28 minutes of 28 Weeks Later

Last week I saw the first 28 minutes of 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Days Later. And it looked terrific. I was on set last year, covering the movie for Fangoria (look for that coverage starting soon) and Total Film and got a good vibe about the production. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are onboard as hands-on executive producers and they've hired a great talent in Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to replace Boyle behind the camera. Fresnadillo's last film was the sublime Intacto.

The opening sequence takes place during the initial outbreak with a group of survivors (Robert Carlyle's Don and Catherine McCormack's Alice among them) holed up in a country cottage which soon comes under attack by a horde of infected — a sequence that's as frenzied, scary and gory as any in the original film. As a terrified Carlyle makes his escape, he runs out on his wife who's trapped by the infected in an upstairs bedroom, leaving her to her fate.

The time frame then flips forward six months to when London is under the rule of the US military who are helping rebuild the city, with District 1 on the Isle of Dogs, the first safe haven. And it's here we pick up again with Carlyle's Don, working in District 1 and haunted by what happened at the cottage, lying to his two children when they arrive back in the country from a trip to Spain about what happened to their mother.

With its stark, realistic, uncompromising approach, Boyle's gritty, shot-on-DV frightfest took horror into new territory and Fresnadillo's sequel looks to further expand upon the world he and Garland created. The new film feels bigger, with more action, more infected, and a vision of London — all rooftops and odd angles of Docklands — that you haven't seen before.