Britain, Year Zero
28 Weeks Later
National Review Online, May 15, 2007
Here’s the problem. This review was meant to be about 28 Weeks Later, the newly released sequel to the hugely successful 28 Days Later, but, quite frankly, there’s not a lot to say about it. Judged in its own right, 28 Weeks Later is nicely paced, reasonably exciting, competently made, and well acted (with Robert Carlyle, as so often, a stand-out). What’s more, it boasts a few thought-provoking moments, and has enough deaths-by-helicopter-blade to justify the price of admission alone. The difficulty is that it’s a sequel. It cannot just be judged in its own right. The awkward, inconvenient fact is that those 28 weeks (or should it be 24?) simply weren’t worth the wait.
To understand why 28 Weeks Later is, relatively speaking, such a disappointment, it’s necessary to take another look at its predecessor. That’s just as well, because 28 Days Later is a much more interesting movie — and much more fun to write about. Easily the most gripping horror film of the last decade, the most shocking thing about its 113 minutes is quite how good they are. Sure, 28 Days Later is relentless, fast-paced, and savage, but it also displays a depth, intelligence, and lyricism that would be surprising in almost any horror movie: To find these qualities in a zombie flick is little less than miraculous.
Yes, a zombie flick. Ghastly, primitive, and profoundly embarrassing, zombies are the Billy Carters of horror cinema’s already dysfunctional family. Conjured up by American pilferers of some of Haiti’s tallest tales, and given shape by racist fantasy, rock-bottom budgets, and bankrupt imaginations, these hollow-eyed, empty-headed hooligans have been shambling their way through movies for more than 70 years. They may have nothing to say, but their box-office persistence is eloquent testimony to the fact that the supposedly sub-human are not the only creatures to be thrilled by the sight of torn and bleeding flesh.
There have been exceptions, notably the spookily effective I Walked With a Zombie, but for the most part these films have been a disgrace, a bloody smear across the silver screen, dominated by brutal massacre, inarticulate and vicious stumblebums, and, in the case of some of the more recent efforts, the worst displays of table manners since George H. W. Bush threw up in Tokyo.
The titles of just a small portion of the zombie oeuvre (helpfully chronicled in Jamie Russell’s indispensable Book of The Dead) give the game away: At Twilight Come The Flesh-Eaters (apparently the only known example of homosexual zombie porn), Blood of Ghastly Horror, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Corpse Eaters, Curse of The Cannibal Confederates (Strom Thurmond’s “longevity” explained?), The Curse of The Doll People, Doctor Blood’s Coffin, Erotic Nights of The Living Dead (heterosexual zombie porn), I Eat Your Skin, Neon Maniacs, Orgy of The Dead (scripted by Ed Wood!), The Return of The Blind Dead, Zombie Holocaust, Zombie Bloodbath, Zombie Creeping Flesh, Zombie Flesh-Eaters, Zombie Lake (Nazis — a twofer!), you get the picture.
Compared with that drooling, lurching cinematic rabble, 28 Days Later wouldn’t have had to amount to much to be considered one of the better zombie movies, but its makers were more ambitious than that, something evidenced by the trouble that the film’s director, Trainspotting’s Danny Boyle, has taken to distance his film from the z-word. Well, he can say what he wants. 28 Days Later is steeped in modern zombie lore. Boyle’s zombies (oh Danny, that is what they are, even if they didn’t have to go through the whole dying thing first) are the result of infection (science awry, another familiar theme), rather than supernatural intervention, they chew on me and they tear at you, and they exist in a post-apocalyptic landscape that they themselves have created.
Superficially, the most obvious difference between Boyle’s vision and that of the principal zombie auteur, the legendary George A. Romero, is that Boyle’s zombies, unlike Romero’s lumbering slowpokes, can move very, very fast. Thus the violence in this movie is often depicted with flickering, jittery strobe-light glimpses of high-speed slaughter, panic and mayhem, giving it an almost hallucinatory feel, far closer to Spielberg’s Omaha Beach than anything witnessed on Romero’s slow-mo killing fields.
A much more important difference is the care with which both the ruined world (in this case, Britain) and its few surviving people are portrayed. When Boyle’s hero, Jim (a terrific performance by Cillian Murphy) awakes from the coma that allowed him to sleep safely through the days in which a virus, “the Rage,” changed almost all his countrymen into unreasoning, homicidal maniacs, he discovers an eerie London that is both still there yet has been lost beyond recall. For Boyle, the litter-strewn shopping mall that usually symbolizes the aftermath of zombie apocalypse is not enough. In a series of magical, beautifully shot images of the deserted British capital, he gives us vistas incorporating the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, all intact, all empty, their survival only underpinning what has been lost, their lonely, lovely splendor only emphasizing the desolation.
The use of beauty to contrast with, and therefore deepen, the impression of overwhelming catastrophe is an effective device. Boyle returns to it throughout the movie, above all in its astonishing, blistering climax. Its setting, the complacent grandeur of a centuries-old country house, and the role in which it plays in the narrative, shows us both the achievements of civilization and, by not-so subtle implication, its fragility.
Seemingly a last outpost of order in a land gone mad, the once aristocratic mansion has been occupied by a small detachment of troops who have succeeded in keeping the infected at bay. When that order, never more than an illusion, finally collapses it does so into a ferocious hide-and-seek between zombies, Jim, increasingly feral troops, and Selena and Hannah, two refugees promised to the soldiers by Major West, their commanding officer, as playthings and broodmares. The fact that this lethal drama unfolds in the midst of the remnants of a Palladian idyll only adds to the sense of moral and intellectual collapse.
All this is reinforced by the soldiers’ decision to kit out their prospective concubines (one little more than a child) in gorgeous red dresses, costume that both parodies and mourns an elegance that now only exists in memory. Add the irony that Jim has to resort to such extreme violence to save them that both Hannah and Selena think that their rescuer himself has become infected, and then throw in some extraordinarily effective soundtrack music, and the result is some of the most powerful footage in recent cinema.
That description might give the impression that 28 Days Later has succumbed to the dime store misanthropy that characterizes all too many zombie movies. You know how it goes. The surviving humans (who are usually bickering amongst themselves) contribute to their own destruction and, even if they don’t, they normally behave so appallingly that it’s difficult to feel much sympathy when they are eventually pulled to pieces by greedy zombie jaws. That’s also typically Romero’s approach, except that he tends to camouflage the misanthropy with community college leftism: Vietnam, inequality, consumerism, redneck brutality, blah, blah, yada, and blah.
Thankfully, Boyle takes a more innovative tack. The survivors of 28 Days Later are often sympathetically portrayed (in the case of Frank, the loveable cabbie, somewhat stereotypically so), and when they bicker and feud, we see that this is a fairly understandable response to the predicament in which they find themselves. The film’s most identifiable villains (if we put the homicidal maniacs to one side), those renegade soldiers, are shown to be the lonely, scared, and despairing victims of a nightmare that would erode the restraints of civilization within any man. Even their major’s own approach to the situation, a rapidly degenerating mish-mash of Sandhurst, Darwin, Broadmoor, and Nietzsche can be seen as initially well-intentioned, a desperate solution for desperate times even if, as becomes increasingly obvious, it seems more likely to lead to Salò than to salvation.
Perhaps the most striking thing about 28 Weeks Later (this time Boyle was an executive producer, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed) is the way that good intentions gone wrong are also crucial to its narrative development. After a suitably horrifying preamble, the story basically begins with American troops re-establishing some form of normality in what is left of the U.K. As was hinted in the later stages of the earlier movie, the infection was confined to the British Isles. It’s now thought (ah ha) to have burned itself out (basically the infected were too maddened by their disease to look after themselves and starved to death). The few Brits to have survived the ordeal, together with those of their compatriots fortunate enough to have been abroad while the Rage, uh, raged, are now rebuilding their lives under benign, but somewhat oppressive, US supervision in the former financial district around London’s Canary Wharf, now known as the Green Zone. Ah ha indeed.
In a West now living once again in dread of devastating attack that scenario is bound to raise disquieting questions of just what would be left of life and liberty after. Then again, once the Rage returns, such concerns come to seem petty, the trivial obsessions of pampered folk who have forgotten their Hobbes. Needless to say, Uncle Sam’s response to the reappearance of the virus is panicky, brutal, pointlessly bloody, and as ineffective as it is counter-productive. The Green Zone falls, as, perhaps, green zones are always doomed to do. But before you rush to dismiss (or praise) these sequences (thoroughly gripping cinema incidentally) as a predictably unfair/much-needed critique of the current disaster in Iraq, it’s important to note that the sight of the Stars-and-Stripes forlorn and trampled amid the wreckage of the Green Zone heralds neither peace, nor liberation, but is a symbol of the triumph of elemental, irrational barbarism.
So, as I wrote at the beginning, 28 Weeks Later does indeed have its thought-provoking moments, but it’s unable to run with them for very long. The rest of the movie is, as mentioned above, watchable enough, and, as sequels to high-concept movies go, it’s far above Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but the creators of this saga need to learn from the decline and fall of the monkey franchise. There’s already talk of 28 Months Later, but that would be a bad mistake. It’s time to put a stake through the heart of these particular zombies, Mr. Boyle.
Oops, wrong genre, but you know what I mean. Bullet in the head. Helicopter blade. Do what it takes.