The first ten minutes are pretty much the best the film ever gets. And oddly it’s the most like the original.
The movie never felt like it hit its stride. Lots of stuff happened but I kept waiting to get to the point where I was invested and hooked. It never happened.
I have a fundamental problem with a family possibly being immune to the Rage Virus. Because the virus always seemed like more than just a simple sickness…it tapped into a part of our psyche. That element of it is still there, here in the sequel. It has to be in order to buy into why Carlye’s father character so viciously kills his wife (more viciously than the average infected killing your average victim) and why he searches out his children. Apprently he has some sot of radar to keep finding them.
This is also the kind of scary movie that relies on characters not responding to their name for NO APPARENT REASON.
It also tacks on a twist ending for no good reason.
I saw it tonight in an almost completely empty theater. I took that as a sign it wasn’t doing too well at the box office, so I was surprised to see on IMDB that it’s currently #2, only behind SpiderMan!!
I liked it. The camera work was a bit too frantic and the colors maybe too muted, but it had a nice, mostly logical plot, and pretty good plot. It was strangely not as scary as I expected – not even as scary as the first one, I think. In parts it was almost more an action movie than a horror movie.
Actually, I rather liked that they kept the virus biological, and gave a possibility that it could be cured. Any hint that it was somehow supernatural would have ruined it for me.
[SPOILER]Not sure I agree with you completely here. It seemed perfectly logical to me; ruthlessly logical, even. It wasn’t even really a “twist.” The girl may have known her brother was infected, but not wanted to tell anyone for fear of losing the last member of her family. From there it’s very easy to imagine how the disease could spread – maybe they shared a coke and he spread the disease to her through his saliva; who knows. Makes sense to me, within the logic of the movie.
But you’re not the only one who didn’t like the ending: in his review for the New York Times, A. O. Scott notes that… “the last shot brought a burst of laughter at the screening I attended, a reaction that seemed to me both an acknowledgment of Mr. Fresnadillo’s wit and a defense against his merciless rigor.” I have to admit I don’t understand that reaction – laughing was the last thing from my mind at that point. Anybody else have/see that reaction?[/SPOILER]
Just saw 28 Weeks Later - and call me crazy, but in some ways I really think it’s a better movie than the original, or at least equally good. The thing this movie does really, really well is show just how freaking scary the Infection is. Yah, I know we saw it was scary in 28 Days Later, too, but bear with me.
In the first movie, we only ever identified with a small band of characters, most of whom survived. Since the plague had already more-or-less run its course, we never got to see what the earlier days of the disaster must have been like. I loved how in this movie, in the first few minutes, we got to see just how fast the Infected could attack a house, and how utterly confusing and terrifying it would have been. The reviews that complain the camera-work keeps viewers from getting a clear idea of the action sort of miss the point, I think - the characters don’t have any idea what’s going on, so why should we?
I also liked seeing how quickly the infection could spread through a crowd - the first movie described it, but this time we actually got to see the horror. That was pretty cool, and again, the utter confusion seemed very real.
This movie’s not as imaginative as the first, granted. But it does a superb job of doing what the best science fiction or horror does - it makes one impossible assumption, and then goes from there with absolute logic.
