28 Weeks Later

You could say that I'm a fan of the zombie genre.

Then again you could say Shaq is a basketball player. With the zombie stuff, my enthusiasm is on a whole-nuvva-level.

28 Days Later was not the greatest movie in the genre (strictly speaking the infected were not zombies, but the parallel is too close not to include it), especially when the ending veered off on some rather unrelated course. I mean, the whole setup to go to the military compound only to change the storyline into something gross and demeaning was a real blow to what I thought of the film. Still, there were a lot of great moments in the movie.

28 Weeks Later is the new installment. Watch the trailer. The whole story is practically told.

Why would a middle-aged man have such enthusiasm for such silliness? My wife gives me grief over this everytime I rush to tell her something about this new zombie movie coming out, etc. She is right. But just like Ray Bradbury said, "They'll never take away my dinosaurs", nothing will dampen my enthusiasm for this genre.

Why? As Film Geek might say-it scares the pants off me. Second, the possibility of a pandemic is always real. Remember the Spanish Flu pandemic? No, armies of the undead are not possible (or are they??). Third, while I believe in the basic goodness of people, we all see the ugliness. Civilization has mostly unraveled, we are just waiting for the stressor to break it completely down. Sorry if that is pessimistic, but I see civilization as an imaginary set of bars that the lion only believes are there. It is a thin veil, a thread that holds us back from total chaos and destruction. Take away electricity in a major city and what happens? You get the point.

I am rooting for this picture to be at least entertaining and scary. That's all I ask.