Shrinking Universe
Muse

28 Weeks Later (2007)
D: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
S: Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner

Purveyors of stadium sci-fi rock, Muse, have been skronking out heavy blasters riddled with space operas, black holes and uprisings. In the trailer to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, his follow up to executive producer Danny Boyle’s zombie rock, 28 Days Later, we witness the slow trickling of human population after the scouring brought about by the Raging Monkey Virus (a.k.a. the Rage Virus). Burbling under these proceedings is their eventual demise. Ripping the trailer apart, as the military sounds the alarm, is Matthew Bellamy’s recognizable screech, sending shots of adrenalin to our veins.

Shrinking Universe is an ode to Despair, the kind of song that you’d like to sing amidst thousands of audiences while the song erupts into fiery prog-rock dimensions. It carries the anxiety of the characters struggling to escape the resurgence of the virus. Shrinking Universe catapults into the scale of Asimovian and Clarke-sian thinking: searching for our place in the vast fabric of the universe. Don Jaucian