28 Days Later Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)June 26th, 2003
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It's a little jarring to see makeshift memorials with flyers for missing persons on the big screen, but the fact that their presence is due to a killer virus responsible for wiping out scores of people is even more potentially troubling in this post-9/11 world of ours. And that's part of what makes 28 Days Later so much fun. Following outbreaks of anthrax, SARS and monkeypox, Later (actually shot before the terrorist attacks) could never seem more believable than it does now.
After a brief prologue that shows a bunch of do-gooders attempting to rescue animals from the Cambridge Primate Research Center, a rage-related virus is accidentally released into the public (God forbid someone find a cure for cancer or a way to make a tastier monkeyburger, you pricks). 28 days later, bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy, How Harry Became a Tree) wakes up from a coma in a completely abandoned London hospital. But it's not just the hospital that's empty - it's the entire city, and it looks way cooler than when Cameron Crowe did the same thing with Times Square in Vanilla Sky.
Eventually Jim does find some life among a pile of corpses in a church, but they turn out to be blood-spewing zombies who want to feast on his delicious flesh. Not being down with that scene, Jim hooks up with a small pack of non-flesh eaters like himself, who explain what exactly happened while he was in la-la land back at the hospital. The zombie virus, it seems, is passed via blood and saliva and turns you from a mild-mannered human into a bloodthirsty monster in about 10 seconds. But in a better way than Hulk.
Since part of the story - which I'm being purposefully vague about to reduce spoilers - involves the group having to travel from Point A to a slightly mysterious Point B, and since said journey involves going through a dark freeway tunnel, it's easy to dismiss Days as a rip-off of Stephen King's The Stand. But that's actually where the similarities end. Because of its depiction of group insanity via isolation, Days is a bit more like Brian K. Vaughn's excellent comic Y-The Last Man, or even The Beach, which was the last film made by Days' director (Danny Boyle) and screenwriter (Alex Garland).
I'm a big Boyle fan and still think The Beach got a bad rap (it was way too overanalyzed because it was Leo's first post-Titanic feature). Days should right people's impressions of the Trainspotting director, especially his decision to shoot the film using digital video, which not only gives Days more texture, it also gives it a more degraded, apocalyptic look and feel. The fact that the DV camera was being wielded by Anthony Dod Mantle (the veteran of three Dogme films, the upcoming Dogville and the two DV shorts Boyle made for the BBC) only helps matters.
Also helping is Boyle's deft ability to choose the right songs to score his film. In addition to using Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)," which you may remember from such films as Traffic, Boyle also selects God Speed! You Black Emperor's "East Hastings," which practically gave me goosebumps. His zombies aren't anything to look down your nose at, either. They're legitimately frightening, especially the way they lurch and their impressive top speed. These aren't your daddy's zombies, who ordinarily stagger around like old people at the mall. And Days isn't a brainless slasher-zombie flick, like (P)Resident Evil, even if its last act, which devolves into the video for "Jeremy," is a bit unsatisfying.
1:52 - R for strong violence and gore, language and nudity
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