A few minor sub-plots emerge, Fresnadillo offers sly commentary on the military's trigger-happy tendencies, and the film ends up somewhere in between zombie fare such as George A. A pounding soundtrack helps enliven the scenes with 'the infected,' and an abundance of swooping aerial shots highlight the desolate London landscape.

Chaos follows, with the sadistic military and the forlorn survivors battling both each other and 'the infected.'Fresnadillo apes much of Boyle's style from the original film, shooting in rapidly edited sequences that cause plenty of blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments. The two kids soon escape from the heavily guarded community, go off searching for their childhood home, and discover that mom might not be quite as dead as they originally thought. Carlyle plays Don, a man who has lost his wife but is reunited with his children, Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) and Tammy (Imogen Poots), near the start of Fresnadillo's film. The American military are slowly bringing British citizens back to London, where a heavily guarded community is picking up the pieces and trying to return to normal life. The zombies (again referred to as 'the infected') from the first film have died out and England is ready for repopulation. In their places step director/co-writer Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (INTACTO) and actor Robert Carlyle (TRAINSPOTTING), who bring the original story to its next logical step. Few elements from the first film remain-actor Cilian Murphy doesn't return, and Boyle and screenwriter/novelist Alex Garland take producer credits this time out. Danny Boyle's surprise 2003 hit, 28 DAYS LATER, gets the sequel treatment here.

Along with great performances from some of my favourite actors, I got an intelligent and compelling story. It was this cast that made me buy the DVD and I'm glad I ventured outside my comfort zone and watched the film. The cast including Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston alongside Cillian Murphy is great, with them all turning in very solid performances. Even the intentionally grainy picture quality, criticised by many reviewers, works very well for me. And then, just once in a while, inbetween the scenes of utter desolation and frightening attacks by the infected, there are seemingly incogruous moments of relief like the myriad of colourful buckets on the roof or the horses in the field. Knowing that all this was filmed for real rather than being created inside a computer makes it all the more remarkable. Similarly fascinating are the shots of that lone London taxi cab driving along the deserted motorway with the windmills silently churning away in the background.

The film is worth watching for that alone: seeing those iconic London locations entirely devoid of people. The scenes of Cillian Murphy wandering around a completely deserted London are stunning and utterly chilling at the same time. The plot is not so much a horror story as a well contructed post-apocalyptic tale set in England, where a highly contagious rabies-like disease has wiped out nearly the entire population, with a very few unaffected individuals trying to survive and escape to a place the infection hasn't reached. While I'm still not gone on gore and scary creatures, the scenes showing the rabied infected are, though sudden and genuinely frightening, mercifully swift and short. I don't do zombies and have very little interest in horror films, and so it is not until 15 years after it was made that I finally watched this film.

28 weeks later blue ray