After a raid on a primate research facility by animal rights activists, a devastating mutant virus escapes which puts people into state of permanent murderous rage. Within 28 days the UK has gone to pieces. Cillian Murphy plays the man waking up in a London hospital bed and wondering just what on earth has happened and how he is going to survive. A modern zombie thriller that uses DV to good, and unexpected effect.
Britain has a good track record in shaky, low-budget sci-fi, and this is right up there alongside the likes of The Day of the Triffids and Quatermass II. Indeed, 28 Da... more >
Britain has a good track record in shaky, low-budget sci-fi, and this is right up there alongside the likes of The Day of the Triffids and Quatermass II. Indeed, 28 Days Later borrows some staple B-movie plot devices: a man in confinement somewhere (here a hospital) wakes from a coma to find the world upside-down and a lot of people dead; later when he meets a few other survivors, there is a radio broadcast about a military installation somewhere offering hope for survivors; then there’s a journey (with the staple empty road scene) during which loyalties are tested and the survivors must make it through various ordeals. Even here it reads like regurgitated John Wyndham.
The plot is essentially straight out of any number of such films, though the differences are illuminating. The 50s and 60s gave us threats from alien invasion. Here we have bio-terror, a threat from within society that has its genesis in a primate research laboratory in Cambridge (wouldn’t you know). The opening scene is in fact the most chilling in the entire film, with a ‘rage-experiment’ chimpanzee hooked-up to a constant feed of violent crowd scenes from the screens that surround him. Nasty.
Cillian Murphy tries his best with the part of hospital survivor but then comes over all clean-cut which doesn’t seem right at all. At one point the three main characters are shown standing together, looking so young and wide-eyed that it seems they’ve just stepped off the set of the Chronicles of Narnia and really don’t know quite where they are and why every one is being so beastly to them.
The Wicked Witch in this case is a certain Major West, played with assurance by Christopher Eccleston. Presiding over a group of squaddies in a ransacked manor house (there has to be a manor house, see JW), he lures people to him with the promise of survival. Turns out that his ideas about survival are a little more basic than our brave trio would have liked.
It’s not really convincing. The characterisation is a bit random and we never get close enough to any of the characters to care much about them anyway. The special effects are ok in a special-effects-lite kind of way and some of the digitally-manipulated scenes are ok in a Photoshop kind of way but as a whole the film never communicates any real psychological fear and is content just to film a story and provide a silly happy ending. All in the good British B-movie shaky sci-fi tradition in fact.
Sort of The Earth Died Screaming with more blood.
< less
A powerful virus escapes from a British research facility. Transmitted in a drop of blood and devastating within seconds, the virus locks those infected into a permane... more >
A powerful virus escapes from a British research facility. Transmitted in a drop of blood and devastating within seconds, the virus locks those infected into a permanent state of murderous rage. With genuinely eerie shots of an abandoned London this modern reappraisal of the zombie genre is unsettling and engaging. < less
Sometimes the pleasure of watching a film comes from being in the same room as the work of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zomb... more >
Sometimes the pleasure of watching a film comes from being in the same room as the work of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie horror movie lets loose a fatal virus - he Rage - onto the streets of Britain, wiping out most of the population and turning the infected into charred-skinned, red-eyed flesh-eaters. Hero Jim (Cillian Murphy), a courier with cheekbones, wakes up from a coma to find the hospital he’s in abandoned and the world outside just as eerily quiet. A few scattered survivors remain - notably Selina (Naomie Harris), all too aware of her status as one of the last women standing - but the group’s nerves, frayed by relentless attacks, leave them just as prone to defeatist bickering.
The opening twenty minutes - as Jim wonders through silent, depopulated city streets lined with abandoned lottery tickets, useless currency, and the fruits of looted shops - are the best use of the nation’s capital for the purposes of horror since An American Werewolf In London. Boyle, who subverted London’s touristy reputation with that satirical montage in the middle of Trainspotting, here offers Big Ben trinkets littering Westminster Bridge and a double-decker bus turned on its side in an otherwise deserted Whitehall.
This is the first British digital feature to top the UK box office, and I suspect its success is due partly to the fact its audience are unlikely to have seen a film which looks quite like this before. The multiplex crowd and Dogme movie fanatics are two very different demographics, but what both want from a film appears to be fairly similar: the Scandinavian features used digital video as an index of edgy realism, so there’s nothing to stop more horror pics capitalising on this medium’s pixillated ambiguity. (As if to strengthen this felicitous union between mainstream content and arthouse form, Boyle here enlists Festen’s Anthony Dod Mantle as director of photography.)
Boyle busies himself making the background as believable as possible. The first jolt in the film comes not from an infected creature leaping out of the dark, but from a car alarm going off unexpectedly. From then on, plot points hinge on the most credible response to each situation. In an American film, an escape vehicle ploughing through wreckage would make it through without a scrape; here, it picks up a flat tyre. Most end-of-the-world cinema turns to hedonism after a while, but here the principals only squabble over how much Valium to offer an insomniac child. (Give her half of one, her father grimly concedes.)
After My Little Eye, this is the second Brit-directed horror in a matter of months to have a perversely winning bleakness about it. The situation quickly becomes so downbeat that any optimistic note subsequently proposed by Alex Garland’s script invariably seems less convincing, but this is a nicely modulated piece which makes good use of familiar character actors (Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston) to bridge the stretches of the film carried by relative unknowns, and which finds time for the odd chuckle (a trolley-dash around an abandoned supermarket) or moment of grace (wild horses roaming the countryside) amongst all the blood-letting and despondency.
As in the previous Boyle/Garland collaboration The Beach, the film turns on the point at which our nominal hero becomes a shirtless wonder with a glint of madness in his eye - and thus a character it’s not especially easy to like. And one could argue that after the highly atmospheric opening, the second half relocation to Manchester plays like a relatively conventional horror hold-out in the manner of The Evil Dead or Dog Soldiers. But in its own way, 28 Days Later… is a quietly impressive addition to the recent run of above-average British movies, a home-grown chiller of rare scope and scale. < less
