director
Danny Boyle
screenwriter
Alex Garland
producer
Andrew Macdonald
cinematographer
Anthony Dod Mantle
music
John Murphy
editor
Chris Gill
cast
Cillian Murphy (Jim)
Naomie Harris (Selena)
Noah Huntley (Mark)
Brendan Gleeson (Frank)
Megan Burns (Hannah)
Christopher Eccleston (Major Henry West)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 112m
u.k.
release: 11/1/02
u.s.
release: 6/27/03
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other danny
boyle films
reviewed on this website:
- the
beach
- a life less ordinary
- shallow grave
- trainspotting
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I am far from delighted to
hand out this year's Blair Witch
award for Most Overrated Indie Horror Movie (Bill Paxton's ludicrous
Frailty took the prize last
year). Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later seems to have a lot
on its mind -- it was originally released (in Britain) right
when SARS reared its ugly head -- and that's part of what's wrong
with it. It feels too now, too ripped-from-the-headlines,
to pass muster as an enduring work of horror. And it moves not
unlike one of the shambling, flesh-eating zombies in George A.
Romero's Night of the Living Dead or Dawn
of the Dead.
The comparison is apt: In terms
of narrative beats, 28 Days Later is like Romero's Dead
trilogy compacted into a slim omnibus, though the boogeymen here
are not strictly "zombies" -- they're alive, but infected
with a virus identified only as "rage." Screenwriter
Alex Garland probably intends you to complete the quote with
"against the dying of the light" -- this reflective,
post-millennial creepshow takes time to stop and sniff the corpses.
Rage does seem to be all the rage lately -- exhibit A
would be Hulk, not to mention
X2's most popular character, the
berserker Wolverine -- but the rage here is as impersonal and
unmotivated as a tornado. Rage without meaning, as a dramatic
trigger, is a bit of a cop-out in times of painfully meaningful
rage.
In any event, after a genuinely
eerie prologue -- rage-infected lab monkeys (who've been fed
large doses of televised newsreel violence in addition to whatever
they've been dosed with -- the Ludivico Technique in reverse,
I guess) contaminate a group of animal-rights activists who'd
hoped to liberate them -- we settle into the post-apocalypse.
Head-wounded bicycle messenger Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakes in
hospital to find he has the place, and most of London, all to
himself. After much wandering about on deserted streets (shades
of Abre los Ojos and its American remake Vanilla
Sky) and many echoing, unanswered shouts of "Hellooooo,"
Jim encounters a hard-boiled survivor couple: Selena (Naomie
Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley), who save Jim's life and waste
no time filling him in on the backstory of the catastrophe, in
the jaded, this-is-how-it-is-kiddo tone familiar from movies
like this.
More wandering about leads
them to a father-daughter pair, Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah
(Megan Burns); and after yet more wandering about -- I'm being
intentionally vague here, and also intentionally repetitive;
the film's midsection is surprisingly slack and dull, interrupted
on occasion by grainy, incomprehensible spasms of violence whenever
an "infected" shows up -- the survivors run across
a band of military men, headed by the sinister Major West (Christopher
Eccleston), who, like Whitney Houston, believes that children
are our future, though in a slightly different context. His idea
is to put Selena and the underage Hannah in foxy dresses and
leave them to the tender mercies of his crude, priapic soldiers.
Spread your legs or else mankind will die out -- boy, guys will
say anything to get some nookie.
Like The Blair Witch Project,
28 Days Later will likely spook only the dabblers in the
horror genre -- the Saturday-night crowd of twentysomethings
who go see it because the commercials on MTV look hip and edgy,
but who haven't seen the many films from which it "borrows."
Horror fans will yawn and check off the influences not only of
Romero's Dead trilogy but also his lesser-known The
Crazies, and the premise of mindless automatons driven by
single-minded antisocial urges was handled more effectively --
and humorously -- in David Cronenberg's Shivers and Rabid
almost thirty years ago. The leads, except for the amiable Brendan
Gleeson as a daddy trying to make the best of it for his little
girl, are uniformly exhausted and one-note, without much personality
connecting them to their pre-plague selves. The main heroine,
Selena, has been made a strong, proud black woman (Pam Grier
would've done it up with more sex and sass back in the day),
perhaps to sidestep charges of racism: The military boys have
captured an "infected" for research -- too bad this
plot angle has none of the pathos and wit of the similar storyline
in Romero's Day of the Dead,
wherein a zombie named Bub was tentatively, movingly socialized
-- and the "infected," a bug-eyed black man who thrashes
and howls on the end of a chain, is an image to warm the icy
hearts of white supremacists everywhere.
Indeed, I wonder how much of
28 Days Later -- which, like 12
Monkeys, posits an apocalypse wrought by misguided activists
-- is really a right-wing paranoid fantasy in disguise. Horror
movies, which often speak dark and disquieting truths, don't
have to be "politically correct" -- they're
sometimes more potent if they toss politics out the window altogether
-- but what are we to make of this bitter vision of a future
blighted by dissenters? Despite the nihilistic surface of most
of his films (especially Trainspotting),
Danny Boyle is a moralist by nature, and the moral here appears
to be that the angry masses are not to be understood or reasoned
with, but to be hacked down in their rows. An unmistakable --
probably unacknowledged -- strain of colonialist ruthlessness
runs through this dystopian nightmare.
The survivors, a nuclear family
of sorts, turn their gaze to the skies at the end, and the balance
of order is restored. The image is of a military plane -- British?
American? -- and you can't help thinking that the bracingly pessimistic
Romero (who's having a terrible time financing his own fourth
Dead film, a liberal-inflected story equating zombies
with the neglected homeless living forgotten in the cities) might
have had the plane unload a few rounds of napalm on the happy
survivors, or, at least, a few daisy-cutters. For all its grit
and gore, 28 Days Later is every bit as much a reactionary,
establishmentarian work as the horror movies of fifty years ago.
It congratulates its heroes on their willingness to butcher both
strangers and dear friends at a moment's notice (when infection
takes hold of someone, you have about twenty seconds to dispatch
him), and rewards them with a hopeful ending. If it becomes a
hit in America, what that says about the national mood of fear-based
hostility will be considerably more frightening than anything
in this rather feeble and derivative film.
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