Actually, calling the chimp's disease "rage," as opposed to inventing some wonky faux-scientific explanation, made the film that much more effective for me. Citing emotion instead of bacteria as the source of apocalypse heightens our awareness that a moral law has been breached, not just some E.U. testing ban. 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 to the proceedings that folks of all political leanings could appreciate.
And speaking of politics, though it's kind of sad that that's what this is reduced to at this point, there's a scen towards the beginning of the film in which Jim finds a kiosk covered with xeroxed "missing" posters made by families trying desperately to find lost loved ones in a country increasingly ravaged by the zombie infection. It spoke more directly to the chaos of confusion, pain, and loss in New York City after 9/11 than just about any work of art I've seen since the attacks occurred.
There are a few little plot flaws I'll note briefly:
1) I understand that the army guys waited as long as they did to make their presence known to our foursome in order to establish that said foursome was harmless, and in so doing inadvertantly ensured that said foursome was reduced to a threesome. But given what we later learn of their motives, why not cut said foursome down to the appropriate twosome and be done with it?
2) C'mon--surely SOME radio and TV signals are still floating around Great Britain post-apocalypse, especially given what we come to learn about the worldwide situation by film's end?
3) If the British government and/or military were faced with the kind of the decision the rest of the world apparently made about the UK, wouldn't nuclear blackmail start looking like a good idea?
Aaaaallllll that being said, I'm concerned that my relatively flippant tone indicates that I thought this movie was "a roller-coaster ride" or "a popcorn-guzzling theme park attraction" or something else that people say about 2 Fast 2 Furious. It isn't. It's dark, dark, dark--it's one of those movies that grabs the audience around the neck and forces them to watch unpleasant, horrible things happen to good, decent people. It's a nastiness that the dopier aspects of the action-packed climax, or even the happy ending (for which I was unspeakably grateful, especially after the filmmakers naughtily teased us with several possible bad-ending red herrings, including one that was once again awfully close to Night of the Living Dead), can offset. It's the kind of nastiness that makes for great horror.
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.