Genre 
Index

Home

Synopsis: Jim is a bike messenger who has had an accident. The accident has left him comatose, and when he wakes from his coma, the world has changed dramatically. The city of London has been abandoned, ravaged by a plague that turns people into raving bloodthirsty maniacs. Wandering through the city, he comes upon a church where there are infected among the corpses, as he makes his escape, he encounters Selena and Mark, two other survivors who blow up Jim's pursuers with firebombs. They explain that the virus takes hold in less than a minute, and that if they see any hint that he is infected, they will chop him up with machetes forthwith. This point is driven home with savage clarity after their next encounter with the infected. Mark is bitten, and Selena makes short work out of him. They keep moving through the city, and happen across a light in an apartment block. The light has been set by Frank, who with his daughter Hannah has turned his building into a fortress. Frank gives Jim and Selena shelter for the time being, but he explains that they will all have to move on eventually, because there is no water to be had. He also directs them to a radio broadcast that seems to originate from an army installation north of Manchester, where the broadcasters promise deliverance from the plague. So they set off for the north, dodging infected victims all the way. The army unit proves to be rather a disappointment. They have a captive plague victim, who they are studying, but no cure. Further, they harbor a dark secret...

"That's another one for the fire...": When I first got wind of this movie when it was making the rounds of the festival circuit last year, I said to myself: "A new, totally serious zombie/plague movie? Cool, sign me up." Perhaps my expectations were a bit high. I can't say I left the theater satisfied. While I don't mind the fact that someone wants to work in the idiom pioneered by George Romero's "Dead" trilogy--after all, the entire horror genre has been...infected...by the worldview of Romero's films--I DO mind someone taking Romero's themes and tarting them up for the arthouse without adding any new insights or extrapolations of their own. 28 Days Later is just such a film. The film is just as much of an in-joke-laden bore as the Scream movies, only without the wink and the nod. Certainly, one wishes that director Danny Boyle and Alex Garland could have avoided rehashing Dawn of the Dead's shopping mall critique of consumerism or that they could have found something new in their depiction of the miltary at the end, rather than aping Day of the Dead's Lord of the Flies military microcosm.

But then, perhaps I'm being too harsh on this element of the film, because when the film is busy aping Romero, it has a certain power that isn't diminished much at second hand. When the film DOES inject some new wrinkle (and that's all the new blood it has: "wrinkles"), they are so ill-advised that they reveal a serious lack of both imagination and common sense. For me, the movie began to unravel in the first sequence, where it goes to great pains to explain the source of the plague. This scene is so scientifically illiterate, so loaded with fallacies, that it jolted me out of the movie almost from the get-go. In this sequence, a trio of animal rights activists breaks into a lab where a monkey is strapped to a chair and is being force-fed images of violence in the best tradition of A Clockwork Orange. Conditioning, I suppose, but how does this conditioning make it into a virus? But I'm getting ahead of myself: the monkey is watching human violence. Uh huh. Like a monkey is going to care about human violence. Like a monkey posesses the cognitive capability of processing the images of human violence as meaningful information! Meanwhile, I'm still wondering why a dangerous experiment is being run without supervision in a seemingly unguarded facility. Where are the security guards? But the worst of this scene is yet to come: When asked what the monkeys are infected with, the science guy who finally shows up says, "Rage." Uh huh. Puhleeeeeze....

Of course, the mechanics of the plague itself also invite this kind of skepticism. The disease takes effect within 20 seconds. Now, this element is included as a ward against the zombie-movie question of "is he gonna turn zombie on me or not?" which the makers of this film regard as a cliche. Mind you, this doesn't stop them from using this cliche in the closing act of the movie, but this is off the point I want to make. Viruses work by injecting DNA into healthy cells as a kind of "cuckoo's egg," reprograming the cell to do something it ordinarily doesn't do and replicating more viruses. The 20 second delay before the virus takes hold is entirely too short a time for this to happen. It is barely time enough to deliver the virus through the bloodstream to where ever it needs to infect to result in a raging, murdering maniac. In short, I didn't believe the virus explanation for the film's set-up at any point during the movie.

My disbelief in the fundamental premise of the movie made me disinclined to buy into a number of the film's other more outrageous tropes and tricks. The most troublesome of these is the transformation of Jim, our hero, into a one-man army at the end of the film, a one man army capable of taking out a platoon of trained, armed soldiers single and bare-handedly. This is a guy who just woke up from a coma, after all, a man who has an angry, not quite healed scar on his head; a man who looks only marginally healthier than a heroin addict. Curiously, as Jim is transforming into a Rambo-esque superman, Selena is being turned into a damsel in distress. This is a woman who didn't bat an eye before she hacked up her mate with a machete, who during the early part of the film, looked more qualified to survive amid the ruins than even the butchest survivalist. But when the movie puts her in a dress, she becomes a helpless object in need of rescue from our hero. This is, to say the least, disappointing.

The middle part of the film is the best part. Brendan Gleeson's portrayal of Frank altogether dominates this section. This is a guy you can believe would survive in the wreckage. The middle portion also contains the film's best set-piece, in which our band of heroes attempt to navigate a long tunnel. True, the scene is stolen wholesale from Stephen King's The Stand, but it works. One wishes that the rest of the movie had this kind of claustrophobia and tension. The scene at the church early in the film is effective, too, mainly because of the imagery involved. But this all peters out eventually, which is a shame.

A final word: this film was shot on digital video. I presume that the film wouldn't exist at all without the cost savings from filming on DV (there are a goodly number of films out there now where this is the case). But contrary to the film's publicity, DV doesn't "make the action more immediate." Contrary to what you may hear from people like George Lucas, DV still isn't ready for the big time. 28 Days Later looks BAD on the big screen. The image was soft around the edges and I could spot artifacting of the image from time to time during those pesky action sequences. This will surely look better on a television screen, but I can't say that comforts me much.