Film / 28 Weeks Later

There is no escape.

"We are headed for the green-zone, our area of security and reconstruction, designated as District One. District One is located on the Isle of Dogs. Although the Isle of Dogs is completely safe, the surrounding area of London is not....."

— DLR Soldier

28 Weeks Later is the 2007 sequel to the 2002 British horror film 28 Days Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.

As implied by the title, the story begins twenty-eight weeks after the events of the first film, where a literal hate plague ravaged Britain: a U.S.-led NATO force has established a foothold in the Isle of Dogs, where it's started the process of repatriating the countless British citizens left stranded after leaving their country during the Rage virus outbreak. Those who return end up quarantined in "District One" under heavy surveillance by US soldiers; Don Harris (played by Robert Carlyle), one of the quarantined, became one of the few people trapped in London who managed to survive the outbreak. Haunted by the memory of being forced to abandon his wife during an attack by a horde of infected Rage carriers, Don ends up reunited with his two children, Tammy and Andy, when they become new residents of District One.

Since the Infected starved to death weeks ago and no evidence suggests the plague crossed over into other species, the survivors begin the process of trying to rebuild their former lives while the NATO forces begin an extensive effort to clean up further areas of London to prepare for rehabitation. When Tammy and Andy sneak out of District 1 in order to visit their former home, however, the survivors — and the soldiers protecting them — soon discover lingering traces of the Rage virus, which kicks off a frantic fight to keep the plague from spreading once more.

Another sequel, called — what else? — 28 Months Later, was planned by the creators but has been lingering in Development Hell ever since the release of Weeks. It was eventually scrapped, with Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reuniting to make 28 Years Later.

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28 Weeks Later provides examples of the following tropes:

• Actionized Sequel: While the first film was definitely not light on action, this one is pretty much one long flight from the zombies all the way through.
• After the End: The premise of the sequel involved attempts by the U.S. military to recolonize Britain after all the Infected were apparently cleared out.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Andy uses one to escape a locked room after the infection spreads amongst the crowded civilians in District 1. Justified in that Andy is small enough to fit inside an air duct.
• America Saves the Day: Inverted. While initially having things under control, by the end of the film the infection has broken out and the U.S. military fails to contain it. The catastrophe could've been averted if they just had more guards posted on watch.
• Apathetic Citizens: They've all just survived a viral outbreak. One assumes that even the ones who were outside of the UK and returned had been shown videos and been told how virulent the Infected were before they even returned. Yet when they are herded to a secure location for their own safety — no matter how unsafe that actually turned out to be in the end — they bicker and complain to the troops about it.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: Snipers are shown passing time by using the scopes attached to their rifles, rather than binoculars, to spy on residents of the district.
• Badass Normal: When the infected begin breaking into the house Don stays behind and holds them off at the breach for quite a while with only a crowbar, buying time for the rest and only retreating when he loses his weapon.
• Blind Alley: Seen in one of the short films made for 28 Weeks Later. A man is pressed up against a wall as the Rage virus infected run past the alley — presumably their blinding anger prevents them from doing common sense things like looking around for someone who's gone out of sight.
• Bolivian Army Ending: For Tammy and Andy. Their deaths are not shown at the end, but the Rage virus comes to Paris and presumably annihilates most of the population, with all the ensuing crisis that occurs.
• Censored Child Death: Sam is presumably brutally killed by the Infected in the opening minutes, but it's not shown. Alice, who was with him, survives, though she doesn't describe his death. Likewise, Tammy and Andy are heavily implied to have died in the chaos that broke out in France, but it is also not shown.]]
• Chekhov's Gun: Heterochromia. One can pick out the entire plot of the movie simply from one conversation in the first few minutes.
• Death by Pragmatism: Inverted. When the quarantined civilians inside Sector One initially break out, chased by/mixed with Infected, the U.S. soldiers are ordered to only fire on infected. This causes their lines to be swamped by panicking civilians and infected that weren't identified fast enough. Since the crowd of civilians and infected were coming out of one large set of doors, with multiple automatic weapons trained on it, if the soldiers had unloaded immediately on everyone coming through, they might have been able to stop the infection right there.
• Decoy Protagonist: Robert Carlyle's character Don who we start the movie following is either this or a Sacrificial Lion.
• Distant Prologue: The first roughly ten minutes of the movie take place in the midst of the original outbreak in Britain, before Jim in the first movie woke from his coma, chronicling how Don left his wife Alice behind during an Infected attack where she was overrun. The movie then skips ahead to the main time frame, twenty-eight weeks after Jim's awakening on Day 28.
• Downer Ending: London has been decimated once again by the virus and the subsequent firebombing, all of the thousands of London settlers have been horribly killed, and the Infected have overrun France, meaning they'll probably spread to much of the Continent. The children's fate is left up in the air. It's possible they survived, but it's also implied that the plague spread to the mainland via Andy.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: Invoked quite literally in the final scene.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Doyle is a Sniper with Delta Force. It reflects in his pure Badassness.
• "End Is Nigh" Ending: The film ends with the zombies, after a period of containment, taking over France and spreading as far as Russia.
• Eye Scream: This sequel plays this trope horrifyingly straight. After reuniting with his wife, Don gets infected by the virus and kills Alice by gouging her eyes out. This is a direct comparison to the first movie's hero, who does the same to a soldier without being infected.
• Friendly Sniper: Doyle, a Delta Force sniper, decides to abandon his post after the military decides to kill everyone to keep the virus contained. He spends the rest of his time in the movie protecting the main characters and other survivors.
• Go Mad from the Apocalypse: In the distant prologue set in the midst of the original 28-day outbreak, Alice is a sane and stable survivor before she loses all her comrades in the countryside during an Infected attack. Twenty-eight weeks after Jim in the first film woke from his coma, when a solitary Alice is found by her son, she's near-catatonic and has been living in squalid conditions in a den that she's made in her family's old London house, barely able to string words or sentences together, and oblivious to the giant U.S. military presence that has swooped in and has been constructing a huge safe zone next door to her den for weeks.
• Harbinger of Impending Doom: When Sam, a frantic child, is allowed into the barricaded home that Don, Alice, and a group of other survivors are holed up in just weeks after the infection began, his arrival portends the events to come.
  Child: My mum, my dad... They're trying to kill me. There's others too.
  Don: How many others?
  Child: ... Loads.
• False Reassurance: "Everything's fine, I'll be back in a moment." The soldier does return in a moment, but as an infected.
• Helicopter Blender: As graphic and wonderful and horrifying as much of the film.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Doyle pushes off the others to safety before getting torched by one of the extermination squads. Possibly foreshadowed with this line:
    "Their [Tammy's and Andy's] lives are far more valuable than mine...or yours."
  • The people in the basement when an infected Don bursts in. Even though everyone's screaming and panicking, they have enough semblance to recognize Andy as a child, lift him up over their heads and crowd-surf him over the carnage, and then shove him into a ventilation shaft knowing only he would fit in.
• Idiot Ball:
  • If either the Chief Medical Officer or Sgt. Doyle had bothered to explain why the children were so important, even to the children, someone might have been more careful and we might just have avoided the infection of France and the breach of the sea border which was holding back the infection.
  • The lack of the most basic security measures in District One. No effective barrier on bridges and few guards. It's about as easy as sneaking out of high school grounds during lunch break.
  • The lack of any Anti-Rage security measures. No panic rooms. Individual homes are not fortified. Furthermore, the soldier put all the civilians in one big room, which is perfect to spread the Rage.
  • On the children's part, they decided to sneak out of District One even after the military told them explicitly not to do so and why. As poor as the security is on the military's part, they may not have been expecting someone to do something as stupid as what Tammy and Andy did.
  • If the military had placed even one guard on a woman they had every reason to believe was an asymptomatic infected, or ordered one placed on her immediately after they confirmed this, all would have been well.
  • Don holds the biggest one of all. He pretty much single-handedly caused the second outbreak.
  • The Apache helicopter was firing at a car fleeing from fire and poison gas because a bunch of insane Infected would totally do that. Although they probably weren't taking chances, considering that the Infected are at least smart enough to head into the underground to survive the firebombing.
• It Can Think: The Infected in this movie seem to have a bit more going on upstairs than the ones in 28 Days Later, particularly Don, who not only manages to survive the firebombing of District 1, but tracks his children through London all the way to the Underground. He also uses a gun as a blunt weapon when he kills Major Scarlett. He's not the only Infected to survive District 1, either, which implies he's not the only one who's retained some measure of intelligent reasoning.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jacob, in only ten minutes of total screentime in the opening of the movie, comes across as extremely cynical and rude, coldly dismissing Emily's boyfriend being dead simply because he hasn't returned. Despite this, he still stays behind and tries to help the elderly couple from being torn apart by the infected once they invade the cottage.
• Love Hurts: And how. An estranged couple, each thinking the other dead, reunites and is happy that they're both alive and well... and kiss, starting the plague anew (and directly leading to the Eye Scream mentioned above).
• Man on Fire: Doyle after being blasted by a flamethrower.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Averted; the first person we see die is a woman.
• Mercy Kill: Doyle shoots a soldier being attacked by the infected to spare him a much more painful death.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: You singlehandedly thwarted the attempt to repopulate Britain and spread the infection to continental Europe! I hope you're happy!
• Outrun the Fireball .
• Room Full of Zombies: One of the infected creates this by getting into a room of normal people during a lockdown.
• Scylla and Charybdis: As Code Red was being executed, a survivor in a warehouse remarked, "We take one step out that door, if the infected don't get us, the snipers will."
• Shoot Everything That Moves: There's a fairly horrific scene where the soldiers are attempting to secure a compound by shooting infected, except that due to the speed and the confusion it's hard for them to make out just the infected. Then the snipers get the order that everyone is now to be considered a target...
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The virus spreads to France.
• Shout-Out: The boy who shows up at the farm in the opening sequence says he's from Sandford, and later we see a lone swan wandering around London.
• Synthetic Plague
• Technically-Living Zombie: The Infected, again.
• This Loser Is You: Within the first ten minutes of the film, during the welcome back speech, the woman says "As you can see, District 1 is currently under the protection of the U.S. Army." This may have been replaced with "Look around. You're screwed.", which is clearly proven in the next ten minutes.
• Time Title: The story begins twenty-eight weeks after the events of the first film.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The Virus wiped out the entire population of Britain in under a month, but apparently despite the fact that the Virus was only contained due to Great Britain being an island, the U.S. military deemed a mere six months to be enough time to adequately classify it as safe. Realistically, Great Britain would have been kept under a UN Quarantine for decades if not centuries to eliminate any lingering trace of The Virus before any attempt at recolonisation began.
  • There are multiple instances throughout this movie where the second outbreak would have been easily prevented if only the US military had decided to post guards everywhere, leading to a situation where instead of being crazy, the guards don't appear to even exist! The lack of security both internal and external, leads to two children being able to easily escape the safe-zone and let the Rage Virus escape quarantine once again.
  • Any quarantine room would have had doors that might have allowed entry with a keycard, but exit only with approval from someone outside the room. This simple precaution would have locked Don in with his carrier wife, and the death toll would have been two. Similarly, if the civilian quarantine cells had been secured at all, the infection would never have reached the thousands of people trapped in there.
  • The little kid from the prologue. Whilst he can be forgiven for not losing the infected pursuing him before knocking on the first door he saw in desperation (it's actually impressive that he got far enough ahead of the infected that they weren't anywhere in sight when he was on the doorstep), when the infected attack the house several minutes later, the boy decides to run away instead of staying with the others.
  • The adults in the prologue are even dumber, because this child immediately informs them that he's being chased by hundreds of infected. It's clear that the infected are still some distance away, thus it would be very simple for the group to grab some edibles and water and either go to the basement, or the upstairs rooms, or the attic, simply somewhere they won't be seen, and wait for the infected to pass the area.
    • Karen in particular is this in spades due to her breakdown over her boyfriend abandoning them. When the group first hear knocking at the door, she shouts out thinking irrationally that it's her boyfriend whilst Geoff has the sense to silence her in case it's an infected. Later, when the kid is explaining within earshot that there were infected right behind him who are likely in the area, Karen in her delusions that her boyfriend is going to come back pulls one of the cloths covering the window away in the hope she'll catch sight of him, which leads to the infected outside finding the survivors and making Karen their first victim . It's REALLY ridiculous and not even excusable as an emotional breakdown . Watching this happen on screen might make the viewer want to jump into the movie and murder Karen.
    • The old woman at the start of the film. Instead of running away from the infected, she decides to stay behind and argue with her husband.
• Typhoid Mary: Alice is an asymptomatic Rage carrier, and it's implied at the end that Andy may have become one as well.
• Unbuilt Trope: Of the Technically-Living Zombie, continuing from the previous film. While the rage virus is devastating in the short term, the infected's mindlessness leaves them with no ability to care for themselves, and the film begins after Britain's hordes have died off from simple starvation and dehydration.
• Villain Has a Point: Despite the moral grey area in what they do, the US military's ultimate goal is to prevent the virus from spreading to the rest of the world, which could bring about the end of humanity. And if the US government had succeeded in killing the survivors, Andy would never have brought the Rage virus across the English channel and presumably infected France.
• Viewers Are Goldfish: About 15 minutes after the opening we're treated to a flashback to it.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Yet again.
• Zombie Puke Attack: Some "infected" constantly hemorrhage high-pressure blood out of their mouths.

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