PulpLit.net

28 Days Later...

28 Days Later... is a gritty, scary film, but not in the way you?d expect. Blame this on poor marketing and Fox Searchlight succumbing to the expected Hollywood hype: in the logo alone - a symbol of disease and contamination accompanying the film's title in blood red font - we see a misrepresentation of this beautiful film as blockbuster horror claptrap. The logo leads us to expect something similar to the brainless Resident Evil (read: cinematic lobotomy). Even the film trailers feature the clich?d image of contaminated humans becoming zombies (the "infected") and people fleeing for their lives. However, brainless this movie is not. As this astoundingly unconventional film develops, we see that director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary) has created an impressive monument that's less about horror-zombies than it is about the human condition: in the end, the most dangerous creatures are the humans themselves.

Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in hospital from a coma to find his hometown of London is an unpopulated wasteland. After wandering aimlessly for a while, he is attacked by a strange man; once a priest (one of many homages to past zombie films), now a twisted creature with bloody red eyes, moving erratically like a wounded animal. Jim barely escapes only to be pursued by more of these demented ex-humans, all of whom are horrifically vomiting their own blood. These are "the infected," and though we get a bare introduction to them in a "who's to blame" prologue, these "zombies" are never really explained. Jim is rescued by two other survivors, Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley), from whom he learns the devastating truth about what has happened to the world.

Boyle adapts Alex Garland's story to the screen in a wonderful cinematic vision of devastation. Shot entirely on video, the cinematography of 28 Days Later... complements and accentuates the plot. This is perhaps the first film I've seen this year to use jump-cuts capably to help the movie - whenever the "infected" are onscreen, their exasperated actions are warned by the fast editing which creates genuine fear as the humans run for their lives. Some startling still images are also used to good effect; my favorite image from the film is an obscure upside down wide shot of a colorful, living hillside, with the word HELL printed into the image for reasons later explained.
The film is episodic, posing different questions about humanity to parallel each grim situation. At it?s root, 28 Days Later... is about humanity and survival. Selena thinks that the only way to survive is to embrace the animalistic traits of the beast to beat it, yet can't hide the fact that her own humanity is what makes life worth living, even after an apocalypse.

The film slowly turns from the zombies and becomes, more obviously, about something deeper. Beyond early comments on animal testing, the film's story takes an unforgiving look at human nature. The later acts feature some nastily unfair events that articulate masculine sexuality/animal needs, and although the morality trip of the final act betrays the film's concept of horrifying realism, it is an unsubtle and satisfying conclusion.

28 Days Later... is not flawless, but is both an original story and an original telling. Those after mindless horror would be much better attaining to Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead, or take part in the high-budget malarky that is Resident Evil (snicker). For others, 28 Days Later... is a fascinating film, rarely contrived and falling just short of brilliance. I found it much more enjoyable than most of the summer crap currently on US screens.