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Director - Danny Boyle.
Writer - Alex Garland.
Director of photography - Anthony Dod Mantle.
Editor - Chris Gill.
Music - John Murphy.
Production designer - Mark Tildesley.
Producer - Andrew MacDonald.
Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures.
108 minutes. Rated R.
STARRING: Cillian Murphy (Jim), Naomie Harris (Selena), Christopher
Eccleston (Maj. Henry West), Megan Burns (Hannah) and Brendan Gleeson
(Frank).
After seeing the preview for 28 Days Later, those who love
violent zombie movies will rush to the theatre hoping for chaotic
bloodletting.
Others will assume it is just another icky horror film, and they'll
steer clear of it. And who can blame them? Derivative, disposable horror
movies show up almost every week these days, and those worth discussing
are rarities indeed.
But Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) had a lot on his mind while he
assembled this low-budget, high-tension thriller about zombies and the
apocalypse. The result is, yes, terrifying, but not just in the "Yikes!"
sort of way. It's scary because, while we may never be stalked by slimy
zombies, we are coming to know more and more what it is like to live in
the midst of an angry, violent, explosive populace.
Like the best horror films, 28 Days Later taps into our primal
fears. And like the best science fiction, it reflects things about the
present and dares to prophesy about the monsters waiting for us around
the corner.
Boyle's troubling tale takes a cue from Stephen King's The Stand,
examining the effects of a massive and aggressive virus on a heavily
populated city. It opens with a bicycle courier named Jim (Cillian
Murphy) waking up in a hospital. He disconnects himself from the
abandoned medical equipment that someone had apparently been using to
monitor his condition. And then he heads out into a city that has
strangely turned to a ghost town.
Or better... a zombie town.
We soon learn that an epidemic has wiped out Jim's world, a plague that
began when scientists performed cruel experiments on monkeys, forcing
them to watch newsreel highlights of the atrocities that human beings
visit upon each other. The tests led to an outbreak of a virus
appropriately named "Rage." Rage takes over its host organisms and
reduces them to barbaric animalistic behavior.
So Rage victims are not technically zombies... they're not the
undead. They are human beings whose higher natures have been overcome by
a demonic acceleration of their baser appetites, turning them into
murderous, ravenous beasts who mindlessly seek to kill those with more
civilized and spiritually mature faculties.
In a panic, Jim hurries to a church for help, only to find the
congregation slaughtered and bloodthirsty monsters lying in wait for
him. He learns that attacks are not the only danger: contact with a mere
drop of blood from the infected can render a man defenseless against the
disease. Running for his life, Jim stumbles onto some survivors who
teach him how to fight the heartless monsters. Together, they strive to
learn the truth behind the rumors of a military outpost that offers
refuge for the uninfected.
What they learn is hard to accept — that sin is inescapable. Even if
uninfected human beings manage to hold these irrational Rage-monsters at
bay, other forms of evil will rise in the human heart and corrupt us in
other ways. To resist these forces, Jim and his friends will need more
than barricades and weapons. Their resources are running out, and anyone
who might be alive and able to help them is probably across the sea.
They will need more than humanitarian aid and a Bono-led fundraiser.
Be warned: 28 Days Later is extremely violent and, at times,
bloody enough to send the squeamish running for the exits. I am not a
fan of the genre, because it seems to exist as an excuse to play upon
our fears and to indulge in excessive violence and gore. This zombie
movie, however, kept me riveted with its ideas, characterizations, and
with the way it accomplishes so much with so little.
Screenwriter Alex Garland's predictions are not too far off the mark.
While I doubt there is any virus that can turn us into the bloodseeking,
ranting, raving creeps that haunt this thriller, we have certainly seen
the public more easily stirred up into violent outbreaks in recent
years. And there have been rumors of nasty viruses that are growing
stronger as our devices for hindering them get stronger. So the
"ghost-town" aspect might not be such an outrageous idea.
Moreover, as I watched Jim and his companions fight for survival, I
thought of the plight of African natives, who live today in fear of the
forces that are butchering their communities. Even now, Sudan's native
population is crying out for help while their own Arab-dominated
government funds this century's first genocide.
I'm not just "reading into it." Despite its disturbing visions and
fantastic premise, Boyle's film has critics examining it as a relevant
tale for the era of SARS, AIDS, the West Nile Virus, and epidemics of
civil unrest. Charles Mudede of the Seattle weekly newspaper The
Stranger writes,
"No book or
painting could have captured the late '90s better than The Matrix;
no sonata or sculpture could have better captured the post-Iraq War 2
mood than X2. If X2 got to the terrifying heart of
the days leading to our most recent war, then 28 Days Later
got to the heart of SARS. True, SARS came about after 28 Days
Later was made (2002), but the environment that made the disease
all the rage for the better part of the first half of 2003 is the very
same environment that makes 28 Days Later the best horror
film of our time."
Perhaps the most important lesson of the film is this: A response to
evil that is merely rational and forceful, lacking love and compassion,
will lead to whole new atrocities. Evil thrives within the hearts of
human beings, and it excels at corrupting any devices we design.
Danny Boyle may have meant to write off religion by showing the bloodied
church and the monstrous clergy at the beginning of the film. If so, he
subverts his own anti-religious prejudice... for 28 Days Later
is often punctuated with flourishes of sacred music, which seem to
suggest that we may have to look beyond military might and appeal to the
powers of heaven if we want to survive our own corruption.
Jeffrey's Rating:
B+
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