28 Weeks Later
May 11 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 19
The greatest trick of fantastical storytelling is that it is a venue where we can talk about things that it is uncomfortable to talk about. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is an exploration of how society treats people it finds to not be sufficiently useful or productive. The word “utopia” comes from the title of a Thomas More story about a fantastical island where society is run without the problems More saw in his own native England. Works from Gulliver’s Travels to X-Men to Blade Runner have laid bare the futility of bigotry without once explicitly pointing out the very real bigotries of race, religion, or nationality that actually existed in the societies they mock.
On the one hand, this allows for a wider audience of storytelling. Someone might not immediately reach for William S. Borroughs’ novella Queer because they harbor ill will towards the LGBTQ+ community, but perhaps they might read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness because they simply desire a thrilling tale of speculative fiction and walk away from the experience with a newfound sense of what “gender” means. On the other hand, some readers defy even getting to the slightest layer of subtext. “Since when is Star Trek woke?” they ask, only to have anyone with an ounce of reading comprehension sigh and reply, “since September 8, 1966.”
28 Weeks Later is exactly such an allegorical work of speculative fiction. On its barest surface it’s the story of a zombie outbreak caused by an engineered bioweapon. Scratch that surface ever so slightly and you have the most hamfisted allegory ever told about the American Global War On Terror and its Iraq theater specifically.
28 Weeks Later is the sequel to 28 Days Later (2002) in which a bioweapon called the “rage virus”1 breaches containment and ravages the island of Britain, turning anyone infected into a frenzied zombie. 28 Weeks Later is the story of Britain months after the outbreak. The infected are all presumed dead, and refugees and survivors of the outbreak are slowly rebuilding English society. Don (Robert Carlyle) is a survivor of the outbreak reunited with his children Tammy (Imogen Potts) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) in the green zone, an area in central London protected by the US military.
Andy and Tammy break out of the green zone to go back to their old home and discover their mother Alice (Catherine McCormack), who Don had previously abandoned during a rage zombie attack and was presumed dead. After having been taken back to the green zone for processing, a scientist named Scarlet (Rose Byrne) discovers that Alice is an asymptomatic carrier of the virus. After Don and Alice share a kiss, the virus begins reinfecting the residents of the green zone, causing the general in charge of the green zone (Idris Elba) to declare a “code red” where military personnel are to isolate and extract themselves from the area and remotely kill all the infected, with any uninfected civilians as collateral damage. With the help of a sharpshooter (Jeremy Renner) and a helicopter pilot (Harold Perrineau), Alice attempts to get Tammy and Andy (and with them their genetics that may hold the secret to rage immunity) out of danger.
The moment I realized where 28 Weeks Later was going with its allegory was when Idris Elba referred to the safe area of central London as “The Green Zone.” Any anglophone viewer in 2007 remotely aware of global events would hear “green zone” and immediately think about the 10 square kilometer area in central Baghdad under extreme lockdown by the US military during its occupation of Iraq with the same name. The Green Zone was broadly considered to be the only safe place in Baghdad by the “coalition of the willing” due to its guarded checkpoints and heavy military patrolling, where command lived a comfortable (if sheltered) life. They had a McDonald’s there. Outside The Green Zone, soldiers were on constant alert as the lack of absolute control allowed for the possibility of an insurgent with an IED around every corner.
Even worse, until they started attacking there was no easy way to distinguish between an enemy combatant and an everyday civilian. Y’know, kind of like the people infected by the rage virus.
The amount of incompetence on display that led to the rage virus breaching containment is positively staggering, but whatever, narrative necessity dictates that in a zombie movie there’s gotta be zombies. The interesting part of any zombie property isn’t the zombies themselves, though. It's how the humans react to the presence of zombies. 28 Weeks Later, as with its predecessor 28 Days Later, pulls no punches in demonstrating how the people in charge are one outbreak away from becoming monsters as bad or worse than the zombie horde. The US military in 28 Weeks Later goes from attempting to contain the outbreak by sharpshooting the infected to out-and-out genocide in a matter of 40 seconds. The logistics of how the virus works makes this course of action somewhat understandable, but at the same time, the previous events of the series have demonstrated that there is one proven way of dealing with an outbreak of zombies on an island: seal it off and wait for the zombies to kill themselves off. Is it cruel? Absolutely. But it also feels substantially less monstrous than opening fire onto a crowd of panicking civilians in the midst of a zombie attack.
By mid 2007, the tide was definitively turning away from the notion of the Iraq conflict as being a good decision due to the wanton cruelty of American forces. At this point in the conflict someone who was leaving high school when George W. Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech in May of 2003 was now walking to get their undergraduate degree as the conflict raged on. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal had been made public. By January 2007, despite the prolonged presence of US troops in the nation and their willingness to use extremely violent methods of controlling the insurgency, what America had to show for it was losing a giant swath of the country’s western provinces to a nascent movement calling itself the “Islamic State of Iraq”, which would soon be called ISIS after augmenting the territory it controlled into Syria. Public opinion, firmly on W’s side in 2002 in the leadup to the war, had been degrading steadily, and around this time crossed the crucial 50% disapproval line.2 The horrifying events of the film would be mirrored in the horrifying events of the July 12 2007 Baghdad Airstrike, which would come to the American public’s attention due to a short film from Wikileaks called Collateral Murder. The culture was ready for a mainstream film that was critical of the war effort, allegorical or not.
On this end, the film broadly delivers. As the outbreak spreads, the scientist Scarlet is desperate to save Andy and Tammy, believing that one or both of them might hold the genetic key to stopping the rage virus from spreading any further in case it breaks containment of the island of Britain. We follow the three of them around zombie-ridden London and everything about the language of the film causes us to root for them as they attempt to evade the danger of both the ravenous horde of zombies and the cruelty of the American armed forces. We are meant to breathe a sigh of relief as the children in a helicopter fly over the white cliffs of Dover, presumably to safety in Calais or Dunkirk or something. The film is very clearly taking a side here. Through excellently executed and highly thrilling sequences, director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo shows us how the shortsighted and highly violent nature of American military command is shortchanging the future by refusing to see the humanity (and indeed utility) of keeping Tammy and Andy alive, just as the actual US leadership shortchanged the world’s own future by insisting on ignoring the humanity of the Iraqi civilian population, and instead brutalized them for a decade in the name of “stopping terrorism.” Which is why the final sequence of the film is so infuriating.
Spoilers for an 18 year old film to follow. If you wish to be surprised as I was by the film’s final sequence, now is a good time to stop reading and go pick up a copy of 28 Weeks from your local public library. I will say on an aesthetic level it’s worth a watch if you’re into zombie shit. If you don’t mind spoilers or have already seen the film, read on.
After the film’s climactic sequence of Andy and Tammy’s flight to safety, we see a title card reading “28 days later” and hear a few words of distress spoken in French over a black screen, which then fades into a scene of rage-infected zombies running through the Champ de Mars towards the Eiffel Tower. The most natural inference of what could have happened between those two incidents is that Andy, now himself an asymptomatic carrier of the rage virus, has spread it to mainland Europe, where it will now doubtlessly spread across the entirety of Europe, Asia, and Africa, if not the entirety of the world. The helicopter pilot Flynn’s act of mercy where he broke protocol to rescue a pair of children from certain death has led to the downfall of possibly all of humanity. You should have left those kids to die a painful death, Flynn. Idris Elba was right to firebomb the community of uninfected Londoners. Jeremy Renner was acting in the best interests of humanity as he fired an assault rifle indiscriminately into a crowd of panicked people, and should have just kept firing when he got a child in his sights. The weakness of these characters who dared to recognize the humanity in their fellows have doomed civilization. That’s one (gross) thing if you’re making a zombie movie that’s just a zombie movie. It’s an incredibly wicked sentiment when your zombie movie is a giant commentary on an ongoing conflict that the UK and USA are actively perpetrating when the movie is being released. The movie moves from saying “in times of difficulty we must take care lest we become monsters ourselves” into saying “it is justifiable to kill Iraqi civilians so that the scourge of global terrorism does not spread across the globe.”
I think it’s possible to enjoy art that itself has bad politics. The Dark Knight (2008) takes the tack that the most special and righteous man can and should use every tool at his disposal (including those that could do immense harm) to stop men who wish to do wickedness for its own sake. It’s okay when Batman / America does it, because Batman / America would never abuse this power, right? Godzilla Minus One (2023) implies that the nation of Japan has been needlessly hamstrung by disbanding its military after World War II. Sure, the Japanese armed forces perpetrated thousands of acts of terrible violence and cruelty throughout dozens of years of conflict leading up to its surrender, but they need a standing army and navy, y’know, for Godzilla reasons3. I wish to be clear, I love these movies, but I also love them with a kind of detachment in the vein of watching Jackass: these are people with bad ideas that are fun to watch.
28 Weeks Later and its final sequence doesn’t feel like a well constructed movie with bad politics, though. It feels like a well constructed movie with good politics that does not wish to examine the politics of its final moment, despite the fact that the entire remainder of the film invites this kind of examination. It’s the artistic equivalent of watching a gymnast perform a flawless floor routine, stick the landing, and as they stand triumphantly they out of nowhere lose their footing and tumble into a swimming pool full of pudding while screaming “oh no I’m a sloppy pudding boy.” Everything beautiful and sublime that came before it is ruined by that last moment. Maybe when 28 Years Later comes out later this year, it will manage to end the series with some dignity.
Rating: ★★★★☆ as much as I dog on this film in this essay I had a blast watching it. Folks, the zombies are scary. They can run! That’s still terrifying! The performances are dialed in well if not extraordinary, and I didn’t even get to talk about Robert Carlyle’s survivor guilt. There’s a marvelously terrifying sequence in a pitch black subway station, and if you love to hoot and holler at absurd ultraviolence then let me tell you about what happens when zombies meet helicopter blades.
Economics: 28 Weeks Later was released 18 years ago today, May 11, 2007 at #2 at the box office behind the disappointing juggernaut Spider-Man 3 in its second week of release. #2 is a little misleading though as Spider-Man 3 made $58 million this week and 28 Weeks Later made $9.8 million. It would go on to make $64 million worldwide plus $25 million in home video sales against a $15 million budget.
Other 2007 films visited this week:
Georgia Rule: A Garry Marshall joint in which a rowdy teen (Lindsay Lohan) who can’t get along with her mother (Felicity Huffman) is sent to live with her strict religious grandmother (Jane Fonda) in rural Idaho for the summer. What starts as a quirky fish-out-of-water small-town-rom-com turns real dark real quick when a child-sexual-abuse plotline comes out around the protagonist’s stepfather (Cary Elwes). I love Garry Marshall. The Princess Diaries (2001) is a comforting bowl-of-chicken-soup movie that gave the world my #1 celebrity crush, and Frankie & Johnny (1991) is among the best movies about the ins and outs of working in a small restaurant. That being said, I don’t think Garry has it in him to really grapple with the reckoning that comes from the revelation of years of child sexual abuse. It’s okay, it has some trademark Garry Marshall dialogue and firecracker characters, but if you want fish-out-of-water in a small town, films like My Cousin Vinny (1992) and Doc Hollywood (1991) do a better job, and if you want a story about achieving justice after years of covered up abuse, skip this and watch Spotlight (2015). ★★★☆☆
Next Week: Black Book
The creation of the rage virus in 28 Days Later appears to happen because some scientists showed a monkey the news until it got so mad that it made a zombie virus.
for more info on this see my buddy Jesse Raub’s excellent essay on the subject located here: https://goodones.beehiiv.com/p/right-getting-better-drama