But then there's the innovations. If 28 Days Later's only claim to fame was the fact that it had zombies that moved fast, it would still go down in zombie-flick history as a true pioneer. MAN, those fast-moving zombies! Technically, though, they aren't zombies at all, but zombified living humans who've been infected with a nebulously defined chimpanzee disease that turns them into mindless red-irised killing machines so fixated on slaughter that they don't even bother to stop and eat their victims. (That's right, it's a zombie movie with no real cannibalism--innovation number 2!) Boyle films the lightning-fast zombies at odd angles and with choppy editing that only enhances their mercurial menace. The result is the kind of fast pace that modern audiences require, meaning that 28 Days Later isn't just a valuable addition to the horror canon, but perhaps a vital one.
And there's the stunning use of soundtrack. It just wouldn't be a British Post-Apocalypse without Brian Eno, and his "An Ending (Ascent)," used with devastating emotional effect at the end of Stephen Soderbergh's Traffic, is employed with equal aplomb here. There's also a memorably haunting "Ave Maria," a bit of rambly Britpop in the shopping-cart scene, and tons and tons of Godspeed You Black Emperor*, which in terms of eeriness is a good thing indeed.
None of this would matter, of course, if you didn't care about the characters, but the foursome that comprise the film's band of protagonists (tough survivor Selena, ectomorphic bike messenger Jim (What is it with all these malnourished British actors, anyway? Damn, Danny, hire a freaking craft services department already!), good-humored cab driver Frank and quiet, thoughtful teenager Hannah) are almost instantly (and non-manipulatively) likeable. I found myself favorably comparing the bunch to the four characters at the center of Ang Lee's Hulk film, who despite about two hours of in-depth psychological investigation and backstory muster hardly a whiff of empathy from the audience. (Would you have cared for a second if the Hulk had wiped out the entire remainder of the cast?)
Basically, I loved this movie. This is not to say, however, that many aspects of it, particularly in the film's final third, weren't actually kind of easy to predict, provided you had an extensive enough background in the Post-Apocalyptic Arts. Some lessons, if I may be so bold:
1) In terms of faint military radio broadcasts audible on your hand-wound AM receiver, repeated use in the broadcast of the word "salvation" is roughly equivalent to saying "we have gone Colonel Kurtz and are setting up rape camps and impaling heads on sticks as we speak."
Article comments
1 - Donald Joseph
Great comments about a great film. Another fake bit, however (albeit a minor point): The father-daughter team in the high rise used blinking X-mas lights to attract uninfected humans. When the infected "zombies" saw the humans going up the high-rise stairs, the "zombies" followed them right up. Why, though, weren't the "zombies" attracted up the stairs, in the first place, by the blinking lights? That is, why did the lights attract only the uninfected?
2 - Doctor Slack
I liked your review of the film, Sean. But yes, your political digression irritated me: "To me, this is a bit like there being a group of people in the world of the film who are militantly pro-zombie," mainly because I don't sense you're the kind of guy who's really irresponsible enough to want to compare the population of occupied Palestine to mindless zombies (even of the non-flesh-eating variety). But that's what your digression kinda basically implies.
3 - Sean T. Collins
Hey, Doc: Yeah, you're absolutely right, and I was worried about that. The point I was clumsily trying to make was that the kind of blanket support that GYBE apparently offers the Intifada seems tantamount to endorsing the pointless, purposeless violence which characterizes it (a particularly jarring lapse in GYBE's case because the album itself is dedicated to people whose lives are threatened by unexploaded American ordinance). That's no wiser than expressing support for Israel without condemning the settlement policies, the apparently reckless bulldozing of homes, etc etc etc. Mainly it was just a digression prompted by the synchronicity of seeing a movie full of GYBE music and then going outside and seeing the pro-Palestinian demonstration. And if we can't digress on our blogs, the terrorists have already won!
So, uh, anyway, how 'bout them zombies!
4 - Charlie Murtaugh
Terrific review! You really hit everything I enjoyed about this movie, along with every minor problem about it (esp. your #2, about radio signals from outside the Infected zone). On your point about how it would be hard to spread off Britain, you might enjoy this article on the movie, from last Sunday's New York Times, by former NIH director and Nobel Prize-winning virologist Harold Varmus.
5 - Doctor Slack
"the kind of blanket support that GYBE apparently offers the Intifada seems tantamount to endorsing the pointless, purposeless violence which characterizes it"
Sorry for my late reply, but I just realized what bugs me about this sentence. Whatever violence has characterized the Intifada has never struck me, on either side, as being purposeless. You could certainly make an argument for pointless, but human violence even in the nastiest tribal war always has an underlying web of justifications, rationales, strategies and goals. Anyone who believes this isn't the case with any sector of the Palestinian Intifada -- most especially the extremist suicide-bomber factions -- is kidding themselves.
To bring this back to the realm of the zombie film, it strikes me that precisely what makes zombie movies creepy is that they're a metaphor for inhuman violence -- violence stripped of reason, of justification, even (in the case of 28 Days Later) of motive. At least olden time zombies were motivated by appetite, but Boyle has purified even this trait out of zombiedom.
For that reason, talk about the virus serving as a metaphor for human intolerance or "rage" strikes me as somehow wrongheaded. It's rather that the "rage" provides an action-packed way of dramatizing the merciless power of nature -- particularly a nature lightly toyed with. (I can see other reviewers are already circling the wagons against that most Coulterish of demons, "unexamined left-wing attitudes," but really, this strikes me as a most justifiable kind of filmic commentary on a world which has seen 1) thankfully clumsy attempts to use anthrax as a weapon of terror, and 2) cattle industries ravaged by a disease born when some bright spark decided to feed cows to other cows.)
6 - Dave
"And the film's opening section, in which a chimp is forced, a la Axl Rose in the video for "Welcome to the Jungle," to watch countless looped clips of horrific mob violence the world over added a chilling tone"
"a la Clockwork Orange" is probably closer.
7 - Chris Puzak
Good review.
A couple of points:
28 Days is not the first movie to feature fast-moving zombies. The most well-known example I can think of is Dan O'Bannon's Retrun of the Livng Dead, in which all the zombies were quite capable of running. Also, if we want to stretch the definition of zombie a bit, there are plenty of fast-moving possessed people in Mario Bava's Demons movies. I'm sure there are others, but those are the only ones I can think of at the moment.
2. I'm surprised you didn't mention of George Romero's Day of the Dead from which this movie draws a whole lot of influences. Both movies focus on feature crazy military guys who are just as much a threat to the survivors as the zombies are. Both movies even have zombies being held in captivity, although the zombie in Day of the Dead had a little more personality than the one in 28 Days Later.