The end of the world as we know it will only be the beginning of something a good deal worse. That's been the premise of a great many movies, from The Road Warrior to The Day After to George Romero's Living Dead trilogy. 28 Days Later is like a distillation of what made all three of these things frightening: the survivalism, the nihilism, and, yes, the flesh-eating zombies. In fact, it's almost misleading to bill this as a "zombie horror" movie (printed on the blood-red one sheets for the film). It starts as a nifty horror shocker, but quickly mutates into a smarter and more absorbing movie -- a story of ordinary people caught in terrible circumstances. Action and gore fans are not liable to be disappointed, but the movie has much smarter blood in its veins than, say, Jason vs. Freddy.
SF and horror lend themselves very naturally to satire and social commentary. Most of the time horror movies paint an unsparing picture of humanity -- that man is his own worst enemy, namely, and that we have more to fear from the guy next door than from some nameless toxic spawn from outer space. 28 Days Later compacts that even further: here, the toxic spawn IS the guy next door, and you could become one yourself in a matter of seconds. It serves as a metaphor for how social decay is contagious, about how a quiet suburban block can be transformed into a burned-out crater by its own inhabitants if you raise their ire enough.
Jim awakens in an eerily deserted London, 28 days after the “rage” infection.
The premise is simple. A gang of animal-rights activists break into a top secret laboratory to free the animals, only to discover they've been infected with a virus that causes them to become insatiably aggressive. This is some virus: One drop of saliva or blood and you're on your way to becoming contaminated -- and the contaminated are themselves like feral primates, spitting and roaring and tearing apart anything that moves. I also give the movie credit for coming up with a twist that's both amusing and disgusting: the monsters contaminate their victims by barfing on them.
No prizes for guessing what happens to everyone -- and yes, I mean everyone. Then we get an intertitle, "28 days later..." and cut to Jim (Cillian Murphy) coming out of a coma in his hospital bed. The hospital is deserted, and in a daze Jim yanks on his hospital greens and shuffles outside to find (in a series of astounding and elegant shots) that the whole of London is also empty. I was reminded of the Harry Belafonte movie, The World, The Flesh and the Devil, about a mine-worker resurfacing after an accident to discover WWIII has come and gone, with similarly inspired shots of Belafonte wandering around an abandoned Manhattan. One of the best moments has Jim coming across a massive communal bulletin board, where the survivors have pinned frantic notes and photos for friends and loved ones (shades of 9/11 there).
Jim and Selena: survivor types, in a place where even survivor types are ruthlessly culled.
It isn't long before Jim is attacked, and two other survivors come to his rescue: Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley). They are as no-nonsense as Jim is rattled, and their first words to him are: "We've got some bad news." Selena is adamant in believing that there is essentially no hope, that the only thing that matters now is day-to-day preservation. Jim doesn't entirely believe it, of course, and insists on making a trip to a London suburb to find his parents. What he finds is as appalling as it is poignant, and then there is a truly shocking scene that hammers home just how survivialist Selena really is. Either Jim has to rise to her level or hack it on its own. Both options seem equally ugly.
Two more survivors turn up: Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns), hiding out in an abandoned apartment complex. Frank has picked up a transmission on his hand-cranked radio: apparently a group of survivors are holed up near Manchester. Selena isn't keen on running back out into harm's way, but the others wear down her resistance: if there is survival in the long term, it's not going to come from holing up in a building where there isn't even running water. These scenes set up the basic conflict of personality between the four of them: Selena is willing to leave people behind, but Frank and Hannah counterbalance that automatically by dint of being father and daughter, and Jim is discovering that he is in fact nowhere nearly as domesticated as he would like to think.
Suddenly everything familiar is strange and terrible: Jim deals close-up with a rage victim.
They pile supplies into Frank's cab and hit the road, and from there on the film takes several remarkable left turns that are best left as surprises. I will say that it involves them encountering another group of survivors -- a lone army unit -- who have, how shall we say, eyebrow-raising plans. The ending is rather abrupt, but it works given the overall logic of the movie, and there are many moments where I realized that the filmmakers were not playing predictable games with who deserved to survive and who didn't. Everyone really is expendable, and once this hit me I quit trying to play Who's Gonna Survive? and just let the film unspool.
What really makes the movie work is its tone and tenor, and also its tight and intelligent script. At one point Selena looks Jim in the eye and says "Forget about saving the world; survival is as good as it gets." The second half of the movie is like a systematic exploration of the furthest possible implications of her words, and boy, does she ever regret them. I also liked the tentative way Selena and Jim grow closer together over the course of the film (and there's a payoff scene in that respect that provides one of the movie's biggest laughs).
The journey to burning Manchester.
Director Danny Boyle shot 28 Days Later on a tiny ($8m) budget, using consumer digital video cameras. On home video it doesn't look anywhere as grainy or blown-out as it probably did on the big screen, but that only makes the movie seem all the more desperate and urgent. Everything seems suffused in a patina of grime, but every now and then the fog lifts and we see something striking and even lovely. The whole thing becomes an argument for spending less money on movies, ironically enough: the film earned back its entire cost of principal photography in its first U.S. opening weekend. Shooting on DV was also a good strategic move, since it allowed for London streets to be closed down and used in a much tighter timeframe than would be allowed with conventional 35mm or even 16mm.
Boyle's first film was the blackly comic thriller Shallow Grave, which used a Hitchcockian murder mystery to make many nasty points about greed and desperation as cornerstones of human nature that are often hard to budge. Trainspotting, adapted from Irvine Welsh's acid and merciless novel about Glaswegian junkies, went one better, but The Beach (also from a novel, by Alex Garland) was a misfire, a retread of too much of the same material covered by Lord of the Flies. This time, with a script by Garland, they have dug a little deeper.
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