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There are few things scarier than reanimated rotting corpses hungry for human flesh—and
reanimated rotting corpses hungry for human flesh that move
really fast is one of
them. 28 Days Later feels like Romero’s Dead Trilogy (Night, Dawn,
and Day) jacked up on speed.
The film opens with militant fashioned
animal activists breaking into a lab
to liberate tortured monkeys—television screens
flicker multiple images of
human atrocities on a back wall, hinting at one of the
overall themes of the
film. One chimp is strapped to a chair before the screens in A Clockwork
Orange fashion—which is not to say the chimp is wearing an all white outfit,
suspenders, a black bowler, and a cod piece, but that he is forced to watch these scenes
of carnage. These monkeys are infected with rage, a virus
transmitted through blood
and salvia that sends its victims into a permanent homicidal fury.
After
the rage epidemic has swept through London—twenty-eight days later, to
be
precise—turning most of the population into slobbering, disjointed,
hyper-exaggerated, arm-flaying, body-spazzing zombies (in short, ghoulish
renditions of Joe Cocker), Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a hospital. He
is
oblivious to the obliteration that has gone on around him, stumbling into
the
apocalyptic aftermath where he pairs with other survivors, eventually including Selena
(Naomie Harris), Frank (Brendan Gleeson), and Hannah (Megan Burns), who compose a
makeshift family, heading north in pursuit of “a cure to
infection.”
Divided into two main chapters, the film amply borrows from
the Romero
classics—including the aforementioned Dead Trilogy and his
lesser-known,
pre-Dawn, post-Night film The Crazies (involving a
military designed virus that inadvertently is released on a small Pennsylvania town,
resulting in psychotic behavior). Rather than rely on special effects-driven gore—which
there is plenty of as well—director Danny Boyle employs newer digital techniques and
accelerated editing to give the film a grittier, spastic quality to match the on-screen
action. The film’s most effective tool, however, is the old -fashioned element of
suspense—the grit only feeding an emotional texture of
tension that runs
throughout.
This “cure” turns out to be a military outpost run by Major
Henry West
(Christopher Eccleston), where, just as in Romero’s Day, the
action centers more on the human conflict between the survivors and the military (and
symbolically humanity versus bureaucracy)—with the infected being more
background
material.
28 Days Later is a superb horror movie, weaving our
conscious social fears (epidemics of global proportions—notably, AIDS and anthrax;
uncontrollable violence) with fantastic ones (uhhh…zombies) driving at striking comments
about our culture (our hyper-consuming ways will eventually consume us)—thus doing
justice to its cinematic heritage.
