Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
More
Anarchy in the UK
(28 Weeks Later, 5/21/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
A
recent paper by the British think-tank "Optimum Population Trust"
argues that having more than two children should be considered an "environmental
misdemeanor." The merits aside, I'm not sure which aspect of this
will discredit the environmental movement more—that the tone-deaf
blokes at the "Optimum Population Trust" thought they were
helping matters with this announcement, or that the worldwide media
leapt in to give it wide publicity (the conservative spin: "Green
Big Brother seeks to criminalize parenthood").
Sometimes it does seem as if the
green movement is a race between a healthy sense of responsibility and
misanthropic self-loathing.Very much in the latter category is Juan
Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to Danny (Trainspotting,
The Beach) Boyles' 2002 zombie-thriller 28 Days Later. To call Boyle's
movie "the original" is almost to abuse the sense of that
word: the script (written by Alex Garland) was just an extensive reworking
of Night of the Living Dead, with the action set in England and
the zombification blamed not on the "undead," but on the accidental
release of a bioweapon that causes madness and some highly unsightly
behavior. For all the talk about "rage virus", however, it
always seemed clear that the real pathogens infecting the planet were
the horrifying weaknesses and self-defeating virtues of Homo sapiens.
The sequel is set—yes—28
weeks after an initial outbreak has killed most of the population of
Britain. With all of the flesh-eaters having starved, an American-led
NATO force has begun the process of returning British citizens from
abroad. The first stop is a fortified "green zone" in London
called District One. There Don (Robert Carlyle) is reunited with his
two children (played by two young actors with the very Harry Potterish-sounding
names "Imogen Poots" and "Macintosh Muggleton").
District One is as clean and regimented
as the rest of Britain is a maggot-ridden mess. Alas, the reunion is
upstaged when Don's supposedly dead wife (Catherine McCormack) turns
up alive, thanks to an inexplicable immunity to the virus. A US Army
surgeon (Rose Byrne) devotes herself to keeping her and the children
safe, seeing them as the key to a vaccine.
No more will be said about the plot
except that it is unapologetic in its topicality. The parallel with
occupied Iraq, with innocent citizens caught between suicidal zombies
and their trigger-happy army protectors, is perhaps too on-the-nose.
Somewhat less on the surface is the deadpan send-up of America's faith
that organizational solutions exist for every threat. District One,
after all, seems like a cross between a US-style gated community and
a gentrified rust-belt city. When urban renewal fails, and the undesirables
break through the gates, the soft platitudes of social engineering are
quickly dropped in favor of superior firepower.
28 Weeks Later has enough
action and enough ideas to make for an entertaining 100 minutes. The
Spanish-born Fresnadillo, who won an Oscar in 1996 for Best Short Subject,
still has the crisp, economical visual style of a short-film director.
Yet it's hard to get excited about anything in this oft-parodied genre
anymore. With chlorine truck-bombs, feces-laden explosive belts, and
suitcase nukes haunting our dreams, blood-spitting zombies seem like
the least of our problems.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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