It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
If you pause to consider the movement of zombies, you'll grasp the difference between 28 Days Later and other zombie movies. In other examples of the genre, the undead usually amble along like rotting, exceptionally hungry drunks. But in 28 Days Later, the zombies haul ass while gnashing their teeth and shrieking and spitting blood. In an early sequence, urban guerrillas lob molotov cocktails at a rampaging phalanx of flesh-eaters and set them ablaze, and it doesn't slow them down a bit. The zombies in George Romero's Living Dead trilogy were gonna get you eventually. In 28 Days Later, they're coming to get you now.
Intriguingly posed between low-budget indie grit and mini-major commercial savvy (it's a Fox Searchlight release), 28 Days Later is probably the most noteworthy entry in the genre since Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. It exploits all the old metaphoric implications of zombieism and adds some new ones. It comes from a team that's made a number of interesting, modestly budgeted, unabashedly commercial British art house flicks, the best of which are Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and the rest of which are engaging even when they stink. Director Danny Boyle, writer Alex Garland and producer Andrew MacDonald give good scare; like the current The Eye, this movie generates many of its shocks through oblique editing and a sudden aural switch from dead silence to overwhelming noise. The up-close, handheld action sequences suggest breaking news footage captured by a CNN cameraman who couldn't take prettier pictures because he was trying not to get killed. You often can't be sure if you saw something amazingly violent or if you only thought you did. (The frenzied, deliberately unclear visuals obscure what's happening, but the fork-stabbing-veal sound effects give you a pretty good idea.)
The premise is an exploitation-movie keeper: Animal rights activists release chimpanzees infected with a "rage virus" that turns the infected into red-eyed, meat-craving predators in the time it takes to order up, say, 10 pounds of ground beef at the butcher's counter. The virus is spread by blood, which explains why the victims keep spitting it up like TB cases coming to the end of the line. Twenty-eight days after the release of the chimps, Britain is a seething hellhole, the government has collapsed and the police and military are nowhere. One of the movie's many eerie, upsetting images is an overhead long shot of tiny figures, which pans up to reveal a city in flames. Only the most ruthless and self-interested people have managed to survive out in the open; the rest are either dead or in hiding.
Our hero, Jim (Cillian Murphy) is a bicycle messenger reborn into this scary new world after spending a month in a coma following an accident. The movie follows him as he discovers the awful story, meeting other survivors and surviving wave after wave of attacks by hungry zombies, which the film calls "infected." (Which I suppose makes this not a zombie movie, but a zombie movie by proxy, like Romero's little-seen 1973 movie The Crazies, about the military quarantining a small town infected with a virus that turns people into maniacs.) I liked the earliest sections of the movie best, when Jim is wandering a depopulated landscape, swilling can after can of the only available source of sustenance, canned soda, and searching the horizon for signs of life.
In due time he hooks up with a couple of survivors, only one of whom, the lean and beautiful Selena (Naomie Harris), survives for long. In a trope that suggests Romero's Day of the Dead, as well as countless westerns, Jim and Selena befriend a father-daughter family, Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns). Together they decide to leave the city and seek out an army base that, according to a ghostly recorded radio message, has found an answer to the infection.
Boyle and Stanton aren't merely interested in the situation, but in its moral implications; they want to see what happens to a supposedly civilized country when its institutions are destroyed. (If their movies share a common theme, it's the damage done to community by unchecked appetite.) Jim, Selena, Frank and Hannah have not been infected with violence and rage, so they're capable of having meaningful human relationships, which contrasts them against the infected, who are literally overcome by bloodlust. (Warning, plot spoilers ahead.)
Like the Coen brothers?the American filmmaking team they most resemble in versatility, technical skill and commercial aspirations?the Trainspotting guys are often accused of being too technically slick. I've never thought the charge should have stuck, but since it did, this could be the movie that shakes it loose. I found 28 Days unexpectedly moving. It's truly depressed about the prospect of apocalypse; it realizes the end of civilization as we know it means that only the tiniest seeds of civility will survive, carried by survivors until they reach safety or death.
Detractors often knock these filmmakers as hipsters, which strikes me as odd; I think they're morally conservative, even a touch square. 28 Days acknowledges race and sex, but it has a conservative utopian notion that those issues are minor compared with the splendor that is a minimally functioning industrialized country. It's saying, "Things today could be much worse," then shows you how much worse. The movie is as much political fable as horror movie; it combines pity with terror. I was pleasantly surprised by how often the movie looks beyond apocalyptic panic and sees the humanity that still exists in the infected. When Frank is infected by a drop of blood that falls from a corpse overhead, his beefy body contorts with moral fear. It's as if every cell in his body realized the evil it's capable of and he's trying in vain to resist giving in. (Gleeson is brilliant in this scene?he makes you mourn the loss of Frank's humanity before you mourn his death.)
The movie's alternately loose and studied digital video cinematography is the most adventurous I've seen yet because it revels in the video-ness of video, amping up the medium's smeary, silvery effect until it starts to seem pixilated, like an electronic-age cousin of desaturated Super 8. This watercolorish texture, combined with the director's fondness for slight-askew compositions and super-dark blacks, is playful, original and clearly deliberate. At times it suggests a magnificently rendered comic book from about 30 years ago found in the trunk of a Buick.
Some images are visually striking and politically provocative: fire-drenched infected racing down a city street, as seen in the reflection of a shop window, looking like immolated monks who changed their minds about pacifism; the hero staring into the gore-streaked face of an infected child he must kill in order to save himself; an infected black man kept chained up by a predominantly white band of soldiers whose leader (Christopher Eccleston) wants to see how long it takes for an infected to starve to death. In between super-chaotic action scenes that chart Jim's evolution from alienated former wage slave to remorseless guerrilla warrior, the filmmakers encourage us to think about freedom and security, and the implications of violence, as it's done to us and to others.
The film is repulsed by violence against infected, who cannot help what they do, but it revels in violence against uninfected humans who have tried to take advantage of others. The horror genre's status as distorted mirror of life is acknowledged in many compositions built around reflections and eyes, and in a scene in which one uninfected human tries to blind another. In what might be the movie's summary scene, a philosophical soldier remarks that society's chaotic, zombiefied state is merely a slight amplification of how things have always been. He also notes that humankind has existed for a mere instant in the planet's history, and that if we extinguished ourselves, the planet might not get too choked up.