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May 09, 2007

28 Weeks Later (2007, *** 1/2)

SLEEK, STRIPPED DOWN, AND MEAN AS THEY COME, 28 Weeks Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, is a grim, sincerely nihilist, urgently political, wholly contemporary parable about life in wartime, more Goya than GOP. (The word “Iraq” has entered the conversation.) Coincidences and plot conveniences are rife, but the fury of action and the undeniable thematic intent surge forward. Most of this relentless horror movie takes place post-apocalypse, after the unthinkable is already splattered across your face, on the island portion of London’s Canary Wharf development. Deserted city streets are often shown in sweeping, geometrically pleasing aerial shots while street-level, the grainy, jumpy long-lens style of 28 Days Later. In the next 80 minutes or so, after a couple of apocalypses and sustained genocide, there are several primal scenes of familial investment; a Tony Scott-style phalanx of CCTV screens observing one of the world’s most surveilled cities that eventually show plasma walls of flame until cameras lenses themselves melt and darkness is all; blood geysers and compounded viscera; and a Blair Witch passage; arriving, at the end, at an utterly classic final image. But the most impressive passage is the profoundly upsetting central set piece, which begins with a soldier’s cry, “Aw man, this is FUBAR,” and hurts like hell. Self-protection by American peacekeepers leads to a vivid and explicit depiction of willful, wanton massacre by Army snipers above a city plaza. Just like a walk through a “normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” to borrow a page from Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN). (There is a zombie harvest by helicopter rotor, the viscid slaughter of which is an operatic embellishment on Martin Scorsese’s 1967 Vietnam War allegory, The Big Shave.) There’s some intrigue or fluency in almost every shot: my favorite is a slow wipe left across the screen when a major character realizes all hell has broken loose, that is mere genius. With Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle, Catherine McCormack, Harold Perrineau, Jeremy Renner. 91m. [Ray Pride] [A nice making-of pic here.]