28 Weeks Later

28 WEEKS LATER (2007) - May 12, 2007
If I had telekinetic powers, I think Jaun Carlos Fresnadillo's head would have exploded by now, because I've been sending him some pretty bad vibes. He is a horrendously bad director. By all accounts, this should have been a pretty good movie -- the performances were good, the screenplay was okay and it had a solid enough premise, but man... the direction. It feels like, at film school, his teacher said "Here are the different types of shots: there are extreme close-ups, close-ups..." at which point he immediately stood up, "Alright! I've heard enough! Time to go make me a movie!" I swear, I think 90 percent of this film consisted of close-ups. As for the action, it was probably more like 100 percent. Sweet Jesus, don't even get me started on the action scenes, all of which were unrelentingly terrible. I don't think I've ever seen such badly directed action scenes; they were a complete and utter mess, a chaotic mishmash of images and sounds without even a hint of coherency. Each shot can't be more than a few frames, and it's just an unpleasant, confusing visual assault. And so shaky... Jesus. And I don't mean "we shot this handheld" shaky, I mean "let's shake this damn camera as hard as we can without breaking it" shaky. Even Paul Greengrass looks restrained in comparison. I can imagine someone might defend the film by saying something like "it's a chaotic situation, and the direction/editing-style puts you in the heads of the characters." Well, unless the character is an ADD-afflicted, crack-addled seven-year-old in the midst of a seizure, that simply isn't the case. And even if that were the case, why would I WANT to be in the head of that character? What's pleasant about that? What's enjoyable about watching a barrage of sounds and images and having to struggle to figure out what's even going on? I need to go find Fresnadillo so I can spit on him. *