28 Days Later (2002)

Review

"Repent, The End Is Extremely Fucking Nigh" - Writing on a wall

Jim, a bicycle courier, has been comatose for 28 days in Hospital, which is just as well as he managed to miss out on Britain entering the apocalyptic end times. Seems while Jim was sojourning three animal activists broke into a research facility and released some monkeys, only problem being the monkeys were infected with the "rage" virus. Pretty soon the virus escapes the lab and Britain goes road rage for a few weeks till it ends up resembling a Ghost town Country.

Jim discovers all this while wandering the silent streets of London, but pretty soon discovers he isn't alone; the remanets of the infected are still going Romero crazy. Thankfully he is rescued in the knick of time by Selene, no not that one, and Mark. Next on the agenda is checking Jim's parents, who have topped themselves, and once again the infected catch up with Jim. Later with the help of Taxi driver Frank and his daughter Hannah, Jim and crew head up North where the army is holding ground. Our team are about to discover that there are worse things than the infected left in a desolated England.

28 Days Later caused something of a stir back in 2002, winning accolades and re-inventing the zombie sub-genre once more with the fast moving infected. Of course at the time, and continuing to happen, are differing sectors of the horror movement claiming the infected are not zombies as they haven't died. The ludicrously of this viewpoint takes a mere few minutes to highlight, originally zombies were the victims of arcane practices in Haiti et al, which involved drugging a victim to near death, and pretty much producing in them a placid zombie state. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which led many to determine this was what a zombie was, in fact was a movie about Ghouls, an entirely different breed of creature, and before you start whinging about that Romero himself referred to his walking dead as Ghouls not as zombies. Recently 28 Days has come under scrutiny by a bunch of Reviewers who naturally don't like it, mainly due to many of us considering the movie a horror classic and worthy of as many awards as can be thrown in its general direction. Some of the views being expressed are boarding on legally liable, you need to play the ball and not the man people, and really do smell of the sort of person who considers The Exorcist over rated, i.e. people with zero idea of the history of the dark genre, and how fundamentally some movies change the direction our belovered cinematic diet is heading in. Hey mixed metaphor boy strikes again yo!

At the time of release 28 Days ironically breathed a fresh brief of life into a sub-genre that had become moribund and pretty stale. Just how many movies with the titles including "of the dead" does one really need to view? Screen writer Alex Garland decided there needed to be an explanation for the apocalypse and chose the natural target of science going wrong, the whole Prometheus thing, man dialling into something he really should have left alone. Or as Michael Crichton is apt to put it, just because we can do something should we? So I was amused with the whole premise, animal rights activists unleashing the ultimate solution, Garland pointed out it doesn't matter what your motives, playing with fire is playing with fire! Anyways as horror keeps pointing out, there be dark forces in those Hills, don't tinker with the natural order, everything can go Frankenstein's monster on us pretty quickly, or to put it in Stephen King's terms, chaos is only a wrong decision away.

What Director Boyle has going down is some seriously good action, which at times hits the gruesome, but also takes time to develop some characterisation. The start of the movie might be a tad slow as Jim discovers the new world order but when Boyle goes "rage" he's coming at the viewer with both barrels. The action is kinetic, rapid, and puts the viewer directly into what is happening on screen. There's simply no dealing with the infected, either get out of the way, or be prepared to fight. We find fire doesn't stop them, massive violence doesn't stop them, and for sure pleading isn't going to work. Boyle isn't pulling away from the gore, gore hounds be happy tonight, especially when Selene goes Amazon with a machete, Jason would have been looking away from that scene friends and neighbours.

There's some classic scenes going down that will have you grinning from ear to ear, but Boyle also takes time out of his busy schedule to reference various scenes from Romero's original Dead trilogy. The Director paints a bleak picture, and then layers it with some grimy action that gets steadily worse as Jim and team escape the death trap that London has become. England's major city might be a rubbish dump of slow decay but out beyond its boundaries there's a feeling that things are headed for dark trouble times, did Boyle go medieval on us with this? There's a dark brooding atmosphere to the entire movie which puts you on edge, anything could be coming at our survivors and more often than not it does.

Right from the start of the sub-genre, White Zombie, one of the fundamental themes in zombie movies has been there's more to fear in the new world order from your fellow humans than anything else that might be coming at you. Romero heightened this theme with this trilogy, Boyle takes it into overdrive and points out anyone with guns in the ashes are pretty much a Feudal lord in the making. No doubt the Writer and Director also wanted to underline civilisation is one major disaster away from a complete breakdown and return to savagery. In the second half of the movie the infected are pretty much not that dangerous, in fact Jim pretty much utilises them as allies as he faces an ever more savage enemy.

A couple of things surprised me with this movie. Firstly how quickly paced things are and we aren't simply talking the infected attacks, which were filmed kinetically and at rapid fired speed, I'm talking the movie as a whole. There's the old halt in proceedings for exposition, but the slowdowns are not in the least distracting and are pretty much kept to a minimum. It might at stages seem like Boyle had other places to be and you'll find 28 Days feels like it lasted a bare half an hour when the end credits roll, you will be shocked to learn no doubt the actual running time was actually 113 minutes, that's nearly a couple of hours Bro! The other thing that surprised me was just how violent it got at stages, though for mine this was more in the Toby Hooper tradition of you believe you are seeing more than you do than actually splattering the screen with viscera. Not sure if the gore hounds would approve but I was rocking out to some tough love curtesy of Mr Boyle.

It's not every day you get to see a movie that has a profound effect on the dark genre, which Boyle's little walk through the apocalyptic landscape does, witness the plethora of fast movie zombie flicks since 28 Days to hit our screens, so get strapped in folks. While I'm not a fan of fast movie zombies as such, I do think Boyle pulls it off with his infected, see they aren't dead ergo they can gallop at a rapid rate of knots. While I'm not arguing 28 Days Later had the same impact on the direction of the dark genre that Night of the Living Dead did, Boyle's movie certain turned things from their pre-ordained course of shambling dead to a slightly more modern fast moving creatures. I'm not getting into an argument over whether or not the infected are zombies, we have an article series covering that, but feel free to bicker amongst yourselves over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, for mine they're zombies. The more pertinent question however might be what condition would zombie cinema be in now if 28 Days never got made.

Okay to finish up here the T&A isn't happening, director Boyle doesn't tend to lean that way in his movies at the best of times, and besides scenes involving some violent deaths the gore is kept under wraps. But there is this feeling of impending dread throughout that pushes the movie firmly into the horror zone, and hey that's my bit for trying to define what horror is.

One of the most influential modern horror movies 28 Days Later is also highly absorbing and is pretty unrelenting in painting a bleak picture of an apocalypse. Danny Boyle is right across the requirements and knows his horror tropes, this is a must see movie kids even if you aren't a horror fan. Don't wait around for this one go buy the Blu-ray today, there's another movie in the series, and the hint that a third movie might not be that far away. 28 Days is a recurrent idea in the dark genre, get on board that idea and see just why people raved about this movie on release.