28 Days Later

Danny Boyle, Netherlands/UK/USA, 2002, 113 minutes

Imagine waking up alone one day. Imagine waking up and finding that there is nobody left, that you are the sole survivor of some unknown apocalypse, the only one alive. Imagine finding out that you’d have been better off dead.

As the film opens we see a group of animal liberation activists break into a lab and freeing a set of test chimps, unfortunately these unhappy little simians are being exposed to the “rage” virus, a disease that causes carriers to become savagely violent, attacking anyone. 28 days later Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes from a coma in a London hospital, upon escape he enters a dead world, populated by the shrieking, bleeding infected. Within minutes he is set upon by hordes of the gibbering, disease ridden fiends and has to be rescued by Selena (Naomie Harris), a horror-hardened survivor, and together they set off to find out if they are the only ones left.

28 Days later is Danny Boyle’s homage to the zombie movie, borrowing liberally from many sources, from Dawn of the Dead to Day of the Triffids to The Omega Man. What Boyle manages to instill what would otherwise be a somewhat flaccid effort with a gritty sense of reality conveyed through his use of digital film and stark landscapes, making it feel very different from a traditional zombie movie. Where most movies involving the lurching dead feel extremely claustrophobic, 28 Days Later opens with scenes of the opposite, emptiness, and complete desolation, almost agoraphobic, before an ending that is brilliantly tense. The special effects are excellent, gore encrusted carriers drizzle bloody slobber, resembling rabid animals hell-bent on massacring anything living, and the terrifying speed at which they attack makes them genuinely frightening.

28 Days Later isn’t the best zombie movie ever made (in my opinion that would be Dawn of the Dead), but it does manage to put enough new spin on the genre to make it a thoroughly entertaining movie.

Review by George Williamson
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2004