Cultural Review: 28 Weeks Later

First off, I absolutely loved 28 Days Later. It had all the gore and terror expected of a zombie flick while simultaneously making the entire scenario seemed real. One could only speculate at which characters would live or die... you got the feeling that if there was an actual zombie attack, this is how it would happen. 28 Weeks Later had the same gory action scenes, realistic zombies (I realize how ridiculous this sounds), and disposable characters but it lacked both the original’s flair for the dramatic and the compulsion to empathize with the characters.

***Spoiler Warning*** (not big ones, but still…)

In a way this movie annoyed me because it was reminiscent of that garbage, corrupted-because-you-know-Tom-Cruise-is-insane, abomination that was War of the Worlds. In both movies major children/young adult characters whine about their emotions and their family problems in the face of global catastrophe. Look, I understand that you hear your mom and dad yelling at night and I’m sure it can’t be fun to have zombies snack on your mom but you really need to look at the big picture. The world is ending and your personal problems need to take a backseat to the ultimate goal of human survival. In 28 Weeks Later, two kids single-handedly decimate both England (again) and France (not really a big loss in my book) because they decide to brave the zombie-infested streets of London in order to find a picture of their mother. Not their actual mother…. but a picture of her. Was it worth it? I’m guessing the majority of continental Europeans would have thought not.

Not that the kids are entirely to blame. One could fault their father who narrowly escapes zombies in the film’s opening scene in which he sacrifices his wife for his own survival… now that’s the kind of drama which made the first film so enjoyable. Unfortunately he too puts his emotional weakness ahead of the fate of mankind. When his obviously infected wife is dragged into the safe zone, her loving husband breaks into her holding room, flaunting laughably bad security measures. I’ll just pose this as a question: you saw your wife get chewed up by zombies created by a saliva-born virus and you see her lying, infected, strapped down to a gurney. You have two options:

A. Accept the inevitable, start a blog, pour out your heart online, and join an online support group for people who have lost loved ones to zombies.

OR

B. Make out with her lifeless body (zombie sloppy seconds be damned), catch the rage virus, viciously maul your wife better than your incompetent zombie brethren, and spread zombie fever to continental Europe.

See if you can guess which one the father chooses. All this talk of having zombies in your family leads us to the one, all-important rule about surviving zombie attacks. If your father becomes a zombie... you have to kill him. I’m sorry but sometimes it comes down to this. Of course the kids putter around holding on to that nonexistent hope that their father will suddenly not want to eat them and, of course, this annoyed me.

Ultimately (and in spite of what I just wrote) I thought the movie was well done… just not as well done as the original. The soundtrack was cool and I can never get enough of those panning shots of a desolate and decimated London. Here’s hoping they don’t let a bunch of whiny drama queens ruin the inevitable third segment of this trilogy.