07 August, 2009

28 Months Later

Seeing commercials for The Colony while watching Shark Week has got me thinking about 28 Months Later, the expected sequel to round out the 28 Days Later trilogy of neo-zombie films. (As for The Colony, I caught most of an episode - a fascinating concept, but still about as interesting as any reality show is). Speculation about 28 Months Later abounds, and I have no idea what its official progress is, or even if it's yet been officially decided that it will be made, but, I just thought of an idea of what kind of a movie I would like to see it be, and I want to offer that up to the digital seas of the information superhighway.

28 Days Later was about the immediate post-apocalypse. A man wakes up in the immediate wake of a society-wide breakdown, and must learn to cope. Everything is abandoned, as if the entire population just up and vanished, and the city is overrun with what can best be described as zombies.

28 Weeks Later was cleverly able to take a two-fold approach - by introducing a second breakout, it was able to both portray the rebuilding of society after the apocalypse, as well as introduce the actual apocalypse itself (in the form of a second occurrence).

Clearly, the success (if cult) of the 28 films lies on its "zombie apocalypse" angle. One angle that I would like to see the films explore, and would be a perfect setting for 28 Months Later, is the long-term post-apocalypse. After the world has been reduced to a wasteland, when enough time has passed for things to decay and really fall apart.

That's the basics of what I'd like to see. Regardless of the specifics, if 28 Months Later takes that approach, I will be pleased. Some other ideas I have: it would make sense to utilize the idea of the "carriers" introduced in 28 Weeks Later. Since the zombies can't really survive longer than a couple months (at most) without feeding, it wouldn't really work to populate the world with undying zombies. Rather, the threat for the surviving pocket communities among the ruins could be the carriers. For if a carrier were to enter a community, it would inevitably pass on the virus, thus destroying the entire community. So I could foresee a paranoia/fear of strangers type of atmosphere among one or more of these pocket communities trying to survive. I think that would make for a good film. Of course, you can't have a zombie apocalypse without any zombies, so naturally, things are going to get bad. As far as wrapping up the trilogy and offering some kind of closure to the series, I'm not sure. Maybe that's another thing to think about.

1 comment:

  1. Definetly a good idea. 'Course they'll probably do something stupid (because my cynicism knows no bounds.)

    While we're on this movie sequel subject, here's what Jurassic Park 4 should be (and, what Jurassic Park 3 should have been): They have to do something with nedry's dna samples. It seems like they went out of their way to show the embryo container getting encased in mud (presumably so as to be preserved), and then they never did anything with it. I understand not using it for The Lost World considering there was a book to follow... but giving Jurassic Park three an utter non sequitor plot is unforgivable. Interestingly, the fact that they cut Dodgson out of JP2 opens up a window. Biosyn could send somebody to the island, find nedry's remains and uncover the embryos. Or nedry could even survive by the skin of his teeth (after all, we never see him die).

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