28 Days Later (2002)

28dayslater

Directed by Danny Boyle
Written by Alex Garland
Starring
- Cillian Murphy
- Naomie Harris
- Megan Burns
- Brendan Gleeson
- Christopher Eccleston

Despite living in Utah, I don’t usually pay much attention to the Sundance Film Festival; the segment of “independent film” that they court doesn’t much hold my interest, and the star-spotting games that attendees can play up in Park City only points out to me how much the whole gig’s become a way for the Hollywood mainstream to feel good about itself.

However, a random browse through a co-worker’s newspaper brought me up short: Not only were they showing 28 Days Later, the much-ballyhooed-but-not-yet-domesticated horror film from Danny “Trainspotting” Boyle, but they were going to be showing it in Ogden, ten minutes from my house, instead of (or in addition to) in Park City, more than an hour away. Sometimes, just sometimes, life is good.

The end of the world is no reason to stop stylin’.

I had heard mixed opinions about this movie, and the fact that it was accepted into Sundance gave me further pause. But I gamely bought a ticket and took it in, smuggling the Hieratic Head in in a duffel bag.

I should not have worried. The first five minutes sold me. And after the first ten minutes, the movie would have had to rape my sister to avoid getting a “HOT” rating.

The striking first image: TV monitors showing lynchings, burnings, beatings, all of those graphic representations of man’s inhumanity to man. And the audience? A chimp strapped down to a table with electrodes all over his skull, looking from monitor to monitor in incomprehension.

The chimp is part of a research project, which is as good a reason as any for a group of idealistic activists to break into the lab to free them at night. A lone technician, working unexpectedly after hours, pleads with them not to release the chimps from their airtight cages, but they ignore his protestations of infection and contagion. Big mistake. A red-eyed chimp slashes and gouges a woman while her compatriots try to pry him off — and then, twenty seconds later, she herself is red-eyed and savage, tearing her friends limb from limb. Welcome to the virus called “Rage.”

(An aside: As I was seating myself, I noticed that further down the row sat a tidy little family out on a night at the movies, right down to the cherubic eight-year-old girl. Apparently these people had missed out on any description of the movie whatsoever — which usually dwelt on words like “gory,” “ultra-violent,” “bleak,” “vicious,” and “unrated.” I set my little timer. They lasted about five minutes, and abruptly got up and paraded out during the mad chimp attack. Nice thinking, folks; y’all come back soon, hear?)

Bon voyage! Don’t for get to write!

And now, cut to 28 days later (thus the title): As Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma naked in a hospital bed, disoriented and obviously weakened. The hospital is empty, with overturned beds and crashed gurneys all over. No one answers his increasingly frantic calls for someone, anyone. He finds some scrubs and stumbles out into the street.

No one. London lies like a graveyard in front of him. Empty streets, silent buildings. Signs of flight, smashed storefronts, scattered newspapers screaming “EVACUATION” and “QUARANTINE,” scribbled prayers of supplication hastily pinned to bulletin boards. (And an intense, inexorable soundtrack that puts the Jaws theme to shame.)

He wanders into a church. A church full of dead bodies.

And a handful of the infected. Feral, slobbering, quick and strong.

He tries to outrun them, but hey — he’s been in a coma. And just before they run him down, two figures in gasmasks come to his rescue, hitting the infected with Molotov cocktails and blowing up a gas station to finish them off before tugging him to relative safety. They are two survivors who’ve banded together, Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris), and they fill him in. He’s the first non-infected person they’ve found in six days. There is no treatment, prevention, or cure; infection from the blood or fluid of an carrier is almost instantaneous, with about a 20-30 second lag before the victim becomes a senseless murder machine. There is no government or infrastructure left, and unlike the cheats used in movies like The Omega Man and Night of the Comet, there is no electricity or water.

Yup. They’re screwed.

That’s what you get for driving on the wrong side of the road, innit?

It doesn’t take long before Jim’s awkwardness and unpreparedness attracts another infected attack, in which Mark gets bitten, and Selena demonstrates the resolve that’s kept her alive this long; without a blink, she machetes to death her erstwhile companion before his symptoms can manifest, and gets on with the business of surviving.

Their first sign of other survivors is a flashing light on a high story of a barricaded apartment building. It turns out that lumpish cabbie Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his teen daughter Hannah (Megan Burns) have been holding out, signalling with Christmas lights connected to car batteries and drinking rainwater collected on the roof. Problem is, rain’s been in short supply. But with other people to help, Frank spills his great idea: He’s discovered a repeating shortwave braodcast from an army unit toward Manchester, inviting people up for safety. All it will take is a couple of tanks of gas and his old cab. And a whole lot of luck.

In many ways, this is a zombie movie without zombies. The infected are certainly mortal; they can be killed in all the normal ways, though they don’t go easily. They move quickly and attack viciously for the pure sake of killing. And, like zombies, they don’t bother with animals or their own kind. They’re really the ultimate zombie, which makes this really the ultimate zombie movie despite there being no honest “living dead.”

“My crumpets are soggy.”

What’s more, nothing here is truly original — there are only so many ways a virulent plague story can play out, after all — but that’s in no way a criticism. Rather, it seems that the best ideas from all such movies have been distilled here, with all the normal stupidities culled, and presented in as brutally striking a manner as possible. Even the previously-used ideas aren’t cliches, and each time it seems as if they movie’s going to finally fall into a well-travelled rut, Boyle and Garland treat it as fresh, untrammelled territory. Yes, Selena ends up feeling more for Jim than utilitarian contempt, but it’s a completely natural development, not an obligatory love-story subplot. Yes, there is an army commander (Christopher Eccleston) later in the story, but he’s not the cartoonishly fascist or insane military heavy we all expect to find in uniform. Yes, people end up having to kill people close to them, but this is not a movie that makes it easy. This is no videogame, as evidenced by the long scene in which Jim insists on going to his parents’ house to be sure, and finds them long dead of quiet suicide in their bed, holding a childhood picture of him. And conversations as to what “normal” is — whether people killing people is normal no matter how you slice it, or if humankind’s extinction will finally let the earth get back to “normal” — don’t come with easy answers.

And Garland’s script isn’t afraid to stop for some good characterization. Frank is the most cheerful of our protagonists, mostly because he’s the most practical and down-to-earth; he’s knocked the huge problem of the End Of The World down into a chunk manageable enough to deal with: supplying food and water, and looking out for his daughter. By contrast, Selena is the most pessimistic, because she’s redefined her goals down to the ultimate baseline: Simple survival at whatever cost. It’s Jim who comes into the situation with fresh eyes, learning the ropes of the new world the hard way without having had them beaten into him beyond hope.

“After all, tomorrow is another day.”

I’ve seen some reviewers comment in disappointment on the visual quality of the digital video Boyle chose to use. Frankly, I think those reviewers need to check the prescription on their bifocals. Far from being murky or camcorder-ish, the image is clean and crisp and indistinguishable from film except where the difference is intentional. In the infected attacks, to heighten the tense energy level, the individual frames of the video have absolutely no motion blur; it imparts a staccato hyperreality to those scenes. It’s an effect you just can’t get from film, and completely validates and justifies Boyle’s choice of medium.

I’ll be honest; the main reason I wanted to go see this was so that I’d be able to brag about it with my compatriots at B-Fest. (And I did, make no mistake.) But I also ended up seeing what may be one of my contenders for Best Picture of 2003.