28 Weeks Later..

Viewer Rating:Pandabat has rated 28 Weeks Later.. rating: 1 Star

It's 28 weeks since the events of "28 Days Later", the US Army has arrived and bailed what's left of Britain out again, and surviving civilians are now being set-up with new living quarters in a safe zone within London. Two children, Tammy and Sam, are reunited with their father, Don (Robert Carlyle), who must tell them that their mother, Alice (Catherine McCormack), was lost during a frantic attack by a group of those infected with the rage virus (this attack actually opens the movie and is probably it's high point). On an unauthorised trip to their home outside the safe zone, the kids surprisingly find their mother hiding out there and she is taken into quarantine by the military whereupon it is found out that, while she is a carrier for the virus, she is immune to its effects. So far, so good but before any research into her biological uniqueness can be undertaken, reason decides to leave the plot for a while and through simply unbelievable security access and risky actions that not even an AIDS-ridden hooker would embark upon, the Rage virus becomes active once again in the population. If you can get beyond this point without simply leaving in disbelief then what remains is typical of any movie of this genre. A small rag-tag group must escape the infected through guile, toughness and sacrifice. Many have pointed out the high gore level in the movie but for me it was all pretty tame. Indeed most of the time the camera is shaking far too much to make anything meaningful out of what is happening up on screen - for me that kind of defeats the point of watching a movie but no one's paying me to direct the movies... yet! While parallels can also be drawn between US actions in the movie and those in real life in Iraq, etc., they're not central to the movie and so what is it's message. All I can come up with is that the perennially stupid should not be allowed to run lethal quarantine facilities and certainly allow equally thick people access to same. Personally, because I think the writers could have figured out a better way to get the virus going again and because there's nothing really new to it, I cannot recommend "28 Weeks Later". It's a sequel that we never really needed and, judging by the movie's ending, there is, at the very least, the possibility of more to come.

Review published on the 20 May 2007 18:32