28 Days Later

Your dad was right—liberals have ruined it for everyone. Animal rights activists break into a shadowy research facility and, as they’re wont to do, set lab animals free from their cages--only to learn that they're infected with a (man-made) "rage" virus that turns them into snarling, murderous savages with rat-like red eyes. The virus quickly spreads to human beings, awakening the rageaholic within.

(bad things happen)

28 days later, a man named Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens from a coma to an empty hospital, completely unaware of what has happened. He walks outside to find the London deserted, wandering thorough Piccadilly Circus and crossing Westminster Bridge without another soul in sight.

After a close call with the raging hoard, Jim hooks up with a couple of uninfected survivors. After hearing a remote radio broadcast offering help, he and hard-boiled survivalist Selena (Naomie Harris) team up with a father and daughter (Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns) to travel north to rendezvous with group of soldiers, battling the infected along the way.

"A zombie film is a good vehicle for certain ideas," says director Danny Boyle, and indeed the film’s premise allows Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland to riff on zombie flicks, post-apocalyptic sci-fi, bioterrorism, anxity over madcow disease, SARS, monkeypox and the like, post-9/11 bloodlust, and the “Nature of Man” allegory that lies at the film’s palpitating heart. “I see 28 Days Later as a sort of oblique war film,” says Garland, relayed via seventies zombie movies and British science fiction literature, particularly J.G. Ballard and John Wyndam.”

Shooting on digital video helps Boyle ("Trainspotting") and director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle to establish the film’s rugged tone, giving it a first-hand, documentary feel (it also allowed Boyle to make the film on a paltry $10 million), casting the film’s post-apocalyptic imagery in almost painterly textures and depths.

Alas, the story is the weakest link here, and the convulsive suspense that propels you through the nightmarish first two-thirds of the film stumbles a bit as it is sublimated in favor of some fairly conventional plot machinations for the final third of the film. Regardless of this, ’28 Days Later’ is a quantum leap from Boyle and Garland’s last collaboration, and is also far superior to the bloated mess that was this summer’s other “rage” picture, ‘The Hulk.’

Matt Parks (July 22, 2003)