![]() ![]() 28 Weeks Later, on the other hand, drags this out through the whole movie. 28 Days Later dealt with this very painfully, with the immediacy of killing the little girl’s dad once he became infected. Take the “my dad is a zombie and now he’s trying to kill us” subplot. What 28 Weeks Later does well, 28 Days Later does better. 28 Days Later is much better than 28 Weeks Later. Now that I’ve seen 28 Weeks Later, I have to say I’m a bit shocked when I hear people say they prefer this over 28 Days Later. Pop quiz hotshot: This kid is going to bring about the zombie apocalypse. If 28 Weeks Later taught me anything, it’s that there’s a decent chance I’d shoot baby Hitler. The viewer, on the other hand, knows very well that this kid could bring about the fall of mankind, making it very hard, especially once he’s exposed to the virus, not to wish something bad to happen to him. The others just don’t want it on their conscience that they killed a child. The interesting part is that none of these characters, with the exception of the doctor, know how dangerous Andy is. The most interesting thing to me about 28 Weeks Later is that it presents the viewer with a variation on the classic “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a child, would you do it?” It’s set up very early on that young Andy isn’t going to become infected once he comes into contact with infected blood, but that he’ll be a carrier, just like his mother and infect everyone else. At various points in the movie, Andy is set to die, but is saved, usually by military personnel ignoring their orders (Jeremy Renner both refusing to shoot Andy with his sniper rifle and later taking out another sniper that would have shot Andy, the doctor trying to keep Andy safe to use him to make an antidote, Flynn not shooting Andy, but instead flying him out to Paris). And in 28 Weeks Later, it’s the hubris of a well intentioned doctor that gets the whole rage virus zombie plague started back up again. In Dawn of the Dead, Roger was infected because he went out of his way to put himself in riskier and riskier situations. In 28 Days Later, it was the hubris of militant animal rights activists that caused the virus outbreak in Britain. Except for the ones who can! Keep running!īut that run and push move from Dawn of the Dead illustrates something about the whole zombie movie genre: more than anything else, more so than even the zombies themselves, the major cause of death in zombie movies is hubris, hubris on the part of the living. Do you remember how many times the four main characters in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead used run and push moves out of a John Madden video game to get around zombies? That doesn’t work with the sprinters.įact: Zombies can’t swim. ![]() If the fast moving zombies of 28 Days Later were in the mall of the original Dawn of the Dead, it wouldn’t be the Zach Snyder Dawn of the Dead remake it would be a two minute long movie! Roger and company wouldn’t even make it into Penney’s. If I had to pick which zombie movie world I’d be stuck in, I would definitely pick slow and hard to kill over insanely fast and slightly less less hard to kill. They were rage fueled beasts that really wanted to take a bite out of you. They weren’t slow moving shamblers they were the exact opposite. But what I really liked about 28 Days Later was the fast moving zombie. I still like saying to no one in particular “Hellllllllooooooo…” after every time I watch 28 Days Later. I guess we’ll find that out soon enough (Walking Dead premieres on AMC in 3 days at the time of this writing). I wonder if they’ll keep that part in the TV show. On a side note, this ended up being borrowed pretty heavily in the beginning of The Walking Dead comic. I loved the feeling of isolation and desolation brought on by Cillian Murphy waking up alone in an empty hospital, emerging onto empty streets, looking for someone, anyone else. When I first saw it, it was like a breath of fresh air. After years of reluctantly seeing horror movies with friends, finally there was one I really got into. 28 Days Later is my favorite (non-comedic) horror film.
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