Review: 28 Weeks Later

I just watched this for the first time because Left 4 Dead put me in a zombie movie mood.

And goddamn, what a fucking disappointment. This movie seriously pissed me off. I'm still angry sitting here thinking about it. It had a pretty cool premise, the US army reestablishing a colony on Britain after the infection died off. Unfortunately, the movie is really short, cause we're already at about the halfway mark by the time the infection comes back. That's just not enough, especially since this is a sequel, meaning we're expecting things to be bigger and better. For the most part, this didn't happen. And they had all the ingredients to make a great sequel.

First off, we're supposed to buy that these two dumb kids can sneak out of the safe zone. The level of military incompetence in this movie is truly a wonder to behold, it's fucking everywhere. And seriously, if these kids were real, they wouldn't fucking risk their lives going out to their old house, the area's got damn zombies. I'd be happy to stay in my cozy penthouse or whatever the fuck their dad had going. The girl apparently went back to pack her lame ass shoes or something, dumb.

Then, when they find the infected mom and bring her in, we're supposed to buy that the dad, Mr. Carlyle, has the handy dandy all access keycard and can sneak around like fucking Sam Fisher to get in undetected and see his wife. Again, absolute military idiocy. What kind of military gives a civilian caretaker access to a medical bio hazard quarantine?

So he goes and kisses her all sloppily and gets her saliva, which is icky. Then he gets infected and attacks her. This is odd, because this is the only known case of one infected attacking another infected. In every other instance in the movie, the infected are all running together merrily as one big horde, never attacking each other. How strange.

Later, the military stupidly sticks the civilians all together in one big warehouse for their own safety. And locks it, with one cheap ass padlock. Ok, whatever. However, their brilliant containment plan is somewhat flawed, because this warehouse apparently has a back door which is not locked, and unluckily gets accessed by the infected Mr. Carlyle. Great, all the innocent civilians are locked in a room where they can all get infected together. What the fuck movie? Why do you make yourself so damn stupid and nonsensical?

So everything goes to shit and Doyle the Delta sniper comes to rescue them. Cool, this is getting interesting. But then they run into another army sniper who begins sniping at them. Now, this is where they again lost me. Instead of getting on his radio and saying "Whoa whoa, stop shooting at us, we're not infected!" Doyle shoots the sniper. Wait, what? Would a US army sniper really shoot another US army sniper in cold blood? This didn't make any sense.

Now, there were a few things I liked. One was the helicopter chopping up a bunch of infected with the rotor, that was pretty awesome.

Later on, they get stuck in a car to escape a gas attack. Now, I'm not really sure that getting in a car, closing all the vents and breathing through your T-shirt would really protect you from a gas attack, but we'll let that slide. They see that there are gas mask soldiers coming to torch shit with flamethrowers, and the car won't start. So Doyle decides to get out and push. This leads to him getting burned alive. This was really dumb. Nonsensical. Why didn't he just get out and show the guys with flamethrowers that he wasn't infected? Then he wouldn't have been toasted. Or hell, he could've gotten out and shot them all with his rifle, which he happily did before to the sniper. No logic at all. Just a cheap death to shock the audience, after making us like the guy.

Now we come to the worst part of the movie for me, the nightvision trek through the subway. This was fucking excruciating to watch. Some ppl actually said this was "artistic" but I don't see anything artistic about seeing everything in green night vision while being whirled around like in the Blair Witch Project. I go to the movies to be entertained and this was not entertaining in the least.

This scene also ended a very problematic element of the movie for me, the dad character as some sort of main villain. Sorry, but this whole thing didn't seem like a good idea. I prefer my zombie hordes to be, well, zombie hordes. Just faceless masses of death. The introduction of a boss zombie like the dad was lame and really took away from the sort of realism that the first film achieved, IMO.

So yea, this film was a huge disappointment, since I really liked the first film. While that was dark, this just seemed pointlessly retarded, especially the cheap deaths of some main characters. Left me feeling full of rage, you could say.