Following on from Danny Boyle's excellent apocalyptic horror movie 28 Days Later was never going to be an easy task - the original stands as a masterclass in blood-soaked thrills and rising tension, perfectly envisioning a barren London landscape populated by rabid, infected citizens hell-bent on tearing the living limb from limb. With Boyle and writer Alex Garland taking a back seat as executive producers, the task of following up the original fell to Spaniard Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, the director of the award-winning Intacto. 28 Weeks Later certainly gets off to a blazing start. Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife are holed up in an abandoned farmhouse along with several other survivors riding out the outbreak until it's safe to emerge. Beginning with a fragile sense of domesticity as they prepare and eat dinner, the tentative calm is broken by the arrival of a young boy. They let him inside, but shortly after the infected arrive hot on his heels and proceed to smash their way into the house. All hell breaks loose as they bite their way through the inhabitants, and Don - in a moment of extreme cowardice - flees the house leaving his wife behind to face what appears to be an inevitable death. The scene is superbly filmed and edited, with a wonderful aerial shot flying over Don as he heads to the safety of a riverboat, the infected closing in around him on all sides. Unfortunately, 28 Weeks Later never quite achieves the same level of style and tension throughout the duration of the movie - it has its moments, for sure (the reunion between Don and his wife is memorable, and the helicopter blades cutting through a swathe of the infected is impressively gory), but the ending is admittedly something of an anti-climax.
