When we hear the words 'rehabilitation' and 'green zone', we immediately think of Iraq and rightly assume it to be ironic. The American army has arrived, turned Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs into a green zone, and is beginning the process of rehabilitation. Twenty-eight weeks later, the virus has run its course and everything is under control. To add to the terror, he's deserting his wife.Īfter this shattering opening, we relax as a factual montage carries us through the various stages of the national catastrophe. A bravura five-minute sequence follows that includes rapidly edited close-ups of shock and gore and a tracking shot from a helicopter of Don (Robert Carlyle) running for his life. Suddenly, a ferocious horde of crazed creatures attacks they are as terrifying but much more agile than their counterparts in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Only when a door is opened do we realise there's bright sunshine in the green and pleasant countryside outside. This sequel begins in media res, assuming we know the earlier film, and there's a palpable sense of doom as three generations of Britons live on hoarded food in a boarded-up, candlelit house. In a matter of days, flesh-eating zombies have taken over the country, leaving a few survivors in London and a handful of soldiers outside Manchester. In that film, a holocaust is triggered by animal-rights activists releasing apes from a Cambridge laboratory where scientists are experimenting with a deadly virus. I think his new film superior to 28 Days Later, whose director Danny Boyle here functions as co-producer. 28 Weeks Later, a sequel to 28 Days Later, repeats this scenario, except that, as the title suggests, the time scale has telescoped and, unlike Wells's vision, there is no third act in which the world is rebuilt.Ģ8 Weeks Later is the second full-length movie by Spanish director Juan Fresnadillo, whose accomplished feature debut, the brilliant allegorical thriller Intacto, I thought underrated. He called his principal setting Everytown, which was, in fact, a studio set composed of familiar London landmarks brought together around Piccadilly Circus. By that time, most of the world would be reduced to a wasteland where thousands of contaminated, zombie-like people suffering from the 'wandering disease' stalk the land and are shot on sight by more fortunate survivors. In Things to Come (1936), one of the great science-fiction movies, HG Wells conceived of a war breaking out in 1940 and continuing until the 1960s. Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Catherine McCormack, Mackintosh Muggleton, Imogen Poots