28 reasons why '28 Weeks Later' did not work for me

1) 28 Days Later is at least 28 times better than 28 Weeks Later. Period.

2) The movie starts off with a brand new set of actors. What happened to the actors in the original '28 Days Later'? When you traditionally go to watch a sequel, it's because you genuinely liked the original and wondered what happened to the likeable characters from the original movie. That idea does not hold true with this sequel.

3) The movie then takes you to a zombie-ravaged Britain 28 weeks later. USA led NATO forces have undertaken rehabilitation efforts of London and are working on repopulating the city. But where is the British government? Where is the Queen and the royal family? Did all of them die too? I would like to believe not. If they had managed to run away to some other country, it would have made more compelling viewing to see how the British Government in exile agreed to let the US military into British land and let them control power in their land.

4) And what about the rest of the world? How did the world leaders react to a situation like this? It is impossible to believe that while in one corner of the city there are still rotting bodies from a deadly virus waiting to be cleared, and there are still rats and dogs scattering about the bodies, USA led troops have already started the process of rehabilitation in another part of the city. Don't you think the rest of the world would vehemently oppose such an idea if it were to be implemented?

5) Just like the Saw and Hostel series (which I totally enjoy - completely mindless and slapstick gore) and other stupid horror films of the like, even this movie depends on its lead characters performing foolery all the time to lead the gore chapter forward. The kids and the government officials fall into every horror-movie trap ever set, as if they have never seen a horror film: Don't leave protected confines for a solo trip, don't kiss the half-zombie, don't turn off all the lights when the zombies are breaking in, don't enter the abandoned subway and tunnels.

6) How old is the US Army's chief medical officer Scarlet (played by Rose Byrne)? 28? Isn't she at least 10 years too young to be in charge of an operation this huge?

7) Talk about gaping holes in the movie plotline. First you've got talk about the U.S. Army and its extremely tight security protocols. Then, the next moment, there is practically none. Two kids easily escape. What about Quarantine for a potentially infected person, who just minutes ago is revealed to be a carrier of the deadly virus? There is no quarantine. In a real situation none of the plot turning points could have happened. A janitor or caretaker having unsupervised, total access through a military quarantine facility to get through the area with NO ONE noticing. And this scene is a fulcrum of the entire movie. LMAO.

8) This movie borrows heavily all the good ideas from the prequel, 28 Days Later. And while this movie had added a couple of ideas, the director totally wasted those ideas by focussing more on the gore and violence and blood.

9) One of the good ideas that the director completely wasted was the lead character Don's (played by Robert Carlyle) guilt. This could have been a very good movie about his guilty conscience and how he deals with it. Rather it is tackled the easy way out - get him infected as well.

10) Another idea that is totally wasted is about how to explore Don's wife, Alice's (played by Catherine McCormack) potential for carrying a cure for the virus in her blood.

11) The obvious political allegory in the movie also did not work for me. It might barely be possible to claim it's a commentary about the US led war in Iraq: When soldiers can no longer tell infected people from healthy civilians, they have to execute everyone to prevent the epidemic from spreading - Code Red. But I think this kind of philosophizing would ennoble a movie that has no agenda other than to frighten the movie-going audience. Why did the director venture in this direction when he did not want to explore that theme anymore?

12) It is in moments like this that the movie begins to lack pace. There are moments when it seems confused between whether it should make a moralistic statement or whether it should pander to the zombie movie going audiences' tastes to set the cash registers ringing.

13) The usual sequences found in accepted zombie genre can be found here, including, in no particular order, scenes of zombie hordes approaching over the crest of a hill; a zombie attack on a conked-out vehicle, and a zombie assault on a charming, peaceful countryside hideaway.

14) Which is what brings me back to my core rant with this movie again - The director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo seems more interested in rattling nervous systems than in developing a truly scary movie. There is no coherent plot, rather just a hotch potch set of gore sequences conjured together.

15) The movie's focal gross scene is when a helicopter pilot aims his chopper blades at the screaming, chasing zombies, and blood and flesh begin to splatter. There are heads and limbs flying here and there and the entire scene turns a tomato sauce red. Still not even a drop of blood falls on the chopper pilot, inspite of his chopper getting painted a dark red. How did the pilot escape uninfected through all this gore?

16) And the 12-yr old kid Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton - more about him later on) is much more smarter than James Bond. Everybody else in the movie die when aimed with a shot once. Just like James Bond, Mithun Chakraborty and Rajnikanth (the latter two being Indian superstars), no matter how much you attack Andy, he will always escape unhurt.

17) Why do the zombies always walk and run as if they will lose in the very first round of 'Dancing with the Stars'? And they screech as if they will lose in the very first round of 'American Idol'? Well, come to think more about it - perhaps, they might just win the contest.

18) And why is Scarlet so attached with the kids? Why does she care so much about some random strangers she just met?

19) The last shot of the movie - infected people running through Paris, with a grim looking Eiffel Tower in the background - leaves out scope for further increasing the money making gambit, exploiting the same concept. This way the moviemakers can go on and on with the same concept, never really bringing the series to close. I hear that the next sequel titled '28 Months Later' is already in the books and it will be set in Russia. The way is left open for more movies in a lucrative franchise: 28 months? 28 years? 28 decades? 28 centuries? Who cares? I will probably look forward more eagerly to similarly titled porn versions - 9 months later? 9 inches later?

20) The characters in the movie are totally uninteresting and you don't care about any of them, and certainly not the kids. The kids are generic and the script doesn't care much about the adults. The adults in 28 Days Later inhabited better developed and more sympathetic personalities. Tension in horror movies results from viewers caring about what happens to characters. The audience's connection to the protagonists of 28 Days Later made it a compelling experience. The lack of such a connection in 28 Weeks Later reduces this to a number of sequences just characterized by shock moments.

21) What irritated me further was the jerky camera action. Apparently, Fresnadillo believes that the proper way to film any action scene is to shake the camera violently and pan it wildly back and forth, thereby making it virtually impossible to figure out what's going on (and pushing viewers with motion sickness).

22) To give the the gore sequences added effect without spending much effort in filming them, Fresnadillo's crew came up with another idea - choppy editing. So none of the shots taken during the gory sequences last for more than a second. With the camera jerks and the random edits, what ensues is a mishmash of red colored characters and mumble jumble cacophony of sounds.

23) For further added effect during the blood curdling sequences you have an irritating throbby background score. Old school gore is old news. So Fresnadillo pumps up the volume with his loud, pumpy score aimed at further disorienting the audience with sound. At peak moments, an industrial-grunge soundtrack pumps up to intolerable volume. The results are sickening and frightening, yes, but not exactly remarkable filmmaking.

24) The culminating scene is shot in complete darkness and I really couldn't figure out what's happening until I discovered that Scarlet is dead, because I just couldn't see her anymore. Did I care? No.

25) Most movies with kids aim at making the kids appear all cutesy and cuddly (the most recent criminal to this - I remember the kids from the movie 'The Holiday'). In this movie, Fresnadillo tries too hard in seeing to it that the kids don't seem all bogus cute. In effect, the kids appear to be made of nerve and steel and indefatigable. Which doesn't work either.

26) While 28 Days Later ended with a sense of hope and solidarity (I am not talking about its alternative ending here), 28 Weeks Later ends with a foreboding sense of doom, which says that try as much as you might, humankind cannot get rid of the virus.

27) After the movie ended, I still had to look up IMDB for the movie names and the real life names of the characters in this movie - that's how less I cared about them. If I enjoy a movie, I sit through its credits and the names register in my head. Not in this one.

28) And when I looked up IMDB, what did I find? The kids's real life names are Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton. Poots? and Muggleton? I hope IMDB is not pulling a fast one on me. :)