Review: 28 Weeks Later (2007)
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later is by no means a bad follow-up to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later, but it doesn’t have the same impact that the original movie still does (as I argued in my review). One reason is that, in retrospect, 28 Weeks Later stands out less from the pack of zombie movies that proliferated in the first two decades of the 21st century, from 2004’s Dawn of the Dead to 2013’s World War Z, or even more recent works, such as HBO’s The Last of Us. While Fresnadillo retains aspects of Boyle’s indie aesthetic, 28 Weeks Later looks and feels more like other horror movies and thrillers from the period. As a zombie movie, it contributes little to the genre apart from a relatively realistic portrayal of the militarized containment of infection. It also extends and develops the first film’s concern for the politics, both personal and social, of survival.
28 Weeks Later opens with a group of survivors hiding out in a cottage in the shires. The group includes Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife, Alice (Catherine McCormack). I was immediately confused about when this is taking place, but we soon discover that this opening is set when the Infected are still rampaging across Great Britain.
When the Infected attack the cottage, Don manages to escape, but only by abandoning Alice. Don sees his wife through the cottage loft window as the Infected surround her and we watch in dismay as he just turns and runs. The scene is the most hard-hitting emotional moment in the movie. It’s a scene that scratches into the horror of the depths people can sink to in order to survive. The scene also sets the film’s moral framework: as we watch the rest of the movie, we test Don’s decision against the other characters’ choices.
As with the first film, a jump forward in time is signalled by the film’s delayed title, and then the story properly begins. Twenty-eight weeks after the Rage Virus first began spreading amongst humans, transforming them into crazed, furious, animalistic creatures, the Infection seems to have receded. NATO forces isolated Great Britain and the Infected starved to death. Now, after many weeks of zero new infections, and with the Infected seeming to have disappeared, US military forces begin to repatriate British citizens who had either been off the island when the Infection hit, or who had managed to evacuate early on. The returnees are sent to a safe “Green Zone” on the Isle of Dogs, a peninsula that juts into the Thames River in the greater London area.
On the Isle of Dogs, the film introduces us to its array of principle characters; the multiple, overlapping storylines, albeit each fairly thin, suggest some intention to mimic the network narrative style popular in social and geopolitical thrillers of the 2000s (see, for example, 2000’s Traffic or 2005’s Syriana). This narrative approach allows the viewer to follow the different levels of this society, and, fortunately, the cast is quite deep.
Robert Carlyle, who we spend the most time with early on, gives a particularly strong performance as the emotionally-torn widow and father. It is painful to watch Don greet his returning children, who had been at school abroad when the infection hit, and how he tries to avoid explaining what exactly happened to mom.
We also meet an American sniper, Jeremy Renner’s Doyle. Renner plays perhaps the first version of his good-hearted, highly competent warrior characters that have appeared in numerous films (including his Hawkeye in The Avengers movies). Rose Byrne is Scarlet, a US medical officer concerned that the virus will come back. Idris Elba, under utilized by the script, plays the commander of the US forces, with something of the accent and swager of his character, Stringer Bell, from HBO’s The Wire. It was a delight to see Harold Perrineau as the helicopter pilot pal of Doyle. With Perrineau’s turns here and in The Matrix sequels a few years prior, it is a shame we never got more Perrineau in big, entertainment-gearned movies. He has such screen charisma.
It is a truism that films play differently to different audiences at different times. In 2007, the phrase “Green Zone” would have instantly evoked the ongoing US occupation of Iraq during the Iraq War (2003–2011), with its “Green Zone” in Baghdad, the safe zone in the capital for US forces, reconstruction officials, and foreign journalists. Today, the film’s reflections of the War on Terror and the Iraq War fade more into the background, like interesting historical artifacts. In contrast, in 2025, the film’s interest in the politics of controlling infection come to the foreground, after the Covid crisis of recent years.
28 Weeks Later continues and expands the original film’s concern with the lengths humans go to not just to survive but to preserve their social systems and institutions. In the post-Covid world, the film’s suggestion that the cure might be just as bad as the disease strikes home, as does its portrait of systemic dysfunction when crisis hits. All the planning and insistence that things are totally under control quickly evaporate, in part because of the hubris of assuming one totally understands the virus and can control it. Even more than the lab leak at the start of 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later generates new topicality retroactively. In my view, this is the main reason to watch 28 Weeks Later today, even if the political themes become submerged as the narrative turns into a series of escalating escapes and chases, from both the Infected and US forces seeking to snuff out any new epidemic.
Fresnadillo’s filmmaking seems very much of its time, a mixture of big-budget features and low-budget aesthetics, shot on both actual film and digital. For example, Fresnadillo retains many choppy quick cuts, while other times, the action is on a larger, military scale and accordingly shot more clearly, with scenes of snipers shooting from the rooftops, helicopters zooming around, and fighter jets ready to drop firebombs. There are also moments of novelty, such as having a character guide others through pitch black darkness using night vision: the disjunction between the one character’s (and the viewer’s) ability to see and the other characters’ blindness is played for suspense and surprise.
Overall, 28 Weeks Later is a movie with some good features, few missteps, but little that is great. Apart from one clever narrative turn, the plot goes where we would expect it to, without achieving the almost archetypal simplicity of 28 Days Later. Likewise, apart from certain themes that are more relevant post-Covid, there is not much else remarkable to necessitate revisiting the film or watching it for the first time, apart from the desire to complete the series before seeing the new film.
6 out of 10
Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo; screenplay by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, E. L. Lavigne, and Jesus Olmo; starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineau, Catherine McCormack, Mackintosh Muggleton, Imogen Poots, and Idris Elba.
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