Release Date: June 27, 2003
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Burns, Christopher Eccleston
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Written by: Alex Garland
Distributed by: Fox Searchlight Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (strong violence, gore, language, nudity)
As far as intelligent filmmaking goes, the horror genre can’t say much for itself. 28 Days Later, fortunately, is one of those gems that’s not only capable of scaring the pants off of you but also of developing a smart and meaningful story. It’s a zombie movie with a terrifying sense of realism, and director Danny Boyle’s gritty digital photography is mostly responsible for that. The script by Alex Garland deserves credit as well, even tough it borrows most of its ideas from other post-apocalyptic tales. But it is the combined talents of these men that makes for a much welcomed addition to an otherwise mindless genre.
The plot may sound familiar but rest assured, you’ve never seen it done like this before. Garland’s screenplay starts with the horrifying release of a virus called “Rage,” a highly contagious infectious disease that turns all living things into red-eyed, mindless predators that stop at nothing to keep spreading the disease. Twenty-eight days later, comatose Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a hospital to find all of London completely lifeless and empty. Streets are filled only with trash, overturned double-decker buses, and flyers for missing persons. The River Thames and the Houses of Parliament sit in a peaceful and remarkably eerie stillness, like something you might see on a surrealist postcard. There isn’t a sound or any sign of life whatsoever, which is a nightmare no one wants to experience. But this simple man, formerly a bicycle courier, is right in the middle of it and he must learn to survive against the relentless and bloodthirsty zombies that the rest of the country's population has turned into.
This is the stuff bad dreams are made of, and when a writer and director are able to capture that gooseflesh feeling so realistically, it’s an uncommon treat -- a horror film that actually does its job of creating equal amounts of fear and emotion. There’s nothing unrealistic about the first half of the story, and with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle’s dark and rough photography, it’s as if we’re watching a home movie of an event that happened just yesterday. Much is left to our imaginations as well, and this documentary feel helps make the audience more afraid of what’s going on and more engaged with what the characters are doing. As a result, the film nearly matches the fear created by Night of the Living Dead, because after you’re through watching it you may be scared to unlock the door of your house or even look out the window.
28 Day Later also adds a Lord of the Flies element that shows what the survivors of such a hopelessly decayed society would do without government or a reason to live. This issue dominates the second half of the film, and though it isn’t as fascinating as the suspenseful and frightening first half, it keeps the film from becoming a generic action extravaganza with indestructible heroes who use their strangely proficient martial arts skills and an abundance of high-powered weapons to solve all of their problems. Danny Boyle takes pride in sticking to dramatic tension rather than eye candy, but he and writer Garland might have been able to think of a way for the strong characters of the first half to avoid meeting the weaker, one-dimensional individuals introduced in the movie’s latter half.
That much is excusable, though, because it's unlikely that anyone would have thought that a zombie movie could have style and genuine emotions in the first place. 28 Days Later is definitely an accomplishment for Boyle and Garland, but also for the captivating lead actor Cillian Murphy, a Briton whose name will now be known well on both sides of the Atlantic. His costars Naomie Harris, Megan Burns, and the familiar Brendon Gleeson also contribute their fair share to the movie’s distinct approach -- Harris’s character starts as a selfish militant and ends up as a compassionate mother/wife figure, and Burns plays an adolescent girl caught up in a horrible nightmare no child should have to experience.
But you know when music like Brian Eno’s “An Ending” (a dreamy electronic piece used before in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic) is used to enrich the mood, 28 Days Later is not your typical, nightmarish horror movie. That and several other classical pieces highlight the soundtrack, giving it a profound feeling that hardly any horror film has even bothered trying to generate. Put simply, this is a horror film with taste and humanity, something that's astonishing in itself.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)