28 Days Later (1 November 2002)
directed by Danny Boyle
starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Noah Huntley, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Burns, Christopher Eccleston
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MPAA rating: Studio: DNA Films, British Film Council Script: Alex Garland Music: John Murphy Running time: 113 minutes Tags: anarchy; Horror; London; monkeys; road trip; Science Fiction; taxis; Thriller; viruses Tactical strength: [6/10]
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for strong violence and gore, language and nudity
28 Days Later paints a picture of a bleak future where a virus turns most of the human population into rabid killers. The virus called Rage and engineered at a research laboratory acts almost instantly with just the slightest ingestion of infected blood and turns the host into a zombie-like killer. We see the initial infection of patient zero, as a team of activists break into a research laboratory to free the imprisoned monkeys.
Twenty-eight days later, we watch Jim (Cillian Murphy) wake up in a deserted hospital. He wanders around the streets of London looking for any other human beings, and he finds out the hard way that packs of infected humans still occupy London. Two other survivors, Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris), rescue Jim from a pack of infected and fill him in on the events of the past twenty-eight days. We never really learn if Jim has an immunity to the disease or if he just avoided contamination in his hospital room. He acts as if he could catch the disease, and no one in the film ever mentions immunity as a possibility.
Jim decides he must try to find his parents'. He makes his way with Mark and Selena his parents home and finds they have committed suicide together rather than risk infection. Later that night, Mark suffers a cut during an attack from an infected person, and Selena kills Mark before he shows signs of infection. She tells Jim, "And don't think I wouldn't do the same to you in a heartbeat." So much for the possible love interest. Jim sees some electric lights in a nearby apartment building, and there Jim and Selena meet Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his teenage daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). Frank has plans to drive to Manchester, where a radio broadcast tells that survivors should head there where they claim to have a cure for the infection. The four band together and make the trek to Manchester, where they find the remnants of an army company headed by Major West (Christopher Eccleston). Frank gets infected and killed by the army, and Major West plans on using Selena and Hannah as breeding stock -- or at least he uses that as the excuse to justify wanting to set up a private brothel for his men. A major conflict erupts as Jim tries to free Selena and Hannah from the army.
For what seems like a limited budget film, we have pretty good acting and even some passable effects. Boyle plays uses the horror element well. He could have easily turned 28 Days Later into just another zombie movie with packs of infected hunting the living. Instead, he focuses his attention on the characters, but for what purpose? As with most science fiction works, 28 Days Later asks a big "What if?" question. In science fiction, the plot should play out the answers to that question, but Boyle doesn't seem to make any really big statements. He seems more fascinated filming a lone man walking through the empty streets of London than he does in finding bigger answers, and the ending feels radically out of place with the tone Boyle presents in the body of his film.
We really can't draw many conclusions from the material in 28 Days Later. You could conclude that in times of stress men revert to their base instincts of survival and reproduction, but that really doesn't tell us anything we didn't know already and from much better productions. Essentially we have a character study of a limited number of survivors in a hopeless situation. Yes, they keep plodding on -- as many of us would hope we could do in the same situation -- but we really don't get any great epiphany about human nature in the process.
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