ashleybrownmedia

Ah man, I remember when 28 Days Later came out...I wasn't old enough to see it, but I saw some clips of the opening sequence and I loved the abandoned London feel.

Needless to say, when I saw it it was...and still is...an incredibly good film.

So I came to check out 28 weeks later.

Basically the 'rage' virus has apparently died out and so people start to live in London again, which seems to have been taken over by the Americans.

Two kids are reunited with their father (Robert Carlyle) and all is happy in the rebuilt world for a day or so.

The kids proceed to sneak out and go to their old house, and in the panic that ensues, the zombie plague rises again. But there's something special about these two kids...and everyone around them is very keen to keep them alive.

First of all I loved the scenery in this - the landscape shots are brilliant, and it has this dark - quintessentially British - feel to it, the kind of channel 4 movie feel. Which works well and ramps up the creeping feel of dread at times.

It also has a lot of frantic shots - e.g scenes in very claustrophobic areas that are cut very quickly to build tension. A lot of the time this works, but as a viewer I like to know what's going on and this style of film-making took that away from me at times.

Was good to see Imogen Pootz in this, her career has since gone up and up - Carlyle is good value too, although doesn't get much screen time.

The opening quarter of the film is good, but sadly it fell apart from there - I didn't feel that involved in the two main children characters, and wasn't really rooting for them and I found the ending really disappointing. As I saw the final few shots I had to roll my eyes.

Call me cynical but if you liked the first one, don't bother. The zombies are the same - and yes, they are scary - violent, mindless fountains of speed and rage that you feel hopeless against - but other than that you're better off visiting the original again or going to see some classic Romero flicks.

It's hard to believe that this film is eighteen years old! While technology has moved on a tad, paranoia of being watched & listened to by the government is still just as prevalent as it was then.

In this conspiracy thriller Will Smith plays a high flying lawyer who unwittingly becomes the recipient of a tape which documents the murder of a politician by some FBI members.

What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase - the kind of story that we've seen many a time before. Smith teams up with ex spook Gene Hackman and tries to turn the tables on his pursuers.

Some of the dialogue, particularly in the first quarter of the film, is a little on the nose - I'd gone into this expecting an intelligent thriller (which I guess it is in many ways) and this put me off a bit. But I prevailed, and things seemed to get better.

There's a good ensemble cast when it comes to the bad guys - Jon Voight, Seth Green, Jack Black, the sniper from Saving Private Ryan and Ace from Starship Troopers! However, as nice as it was to see these actors on screen, they interacted like juveniles at times, and while I'm no Andy McNab, I can't imagine that covert operatives would talk like fratboys pulling an all-nighter in the library the night before an essay is due in.

Also, when they chase a witness to the murder near the start of the film they are unbelievably blatant about it and cause havoc across a big city. How their faces didn't end up on the news or at least spotted by a lot of the general public I do not know. This scene should have been so much slicker - there are about six of them and they can't catch a guy on a bicycle! As sheer luck (for them) would have it he ends up being squashed by a fire engine.

Hackman is good in this, although when he met up with Smith I was worried it might turn into one of those tired-out 'mismatched duo on the run' films - but the interplay between the two was good, a personal highlight for me.

There's a good use of aerial shots here, which adds to that whole 'everyone is watching you' feel - and for me worked very well.

I also wasn't keen on the way Smith's wife was portrayed, she's supposed to be a barrister (or so I thought) but behaves like a grumpy teenage girl and is more worried about the underwear he bought her for Christmas than the fact his life is in danger.

All in all, this whirrs along at a nice pace and keeps you going until the end - but, ultimately it's nothing we haven't seen before and suffers from poor dialogue in patches.

Ever since the TV show Castle I've been a fan of Nathan Fillion and I remember buying, and enjoying, the original White Noise on DVD years ago - so, this seemed a natural choice as something to watch.

Fillion is happily married and living with his wife and young son. One day they're sitting in a greasy spoon and chowing down...when a weird guy enters and proceeds to shoot woman and child dead. Instead of shooting Fillion the assailant shoots himself dead. Weird, huh?

Naturally our protagonist is devastated by this and tries to take his own life. He fails, and after being technically dead for a few moments, wakes up in hospital.

Things get a little weird and soon Fillion finds that he is able to tell whether or not someone is set to die soon and begins to intervene with fate...with very bad consequences.

To be honest this had very little to do with White Noise, EVP is mentioned very briefly but if anything it's more like 'Final Destination'. May as well have marketed itself as a standalone film.

It held my interest for the most part and there were a few 'jumpy' scenes - but what really put me off was how unrealistic everything was. I know film is an escape from reality, but every death-scene or premonition was quite simply unbelievable.

When Fillion realises that someone is going to die, it's not something as simple as him lecturing them to stop smoking. It's something like...a bunch of muggers are going to throw someone off of a bridge or a grand piano is going to fall off of a balcony and crush eight people.

The premise here is good, and in the right hands it could have been a decent little shocker. But way too much is thrown into 'Final Destination' style scenes. There's some vague subplot that was relating somehow to The Bible, but I couldn't pick it up properly - and I have a good concentration span, I once read (most of) 'War and Peace'.

In short, this is watchable but don't go out of your way. There are much better horrors out there, I was done by the final third and was just waiting for it to end so I could at least say I'd seen it through.