We then see her realize the ramifications of that for her as he transforms. Hugely relieved, he kisses her and is nearly immediately rocked by the virus, and we register that she knew this would happen. While he’s apologizing, she gazes at him with a frightening implacability and tells him she loves him. Don’s joy at her survival is mitigated somewhat by his spectacular guilt, and he sneaks into the facility where the military has now isolated her, hoping against all odds for forgiveness and an indication that she won’t expose his betrayal to the kids. It turns out that she’s been bitten but hasn’t transformed she’s a carrier but also a key to treating the virus. The kids leave the safe zone surreptitiously to visit their old home in search of mementos, and they find their mother, feral with shock, still living in the attic. The virus seemingly gone, Don’s kids return from abroad, and he tells them there was nothing he could have done to save their mother. Before she’s ripped from view, he-and we-can see clearly her horrified revelation that, oh my God, he’s the monster.īut wait: when it comes to the betrayal of those we claim we most love, it gets worse. Once on the ground and running, he looks back to glimpse Alice at the window with the kind of expression you might expect on a wife who’s just seen her loving husband do what Don did. He decides the other way and climbs out the window. Don then has the same split second to make the same decision. She has a split second to decide between Don, who’s offering the safety of a window to exit, and the boy, and she chooses the boy just as the rage-virus zombies burst into the room. Sure enough, the house is breached by his pursuers, and Don and Alice are separated because she won’t abandon the boy, who’s trying to hide. The boy informs them his mum and dad, along with any number of others, were chasing and trying to kill him. Don counsels ignoring the pleas, given the circumstances, but Alice protests, “Don, it’s a kid!” and opens the door. They’re then jolted by banging and crying from outside: a child’s voice, begging for shelter. She makes clear that they are everything to her, and he agrees. Don’s love is some help, but what really mitigates Alice’s despair is her relief that their two children happened to be on a school trip on the continent when the shitstorm hit. America, as it so often has, is leading the reconstruction and repatriation of those lucky few who’d escaped abroad, that project centred around a secure Green Zone (and those alert to political resonances might intuit how that hubris will play itself out).īut prior to that exposition, the spectacular set piece that opens the movie makes clear where its real energies are concentrated: we start with husband and wife Don and Alice, hunkered down with others in a barricaded farmhouse while the virus is still raging. The story picks up in 28 Weeks Later with the virus having burned itself out in a locked-down Britain after having taken most of the population with it. At that movie’s release, it felt terrifyingly as though someone had changed the rules and not informed the audience. ![]() ![]() The shufflingly slow reanimated corpses that could be avoided by a brisk walk in Night of the Living Dead had, in 28 Days Later, become rabid dervishes animated by a rage virus. First, horror as a genre still seems a little grindhouse to some, and second, it’s a sequel, to a movie that would seem to outshine it: Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, the critical and financial success that transformed (if not created) the modern zombie sub-genre, mostly through the innovation of sprinting zombies. There are probably a couple of good reasons for that. ![]() It’s a measure of how underrated Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later is that when I recommend it to people, they’re often startled.
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