing in panic, and the soldiers watching from high, unable to distinguish between the infected and the clean, do what most people would, and start firing.

From there, ‘Weeks’ turns into a rather standard chase thriller, albeit one that takes in various sights of Londinium along the way. One of Days’ biggest selling points was its stark shots of a deserted capital. The sequel replicates this and revels in London’s desolation, throwing in various landmarks for good measure. The Gherkin, London Eye and Tower Bridge are shown in all their human-free glory, and there’s a particularly fine, timely moment set in New Wembley, complete with a wildly overgrown pitch.

I had Weeks chalked up as a rather decent slice of horror overall. Though it’s fair to suggest the film doesn’t do much that’s new, the infected are as reliably terrifying as in the first episode. Red-eyed, gore dripping down their chins and with a one-track mind, they’re a scary bunch for sure, and the movie packs their scenes in tight once they’ve been unleashed. I have read a number of highly critical comments about the way the action scenes are filmed - the handheld, jerky and quite bewildering camerawork that accompanies the Rage-fuelled attacks. It’s impossible to follow, but imagine all this is being told from your perspective. You wouldn’t be watching what takes place impassively, would you? It’s the confusing aspect of this filming that really makes it work. Everything’s gone to shit for these people, in a world that has been turned into hellish chaos. Highly effective, and looking much more as though it is being filmed by someone stood in the middle of the action, the filming of these scenes has the feel of something from a war zone documentary, which makes it all the more frightening.

However, the film isn’t without its problems, beginning with the point I made at the top of this blog. Was there any need for Days to bear a sequel? Obviously not, and though the production team does enough to try and turn their material into a credible piece of work, it’s all so unnecessary. Once the virus makes its mark, as surely it will, there’s only one direction the story is going to take - our heroes being pursued, and one by one picked off, until the climactic act. There’s a fantastic story unfolding in Weeks’ first act, one of betrayal and recrimination, but this is sacrificed in deference to the infected thrills to follow, and that’s a shame. A truly brave move would have been to save the onset of the virus until much, much later, making the film about humans slowly creeping back into their former world and growing ever securer… But this doesn’t happen, the plot eager to shove its monsters into the spotlight as soon as all the expositional odds and sods have been covered.

And then there are the plot holes, the inconsistencies. These riddle the story to such a degree that cinema audiences would have a perfect right to feel insulted at what they’ve had to accept. The one that cooks my noodle is the fact that at the film’s start, all the infected have died. But once the virus erupts in the Isle of Dogs, carriers start popping up everywhere once again, conveniently enough in the precise places where our heroes are currently fleeing through. Alongside this, the motives of the American army soon become rather vague once the trouble erupts. From being protectors of the people, the soldiers start shooting at them mindlessly, even the ones they know for a fact to be safe. Why on earth did they bother investing so heavily in London in the first place, if this is to be their response to the outbreak? Come to think of it, why would anyone in their right mind either think of letting civilians back into a site that is clearly unready, or be dumb enough to go there after escaping from what’s happened previously?

But it could have been much, much worse. Weeks isn’t bad. It isn’t in the same stadium of wrong as The Grudge II (slated for your pleasure here), neither does it attempt to do something truly stupid with its infected hoards, such as giving them an intelligent leader. That would have been horrendous. What we get is a well-made frightener that contains some truly good moments, manages to lay the scares on thick, the blood and snot even thicker, and is filmed with a beautifully messy attention to bloody detail. It’s a pity they didn’t do more. A flick as ace as its pithy prequel is hidden underneath the layers of a silly plot that takes itself too seriously, but it’s been ironed out to ensure viewers get their fair share of admittedly real-looking guts.