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So without further ado, we present 10 movies to check out when you’ve finished watching 28 Days Later!īetween slick camera work, a relentless pace and overwhelming tension, Train To Busan is one of the best zombie films ever made. If you’ve finished watching this one and are looking for alternatives – fret not! We’ve combed through the archives and saved you the hassle with our top picks for alternate viewing. While some may bemoan the illogical character decisions, there’s no denying that the suspense, horror and interesting reflection on humanity’s worst traits make this a really great movie. It's a similar philosophical journey, but in this case, idealism and faith are a fool's errand that ends up possibly dooming life on earth entirely.28 Days Later is a modern classic when it comes to zombie films. The middle part is all altruism and sacrifice for the greater good, but the conclusion ends where it started: Flynn saves the children via helicopter and takes them to France, and 28 days later, Paris is overrun with the infected. In this one, the first thing we see is the ease with which humans can abandon morality in dire situations. The first film opens with naiveté and optimism, then has that mindset challenged in the middle before the good of human nature wins out in Act III. Not to lay too heavy a hand on it, but it's films like this that underline why zombie movies have such staying power there's an unfortunate timeliness and universality to the philosophical challenges the genre brings to a front, particularly in what can be stomached and justified for self-preservation and self-interest.īut 28 Weeks Later takes a decidedly more grim approach to that idea. The imagery of people in cages and crowds of people being decimated by assault rifles was surely upsetting when the film was released in 2007, though it is particularly disturbing now. Once Stone embraces the "fuck it" mentality, there are some horrific scenes of snipers gunning down survivors to keep the infection contained. Dad has no such luck and, once infected, is wholly focused on converting the kids to his side. Whatever is in their blood, they got it from their mom, who has unexpectedly survived despite being infected. The optimists are a sniper named Doyle (Jeremy Renner) and medical officer Scarlet (Rose Byrne), who break military protocol to keep Andy and Tammy alive when the quarantine is broken and they learn that the kids' blood might have the key to a zombie antidote.
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Somewhere in the middle is helicopter pilot Flynn (Harold Perrineau), who wants to be optimistic but understandably doesn't want to submit himself to zombie-life, which seems to suck. The prominent American military characters fall neatly into idealistic and self-preservationist camps: Brigadier General Stone (Idris Elba) has the heavy burden of a "trolley problem" on a global scale, deciding how many innocents are worth sacrificing to save humanity (his conclusions tend to err on the "fuck it, kill 'em" side, though not without anxious pacing and remorse). Among them are Don and Alice's children, Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) and Tammy (Imogen Poots), who are excited to be reunited with their dad, though he tells a slightly modified version of their mom's outcome. Twenty-eight weeks later, the American military has restored London to someplace vaguely livable and survivors are gradually, and hesitantly, being flown in. The cottage is attacked and the survivors are picked off one by one, until, in one of maybe the whole genre's more shocking turns, Don abandons Alice in brutal fashion and makes his way off from the attackers in a motor boat. There's a nice old couple who own the farm, a grumpy pessimistic man, a woman whose boyfriend has been missing for a week, and a middle-aged married couple, Don (Robert Carlyle) and Alice (Catherine McCormack).ĭon and Alice have children whose fates remain uncertain at that point, but there's serious love and trust evident in the short time we spend with them before a child survivor shows up with a pack of infected in tow.
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The film, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, opens at a remote English cottage where a handful of survivors have settled into a routine of eating non-perishables by candlelight and stifling their paranoia and bickering to a manageable level. The sequel, 28 Weeks Later, more or less says, "nevermind."
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