28 Weeks Later, the Zombies are Baaaaack!

Both Professor Schaff and myself are ardent fans of the zombie genre.  Tonight I saw 28 Weeks Later with my kids.  It is a very mixed body bag.  The film is a sequel to 28 Days Later, the second most influential zombie movie (after Night of the Living Dead). 28 Weeks was very loud, with a rock video soundtrack, and very bloody.  It featured a lot of frenetic camera motion that grew tiresome as the film progressed.  But I have to admit that it put the viewer into the action.  I found myself physically trying to kick the zombies off the motor boat. 

28 Days Later was a work of twisted genius.  The zombies were not literal zombies, but living persons infected with a virus, unwittingly released from a lab by animal rights activists.  The virus turns an infected person into a raging monster within seconds of infection.  The infected person has only one instinct: to bite and/or throw up on the uninfected, thus spreading the virus.  If all this sounds like fantasy, it isn't.  Except for the speed with which the virus transforms its victims, it's pretty much like rabies. 

The real innovation of 28 Days was the speed with which the infected moved.  Up until that movie, the top speed of your average celluloid zombie was a lurching three miles an hour. A  guy in a wheel chair could outrun them.  But of course the heroes always get cornered by lots of the undead.  Since 28 Days, zombies ten to be faster and a little more deadly than rugby teams. 

Zombie movies are interesting because they vent three fears that are coeval with human society.  The simplest is the fear of the dead.  Another is the fear of contagion. The  last and most interesting is the fear of being around a lot of other people.   Since human beings first started to form groups larger than nuclear families, other people replaced animal predators as our greatest threat.  Any time we are in a crowd, we are outnumbered.  We depend for our security on the reliable behavior of the people around us.  The zombie film exploits that sense of vulnerability by creating a crowd that has no other motive than to devour us. 

I can't recommend 28 Weeks.  There are too many absurd assumptions.  One of them (spoiler alert!) is that the virus spreads from Britain to France.  That's absurd because in France, who would notice?