Went to see 28 Weeks Later last night and really enjoyed it. I agree with my favourite film critic Mark Kermode that it's a perfectly good addition to the horror genre, with lots of gore, lots of screaming, children in peril, fast-paced, and armies of zombies hurtling round London. What could be better? I particularly liked its use of London as a setting. It really has become a stunning cinematic landscape - the Gherkin, the Eye, Docklands, Tate Modern, all jumbled up with the heritage. I've spent some time in the last year in Greenwich visiting a son who was living there for a while, and took a trip on the DLR through Canary Wharf. I remember frequent visits to friends who lived on the Isle of Dogs back in the very early 70s, when to get there, I had to take a long trip down the Central Line, followed by another lengthy bus ride from Mile End down West Ferry Road. It was a deserted, derelict wasteland, and my friends lived in a Victorian street surrounded by 1930s council blocks which I think was Cubitt Town. There were very few shops - I remember having my ears pierced in an extremely old-fashioned jewellers shop on West Ferry Road. The shopkeeper pulled out a chair, I sat down, he rubbed a bit of alcohol on my earlobes, quickly pierced them with a syringe, popped in a couple of gold rings and sent me on my way. It cost very little, I remember, and was a far cry from the hyper-sterile exercise it would be today.
Anyway, it's an entirely different landscape now, almost surreal, and it's ambience was captured very well in the film. Not a long film (Hooray!) and not an expensive one (even better - I'm losing patience with bloated, big-budget spactuculars that cost in the region of a nation's GNP.) So, highly satisfying in every respect.
