Twenty-Eight Weeks Later

This evening we watched the 2007 sequel to the 2002 Twenty-Eight Days Later. Though, for obvious reasons, it had to come second, Twenty-Eight Weeks Later was, we all agreed, much better than the first film. It wasn’t difficult to work out why. Twenty-Eight Days was about exodus and delivery, with the characters dying off until just one couple and one child are left (and even then the scriptwriter, Alex Garland, had scripted an alternative ending where the male lead, Jim (played by Cillian Murphy), would also have been killed off for an all-doom-and-gloom ending. The sequel, on the other hand, has strong characters facing difficult moral and existential choices: should a husband stay with his doomed wife or save his own skin?: should a doctor fight to keep a mutant with apparent immunity to the infection alive?; should an American (NATO) general give orders to fire on a crowd, knowing that there are infected people among it? And some of the characters are strong positive moral forces: children who refuse to give up on their parents; an American soldier who refuses to shoot on that crowd; a helicopter pilot who ignores orders and remains loyal to his friend. These satisfyingly balance the moral weakling of the story, Don (played by Robert Carling), who abandons his wife and several friends before becoming an infected zombie who single-handedly re-infects a new starter colony in the Isle of Dogs before receiving his satisfyingly double-barrelled come-uppance from his own daughter. All round good entertainment, in other words.