28 Days Later (2002) Review
28 Days Later (2002)
Considering the response, both critical and financial, to director Danny Boyle’s big screen version of Alex Garland’s 1996 novel The Beach in 2000, you would have thought that possibly they wouldn’t want to work together again. Instead they were well up for it! Producer Andrew Macdonald was impressed by Alex’s gift for storytelling and when Garland said he wanted to do something science fiction based, it was suggested to him by the producer to base it in Britain. The result was 28 Days Later a pastiche of zombie movies along with a healthy nod to classic British science fiction literature, notably J.G Ballard and John Wyndam.
With Danny Boyle coming fresh off completing two digital films for the BBC – Strumpet and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise (both 2001) – the creative ingredients were in place to make a movie that effectively revamped the redundant zombie genre – just don’t call them zombies in front of Mr. Boyle though, to him these are simply infected people. Everyone else involved in the
project seemed happy with the z-word except him. He tended to get quite angry about it in interviews, which is ironic in a way given that the virus in the movie is ‘rage’, taking the extreme we have of social rage and cranking it up a gear.
Perhaps he ought to sit down and watch a couple of genre flicks or chat with the writer, who readily admits that his sources stem from both genres. Half funded by the lottery via the British Film Council, 28 Days Later became an unexpected smash, grossing an estimated $45million in the States, despite a limited release at fewer than 1,500 screens; all this from just a £5million budget. It grossed a further $35.4million outside the States, £6million of which was from the U.K.
It’s criminal to think that nothing was made of the movie’s success globally by a British press all too happy to run successful British output into the ground. In the States another version of 28 Days Later was put into circulation a month after its release with a second ending, which is available as an extra on the U.K. DVD release.
In fact there were a number of endings. The original cinema release closed with Jim, Selena and Hannah living together in the Lake District, the infected appear to be dying out and a plane is flying over their abode, finishing the movie on a positive note. It also follows up on an earlier scene where Jim sees an airplane in the sky, indicating that the virus could just be restricted to the United Kingdom rather than the rest of the world, much like Mad Cow Disease.
The original ending, not to be confused with the alternative ending (which has just Selena and Hannah in the Lake District meaning that Jim had died from his wound) has the dying Murphy back where he started the movie, in hospital, with Selena trying to keep him alive. As his life force drains away from him, he remembers the bike accident that put him in hospital. He dies despite Selena’s efforts to save him. I felt this ending was bleaker and more in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the film.
There was also an un-filmed alternate ending following straight on from Frank being infected at the roadblock. Jim, Selena and Hannah take Frank to the same complex we see at the start of the movie, where a liberated chimpanzee infects its rescuer. It turns out that there is a cure to the infection, a complete blood transfusion. Jim dies in this ending as he does in every other, except the released original ending however, this time it is in giving his life to save Hannah’s father Frank. This ending was scrapped as the director felt the solution of a blood transfusion to be unbelievable. Personally I felt it would have been an anti-climax and that the soldier fortress chapter was a far more satisfying, if cribbed climax.
Horror authority Kim Newman wrote in Empire magazine that ‘the power of the film is not that it hasn’t been done before, but that it hasn’t been done recently.’ As mentioned before, Alex Garland made no secret of the material that influenced his writing for 28 Days Later. Indeed some genre fans complain that it practically lifts the plot of Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985) for its climatic scenes at the military base. It could even be said that Christopher Eccleston’s Major Henry West, with his little military paradise, is not that far removed from the Colonel Kurtz character in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). More evident are the similarities to John Wyndham’s classic novel The Day of the Triffids especially Jim’s waking up and finding no one else around in an apocalyptic London.
28 Days Later opens with animal rights campaigners attempting to break chimps out of cages, only to discover too late that they are infected with a psychological virus called ‘rage.’ It is a potent and highly effective opening, grabbing the viewer by the throat, and letting them know that this is not going to be a smooth ride. It also establishes the nature of the virus through a ton of exposition, so that the story can concentrate on the plight of Jim played by Cillian Murphy, who went on to star in Wes Craven’s Red Eye and Batman Begins (both 2005), who wakes up naked twenty-eight days after the virus breaks out. (We find out later that he is in hospital as a result of a road rage incident whilst he was bike couriering).
As Jim stumbles out into a disturbingly quiet and empty London, the effect is remarkably eerie. If nothing else in the movie impresses the viewer, these scenes of a barren capital city can’t fail to. The filmmakers did consider having bodies strewn around the hospital, but realized that the emptiness and stillness conveyed earlier on that something was dreadfully wrong. The last time I saw certain landmarks that empty in London were in the big screen Doctor Who movie Dalek’s Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966). With a mix of visual effects and closing off sections of street for minutes at a time to minimise disruption, they were able to film scenes at Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street. By using Digital Video (D.V.) instead of traditional film cameras, they were able to film the brief shots as required in tight time windows.
Soon Jim comes across the infected in a church with the audience discovering things at the same time as Jim does. Chased into the streets, he is rescued by Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris) who bring him up to speed on what has been happening. Concerned for his parents they travel to the family home to find that they have committed suicide together with a photo of a young Jim in their hands with a message reading ‘Jim with endless love, we left you sleeping. Now we’re sleeping with you. Don’t wake up. X’. After an attack from an infected neighbour, Mark is hacked to death by Selena before he can become fully infected.
Whilst walking, Jim and Selena see, in the desolation around them, flashing decoration lights coming from near the top of a tower block of flats. This leads them to Frank (the always impressive Brendan Gleeson), a cabdriver and his teenage daughter Hannah, who welcome them into their family home after rescuing them from chasing infected. After picking up on a radio broadcast they decide to journey to the location it states hoping salvation lies there. Instead they end up guests of the slightly mad Major Henry West and things take an unexpected turn for the worst.
28 Days Later reinstated Boyle as a director of note after some big disappointments – A Life Less Ordinary (1997) and The Beach (2000). So impressed was horror novelist Stephen King, with the film, that he bought out an entire showing in New York City. Whilst it is claimed that the likes of Resident Evil (2002) kicked off the big screen revival of the zombie genre, I consider it is more likely the success of Boyle’s apocalyptic version did. Witness the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead where the un-dead give chase. Would that have been the case had the infected in 28 Days Later had not done the same?
As mentioned earlier, 28 Days Later can hardly be considered original but what it does, it does so well. Jolting the audience from the word go with scenes of violence being projected onto a chimpanzee, to the sudden attack on the female activist, to the completely nude shot of Jim waking up and from then on the movie constantly unsettles the viewer. From empty shots of London, to Jim’s killing of an infected child, the movie is far from comfortable viewing. Even the scene in the Blackwall Tunnel, where the four main characters are trying to start the cab to flee from the fast approaching infected, takes the well worn cliché of whether the vehicle will start and get them away in time and makes it feel dramatic and edge of the seat.
I know its nitpicking but when someone is in a constant state of being angry doesn’t the body just quit with something like a heart attack or some stress related illness. Also why does it take our heroes two days to get to Manchester from London? The filmmakers’ answer is that it just does.
Where 28 Days Later succeeds is in creating well rounded characters to root for, with Gleeson’s Frank coming across the best. In fact, the scene where Frank is shot by the very same soldiers he hoped would be their salvation, following being infected by accident, is a very emotional scene. Whilst there are no jump moments or out and out frights, the atmosphere is unrelentingly unsettling, with a sense of foreboding underlining each scene.
