All the Rage
London goes mad again in '28 Weeks Later'; 'The Parallel' is existentially void
By Andy Klein
Back in the '90s, the standard way a foreign director could make the transition to Hollywood was by taking on a Jean-Claude Van Damme film. But the market has changed, and Mr. Van Damme's star status has waned, so now the preferred path is horror films. Since New Year's, we've had Blood and Chocolate (German Katja von Garnier), The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, also German), The Messengers (Oxide and Danny Pang, from Hong Kong by way of Singapore), and Vacancy (Hungary's Nimród Antal). Now we have 28 Weeks Later, from Spaniard Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, whose thriller, Intacto, made a small splash a few years back. Unlike most of the above, Fresnadillo does not disappoint.
It makes sense that directors for whom English is not a first tongue would be more at home with horror or suspense or action - genres that tend to be more visceral and visual than dialogue-heavy. (Having said that, let's note that many of the European directors instrumental in the Golden Age of Hollywood - Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Douglas Sirk - specialized in dialogue-oriented comedy, literary adaptions, and melodrama. Go figure.)
28 Weeks Later is, of course, a sequel to Danny Boyle's 2002 hit, 28 Days Later, in which Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson, and a bunch of others flee a London devastated by a "rage virus." Within a minute of contamination, victims turn from normal humans into feral, unrestrained monsters, whose minds contain nothing but fury, aggression, and a predilection for biting - the latter act naturally infecting their victims. (Note to exhibitors: how about a double feature with Anger Management?)
Once again, the story starts during the waning days of the viral plague. Working-class couple Don (Robert Carlyle) and Alice Harris (Catherine McCormack) are holed up with a handful of other survivors in a rural house. Loonies arrive, and Don manages to escape, sure that his wife has been fatally bitten.
We leap ahead 28 weeks: The plague is apparently over. London is being cautiously repopulated, with the U.S. Army in charge. (And here I thought that our armed services were stretched to the breaking point in Iraq. Live and learn.) Even though the virus is only communicable through direct human contact, and all the infected humans are presumed to be dead, the returning Londoners are housed in heavily guarded high-rises, referred to - in one of the movie's most blatant political allusions - as "Green Zones."
Don - still haunted by his abandonment of his wife - is now the superintendent of one such building. He is finally being reunited with his two kids - teenager Tammy (Imogen Poots) and twelve-ish Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) - who have fortuitously been in Spain during the outbreak. The youngsters are resentful and distrustful of Don's explanation of why he had to leave Mom behind. And, through some cleverly worked out plot manipulations, this breach of faith within the family becomes magnified into a breach of the Green Zone's security and a return of the plague.
Tammy and Andy manage to break out, with the help of top medical official Scarlet (Rose Byrne) and Army sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner). The last third or so of the film is their flight, as they try to evade both the "zombies" and the soldiers, who have been instructed - cruelly but not unreasonably - to obliterate all escapees.
"Zombies" is in quotes, because, as you probably noticed, the attackers aren't zombies per se, even though 28 Days Later is commonly referred to as a zombie flick. Indeed, this is basically a technical distinction: in the original, Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland came up with a "scientific," non-fantastical hook that mimicked, in most meaningful ways, zombie behavior.
If Night of the Living Dead was mentioned in many reviews, the plot setup was more similar to one of George A. Romero's other early films, The Crazies (1973; a.k.a. Code Name: Trixie). There was one particularly noticeable breach of the "living dead" conventions that Romero established or at least codified: the "zombies" in the 28 films can move really fast. Nonetheless, the 28 films are essentially zombie movies in sci-fi drag, much like Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror section of Grindhouse, with which 28 Weeks Later also shares one particularly clever piece of zombie-fighting shtick, albeit executed in a completely different tone.
While Boyle's film was first-rate, Fresnadillo's beats it in some crucial ways. Both are tremendously tense, but the pacing and structure seem tighter this time around. The new entry is about 15 minutes shorter; the last half is nearly nonstop, with none of the original's relative discursiveness. The performances are a mixed bag; the plot doesn't allow the always excellent Carlyle to display much subtlety past the halfway point. Renner and Byrne are good, but the majority of the heavy lifting is done by Poots and Muggleton. (And I used to think that P.G. Wodehouse just made up names like that.) And there is no single moment that achieves the emotional resonance of Gleeson's turning point in the earlier installment.
There will doubtless be talk that 28 Weeks Later is some kind of allegory about the American presence in Iraq, and there are a number of moments that encourage that notion. But, if so, the metaphor isn't very well worked out. Are the zombies Islamofascists? Does their rage somehow map to sectarian hostility? Well, not really. The clear references seem to have been tossed in more to be "cool" than to make any particular point.
And speaking of "no particular point" ... On paper, the low-budget indie The Parallel sounded like my kind of thing: "If nobody acknowledges our existence," the press release says, "how do we know we exist? Our existence is acknowledged in two different places, two different times at once, leading to the question, is it possible to live a parallel existence?" Of course, the simple positing of metaphysical questions is no guarantee of an interesting movie; and, sadly, any such guarantee vis-a-vis The Parallel would be null and void.
Taylor Hart plays high school hotshot Danny Fitzgerald, who expects his future to include Harvard Law School and marriage to the comely Lynn (Margaret Scarborough). But one night at the beach, high on ecstasy or some such, Danny comes across Choorba (Jeff Swarthout) - a pompous ... gypsy mystic ... or something, dressed like he's on his way to a Halloween party in West Hollywood. Next morning, he wakes up, 39 years old, a professional failure, married to faded high school "bad girl" Margie (Darla Gordon). Was the first act all a nostalgic dream? Is the current reality a vision of his future life? Or simply a potential life that he can still somehow avert?
By the end, I had no idea. That might be my fault, but it was pretty apparent that writer/director/producer Jack Piandaryan doesn't have any idea either. Or, if he did, the bungled execution obscured it hopelessly.
Published: 05/10/2007
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