28 Very Weaks Later

Spoiler Warning for 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later

I watched 28 Weeks Later tonight, hoping that it would surpass the original. Unfortunately, it suffered for the same reason that the original was ultimately unsatisfying. Both are great “zombie outbreak” films that are weakened by a deep hostility towards the military.

The original is a superior piece of work for 2/3rds of the film. Indeed, there is a dramatic cut-off point when the father of the teen-aged girl is infected, and the screen goes black. Then, struggling for an ending, it takes a jarring turn: the military camp that was to be the salvation of the survivors is being run by a sicko and he plans to conscript the females as sex slaves for his brutish troops.

The movie is struggling for an ending because the (probable) original ending was completely different, as revealed in the DVD extras. 28 Days Later was supposed to end with the male lead, Jim (Cillian Murphy) volunteering for an experiment that would restore the father’s sanity at the cost of becoming an “Infected” himself, and the movie ends as it began with him incapacitated in a bed and watching horrors on video screens like the monkey in the lab experiment. Unfortunately, this ending seemed absurd, given that a drop of infected blood can contaminate a person, so they came up with the military camp ending.

I don’t think the hostility towards the British armed forces is even intentional. As a tacked-on ending, it can’t have been the overall message that the director and writer were intending to send from the beginning. Rather, my suspicion is that it reflects the general view of the military held by the writer and the director.

Even if you can justify it to yourself as “that was just the case of one group of troops cut off from civilization, having spent a month shooting thousands of infected civilians until they don’t remember their old ethics”, the sequel is worse.

In 28 Weeks Later, an American Army General makes a tough decision to allow his troops to begin firing on a crowd because containment of the outbreak is top priority and trying to tell who is infected in the distance, in the dark, in the midst of a screaming mob makes smart determinations difficult. Okay, that’s understandable, if harsh. But then they go overboard with a “kill everything that moves” rule that insists on killing everyone even if you can be entirely certain they are not Infected. It gets so bad that at one point helicopters are shooting at a moving vehicle, as if one of these zombies could be driving!

The military exists to protect the populace. Most members of the military go to great lengths to save lives and would gladly give their own to protect others. Seeing them portrayed as uncaring thugs gets my hackles up.

In any case, it’s not a great movie. All too often, I am baffled at the poor planning in case of an outbreak. I realize that logical security measures would make it tough to get the movie going, but we’re talking about a film where the outbreak happens because the locked civilian shelter has an unlocked back door.

More fundamentally, why do the infected not attack other infected? If there’s no brain-eating involved, as there would in a zombie movie, but instead the infected are simply overcome with fury, what makes them discount getting angry at other Infected? And if you were enraged all the time, wouldn’t you burn out pretty quickly via high blood pressure?

And can you really survive an attack of liquid fire (napalm or similar) by going around a corner of a building?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...