Openings: 28 Weeks Later

Last time I looked at an opening that I generally thought was fairly great. In fact I considered it to be the best part of the film on the whole and something of a genre leader in terms of found-footage horror openings. Now I am going to look at an opening that I am far more unsure of, for a film that I really don't like very much.

To start, as this film is a sequel I feel I owe my opinions on the original 28 Days Later. I like it a lot, everything works well and it successfully evolved one of the most important subgenres in horror history. The direction is great, the pace is phenomenal and the acting is great all across the board. It's a great example of a film that I forget that I love until I begin thinking about it.

The sequel is, odd. Larger in scale and yet smaller in character. It is a film that fails to create a sense of epicness, partially due to the strangely restrictive budget (and as a result cheap looking visuals) and also due to an overly tight runtime. However it's opening is notable for how separate it feels from the main body of the narrative, it is a true prologue in the traditional sense.

The opening of the film is the ending of a story that we did not see. The remarkable thing about this opening is that it gives the impression that the characters we are seeing, despite almost no significant screentime, are real people. Character relationships are implied and depth is given in some surprisingly subtle places. The audience gets the sense that even though this group of survivors is being overrun by zombies, that they were compelling and would have been interesting to watch....this brings me to the problem this entire idea raises.

The story that concludes as the film's opening takes place seems like a more interesting narrative than the one that the main film consists of. This manifests in several ways over the course of the film. For example, where as great lengths have clearly been made to create convincing characters in this scene, written to feel real, the main body of the film is severally lacking character, filled with bland an emotionless dialogue giving no semblance of personality. It is confusing to think, but it feels although for care and attention was put into the screenplay of this little scene than the film at large.

A further problem with this scene comes when looking at the use of the iconic 28 Days Later theme song. Intense and memorable, this track was used to great effect in the first film, with small snippets used throughout, with the entire song only being heard over the excellent climax. In Weeks however, the theme song is used immediately in the opening scene. In it's own right the scene is certainly intense enough to justify the song, however it lessens it's use later on in the film, once again giving the impression that more care and priority was given to this eight minute or so sequence that the film's actual narrative.

Perhaps the worst indictment I can give towards this scene is that it feels far superior to the film that it was grafted onto, and it actively undermines and points out the flaws of said films narrative. 

It is a true shame, because as a generic zombie movie opening this one works well, it just goes on to highlight how inadequate the following film is, especially when compared to it's predecessor. 

By Jack D. Phillips
Openings #2