When 28 Weeks Later pauses for a moment in its full-long flight to gawk closely at death, it feels a little like someone's kicked you in the marble bag. It doesn't set new bars for gore or atrocity, but it does give immense emotional and visceral gravity to its mayhem. Better, the picture goes places you wouldn't expect it to go but with good reason to go there. Dig just a little under the surface and find, almost at the same time, sticky commentary on how and why terrorists are bred from otherwise docile stock and, that much stickier, suggestions about the extent to which intimate family dynamics are built on aggression, fear, and the inability to let things in the past stay buried no matter what lip service is paid to absolution. The pleasures of 28 Weeks Later are multifold for the fanboy looking for a fix but perhaps more so for the sociologist looking for toeholds in our popular culture. Rose Byrne plays Major Scarlet (her name possibly a joke at the expense of the gore), the ranking American medical officer who fulfills her role as disastrous peacenik without once sacrificing herself on any camp pyres. Hicks manqué: sensitive man-of-action placed in the unenviable position of shepherding civilians to a promise of safety. Jeremy Renner's Doyle, a Delta sniper asked early on to stop drawing distinctions in his targets, makes a fine Cpl. In an end-of-the-world opening in what only appears to be night (it's the first of several brilliant reversals), we see how a fissure develops in Don's marriage to wife Alice (Catherine McCormack), and of how that stress fracture becomes the foundation for the rest of the picture's relationships and politics. Repatriation and reconstruction have begun six months after the outbreak of the first film's "rage virus," reuniting two kids, Tammy (future superstar Imogen Poots) and Andy (Harry Potter-named Mackintosh Muggleton), with their tightly-wound da', Don (Robert Carlyle). It's impossible to not compare it to the years and tens of thousands of fatalities since the declaration of "mission accomplished" when the picture begins with the reassurance that everything's peachy in dead-as-a-doornail England. The triumph of the picture, though, is that it's as succinct and eloquent as a heart attack as a parable of the Iraq War (popularly called "The War in Iraq," a subtle semantic distancing technique particularly trenchant to this discussion), it's all about aftermath and occupation. was saddled with ambition that exceeded its reach and, in Danny Boyle, a director who not only disdained the genre but has otherwise proven himself a grade-A tool as well, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's sequel 28 Weeks Later is brutally graceful in its vision of a nuclear family's dissolution as the metaphor for a broader, collective unrest.
Screenplay by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, E.L. Starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Idris Elba
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