28 Weeks After
starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineau, Catherine McCormack, Macintosh Muggleton, Imogen Poots, and Idris Elba
screenplay by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, E.L. Lavigne and Jesus Olmo
directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
This is a British Film Council movie, co-written by a committee of continental Europeans. As a result it reflects the poor quality of exponential diminishment. It seems to be a made-for-TV film, or at least that is the kind of quality it exudes. But British production values tend to be so low that it’s possible to be a theater film with those kinds of production values. I wonder how the producers got a star of Robert Carlyle’s stature and talent to appear in it. 28 Weeks After is kind of a cross between Children of Men (starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine, directed by Alfonso Guaron - a pretty good move), and I Am Legend(starring Will Smith, a re-make of the rather mediocre Charleton Heston film The Omega Man). Maybe a little bit of The Andromeda Strain, too. They all feature plots that posit the extinction, or near-extinction of humanity at the hands of an incurable virus that spreads so fast that there is no time to react. Any survivors of the initial plague are rendered rabid with madness. It looks like someone in the U.K. wanted to cash in on the I Am Legend thing and whipped up 28 Weeks Later over a weekend. It’s a bunch of crappy-crap-crap. One interesting thing, though, is the European take on Americaand its military. Because it’s a cheap film a bunch of no-name U.S.actors were hired to play military roles. Of course, their roles were written by a committee of Europeans and so they contrast remarkably with how American writers would portray their own military. But don’t watch it just to see what I mean. Don’t bother.