A virus that goes quiet is still a virus. 28 Weeks Later builds its whole case on that idea, and the case still holds.
Trailer, via HDQualityTrailers.
Don Opens the Door
The film starts during the first outbreak. Don, his wife Alice, and four other survivors are holed up in a cottage outside London. A boy screams outside. They let him in. A horde of Infected has followed him.
As the Infected break through and kill the others, Don tells Alice to leave the boy. She refuses. She is cornered. Don runs, gets to a boat, and leaves her behind.
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directs, and co-wrote the script with Rowan Joffé, Enrique López Lavigne and Jesús Olmo. It runs 99 minutes. Robert Carlyle plays Don.
District One Looks Safe
Twenty-eight weeks on, most of the Infected have starved. US-led NATO forces move settlers into a protected zone in London. Don and Alice’s children, Tammy and Andy, arrive and are housed on District One, a guarded safe zone on the Isle of Dogs.
Tammy and Andy sneak out at dawn to their old home for family photographs. They find Alice alive, but ill. Soldiers take all three to an isolation unit, where the medical officer, Scarlet, finds that Alice carries the disease without symptoms.
Don visits her. He kisses her. He becomes infected and kills her. Then he goes on a rampage.
The cast is deep for this kind of film:
- Rose Byrne as Scarlet
- Jeremy Renner as Sergeant Doyle
- Harold Perrineau as Flynn
- Catherine McCormack as Alice
- Mackintosh Muggleton as Andy
- Imogen Poots as Tammy
- Idris Elba as General Stone
The Order to Kill Everyone
Scarlet decides the siblings’ genetic makeup may matter for a cure or vaccine, so she helps them escape. In the dark, infected and uninfected look the same. American troops are ordered to kill everyone.
Doyle, a sniper, refuses. He runs with Scarlet and the children while the US Air Force firebombs parts of London. Flynn, Doyle’s friend, arrives for extraction but will take only Doyle. Doyle will not leave the others.
On a $15 million budget, principal photography started in August 2006 and ran ten weeks. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland came back as executive producers, and Boyle shot second-unit footage used in parts of the opening. The film opened on 11 May 2007, a UK, US and Spanish co-production, distributed by 20th Century Fox in the UK and Fox Atomic in the US. It earned $72.3 million worldwide.
What the Film Gets Right
The infection logic is the sharpest weapon here. Don is not a monster. He is a guilty man who does one tender thing, and that is enough to end the safe zone. No villain required. The film earns that.
The military material is thinner. The Americans arrive as an occupying force with a plan, and the plan collapses on schedule, but the film rarely asks what the occupation was for. Doyle’s refusal to fire is the one soldier given a conscience worth watching.
The children are the weak link. They break protocol for photographs, and the film treats that as fate rather than a choice. It is the cheapest move in the script.
This paper’s view: the set pieces land, and the opening sequence is the best argument for the runtime. 28 Weeks Later is a tense, well-built disaster film with a great first act and a middle that never quite matches it.
The audience score is 6.6 out of 10.
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