Rose Byrne and Jeremy Renner in 28 Weeks Later.
You’d be hard pressed to argue that 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later are inherently conservative movies (and you’d probably hear some complaint from series creator Danny Boyle if you did), but there are certainly some conservative undertones. If the sequel, released on Friday, was meant to be an allegory for the evils of the Iraq war (as some have claimed), it’s a terribly confused one. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s look at a few aspects of the series that merit closer attention (SPOILERS FOLLOW. Stop reading now if you don’t want the film ruined). In the original, the film kicks off when a group of do-gooding PETA/Earth Liberation Front types break into an animal testing lab to free some cute, cuddly monkeys. Except these cute, cuddly monkeys are infected with the Rage virus, the disease that ends up destroying England. Instead of listening to reason, the radicals threaten the scientist who discovers them with bodily harm and release the animals. Similarly, in 28 Weeks Later, an American sniper refuses to fire on a crowd of civilians who are quickly being turned into rampaging zombies by their infected countrymen. This action is supposed to gain our sympathy–indeed, the sniper pays the ultimate price for refusing to kill, and later helping to escape, the child within his scope’s sight. His refusal to follow orders and his imploring a helicopter pilot to carry the child to the European continent and safety, however, will lead to millions, if not billions, more deaths, as the boy is a “carrier” of the disease. He doesn’t show any symptoms, but he can infect others through his saliva and blood. The final scene of the movie is that of a cadre of zombies rushing the Eiffel Tower–by transporting the boy to the mainland, one American soldier with a conscience has doomed the Eurasian landmass to a nasty, horrible death. My basic point is this: In both films, liberal good intentions are the catalyst for the deaths of millions of people. Another example from 28 Weeks Later: if the military doctor overseeing the case of an infected survivor had followed her superior’s orders and promptly killed the woman, the plague wouldn’t have been reignited (we also wouldn’t have had a movie, but you see my point). Also, the portrayal of the militaries in the two films is fundamentally different. In 28 Days Later, the British military is depicted as a group of sadistic rapists. In 28 Weeks Later, the American occupiers of Britain are depicted as benevolent, if incompetent. Once the virus breaks free again, it’s hard not to agree with the decision to firebomb the affected area in hopes of containing the outbreak and saving the rest of the “green zone” from infection and certain death. Even the use of nerve gas is understandable in the context of the film. A.O. Scott, the superlative film critic for the New York Times, said it best in his review: “It is only when things spin out of control that the inherent brutality of the situation becomes clear, but here again the movie poses intractable conundrums rather than scoring easy points. To the soldiers and the survivors alike, there are only bad choices, and doing what seems like the right thing–firebombing an open city or rescuing children from the bombs–can turn out to have horrendous consequences.”
