Aaron McCollough

I ENDURE

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28 Disappointments Later

Posted on May 12, 2007 - Filed Under | Leave a Comment

Despite some nice moments, the 28 Days Later sequel is pretty much a bummer in my book. The reviews have been fairly favorable, and I guess I wouldn’t discourage people from going, but this movie is deeply inferior to the original. The first movie was, to be sure, a genre picture, but it transcended the genre in the way that only the best works of popular art can. I’m particularly fond of the zombie sub-genre of horror, and I’ll watch just about anything with zombies in it. Cinematicaly, 28 Days Later strikes me as the definitive farewell to the 20th Century. Big words. Maybe I am in the minority in this opinion. In any case, where 28 Days Later belongs in its own category, 28 Weeks Later is just a B-grade thriller.

The opening scenes of the new movie are very good and draw on the tense, post-apocalyptic qualities of the original. Things quickly turn bathetic, however, as an over-determined “family drama” plays out in the reconstruction period. Freud might be pleased by this, but I think it’s the movie’s undoing. Obviously, the filmmakers knew they had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, they overplayed their hand.

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