Six months after the outbreak of a cannibalistic rage virus in Britain, vividly depicted in Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later…” (2002), all the infected have starved to death. Under the wise guidance of the American army, the country slowly begins to recover, with survivors relocating to the fortified Isle of Dogs in London, where snipers are almost as numerous as civilians. Here comes Robert Carlyle’s character (or rather, anti-hero), who cowardly abandoned his wife (Kathryn McCormack) to the last of the infected. We soon see him as a high-ranking official in the engineering department, meeting his children, Tammy and Andy, from the quarantine camp where they were placed at the start of the epidemic. The fate of the characters from the first film remains unknown – the story continues with a new chapter and new faces.
As if catching the rage virus from Danny Boyle, director Fresnadillo leads his film like a target running from a sniper. In fits and starts, he rushes and creeps from one pivotal plot point to another – each of which seems so important and cleverly conceived that revealing any would be sacrilegious. Here’s the only spoiler: after escaping the guarded perimeter to their old home for mementos, Andy and Tammy discover their mother, presumed dead, alive, not dangerous, but not exactly unharmed. Her hands are bitten, her mind is confused, and there’s a bloody haze in her eyes. The suspicious citizen is brought to the Isle of Dogs, and now the residents of the new England will have reason to go berserk again.
The Vision of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
By betting on Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Danny Boyle (here, only as a producer) had a profound calculation. The Spaniard Fresnadillo is not well acquainted with horror films and hasn’t heard the rhyme “Don’t forget to kill your dad” from the comedy “Shaun of the Dead” (2004). Therefore, he perceives the feelings of the heroine aiming a rifle at her reanimated father so acutely that the range of moral choices in “28 Weeks Later” sometimes reaches a natural Dostoyevskian depth. And it’s terribly touching. Even the inevitable cinephile allusions (for example, Robert Carlyle has already eaten people in Antonia Bird’s “Ravenous” (1999)) in a person with such a sensitive soul look not like an annoying repetition, but like fidelity to tradition.
Action and Meaning
But soul is soul – and Fresnadillo didn’t forget about choosing the right caliber either. All the country’s machine guns are working, and a good half of the scenes are filmed through an optical sight. The American military shoots Englishmen, poisons them with gas, burns them with napalm, and chops them into pieces with the blades of an army helicopter. Blood splashes onto the camera lens in liters, and the frames interrupt each other in horror. Due to the impossibility of blocking off London streets, the film was shot at night, so the battles look like a chronicle of street clashes in the Baltics in the late 80s – everyone is shouting in a foreign language, it’s dark, incomprehensible, but terribly scary. At the same time, Fresnadillo managed not only to surpass the original in terms of both action and semantic subtext, but also to set a trap for those who decide to continue the franchise. The elimination of romance, cannibalistic humor, and the evolution of reflections on the power of the barrel (remember the soldiers’ lawlessness in the first film?) into almost political statements – this is as beautiful as the scenes of mass destruction by fire.
But on the run, to briefly outline the plot of a quite possible threequel in four seconds – what else do you need to do to never hear “not untalented” addressed to you again?