28 Days Later (2002)

 

“Channel 4s 100 Scariest Moments” #18

 

 

28 Days Later

(2002)

 

Pretty much any film about Zombies made over the last five decades is a homage to Writer/Director George Romero. In 1968 he gave us “Night of the Living Dead,” and created a whole new monster, not even nominally connected to the creature of Voodoo lore, that leant itself to the audience’s growing taste for explicit gore, offered an easy-out for low budget film-makers, and proved remarkably pliable in its allegorical potential. Now, our media universe is dominated by Romero-influenced Zombies, and this film is only the one of a literal horde of Romero’s children that made these lists.

 

“28 Days Later,” a remarkably-epic low-budget film, it came close on the heels of another British zombie movie, “Resident Evil” which was easily the biggest-budgeted and most lavish Zombie film to-date. “Resident Evil” was also wholly feeble, soul-less and scare-less. Meanwhile, “28 Days Later," the most aggressively homage-driven of a genre of film that was all homages anyway, exploded with new-found and completely surprising vitality and set the Horror world on fire.

 

“28 Days Later’s” ambitious script by Alex Garland has three clearly defined acts, plus prologue and epilogue. Each act had a different setting and Cast changes, and each is a compression of Romero’s first three zombie films:

 

Act one, homaging “Night of the …” It introduces a disorientated character in a world that has stopped making sense, Cillian Murphy. He falls in with strangers he probably wouldn’t have picked as allies if he had a choice, Naomie Harris and Noah Huntley. The act climaxes with them in an isolated house under siege and their numbers are reduced.

 

Act two, homaging “Dawn of the Dead” (1978) --The survivors of the first act find new allies, Brendan Gleeson as the devoted father of teen Megan Burns. With their help, they learn about normalizing into this new Monster World. The most explicit nod to the Romero film is a scene where they go “shopping” in a still well-stocked mall in abandoned London.

 

Act three, homaging “Day of the Dead” (1985) –Our heroes’ numbers are reduced again; the survivors find new apparent allies and achieve an apparent sanctuary. But this sanctuary is doomed, and its death is anticipated by a strongly anti-Militarist theme. The soldiers led by Christopher Eccleston, who seems rational and disciplined at first, soon proves to have been driven mad by the isolation and corrupting influence of an all-male culture that defines itself through violence. It’s the darkest part of a dark film, suggesting that the Zombie horde is only a symptom of an inevitable entropy that would’ve doomed our Civilization even if this particular plague had not come.

 

The power of this film is not introducing new and original themes or ideas, but that it really works themes had been not been treated as real ideas in recent years. And Romero’s films are not the only referenced classics, the social breakdown is reminiscent of the “Day of The Triffids” (I’m thinking the 1951 novel by John Wyndham more than the not-so-faithful 1961 film version) and the evoking of suspense mixed with hopeless inevitability echoes “On The Beach” (both the 1957 novel by Nevil Shute and its faithful 1959 film adaptation). There’s a very explicit reference to the latter is the use of a tantalizing radio broadcast that offers false hope.

 

As far as I can tell, Director Danny Boyle, who loves to bounce all over the genre map, has yet to make a bad film. He’s created for himself a remarkably flexible film vocabulary that always saves him when a lesser auteur would be trapped wallowing in cliché. The biggest difference between “28 Days Later” and the Romero films is that the Zombies run fast. This was at the heart of the many pulse-pounding action scenes captured with extraordinary skillful hand-held camera work by Anthony Dod Mantle. Almost every review references this innovation, missing two points – this wasn’t the first film that had fast Zombies and there’s a plot reason they are fast – they aren’t actually Zombies.

 

This goes to the movie’s powerful expository prologue, followed by its most visually striking sequence, both of which were universally praise by critics, even that small camp that dismissed the rest of the movie (and almost everyone in that camp hate almost all Horror films to start with).

 

In the prologue a group of naive Animal Rights Activists invade a lab doing primate research. The monkeys are being subjected to experiments in which rage is chemically induced. With a bit of scientific improbability, that rage takes the form is a virus, and when the activists liberate one of the chimps, they get bitten and infected. In another bit of scientific improbability, it takes all of 20 seconds for the virus to turn anyone infected into a frothing, savage killer, with no goals or motivation except the most terrible form of “forward panic” (a phrase that does not appear in the film, but best describes this kind of mindless brute evil in Real-World terms). So, “28 Days Later’s” Zombies aren’t raised from the Dead, their still alive, just rabid.

 

Cut to twenty-eight-days later. Cillian Murphy, as Jim, wakes in a hospital bed. He’s been in a coma, unconscious for the End of the World and there’s no one around to explain to him what was going on. At this moment, we know a little bit more than he does, but for almost the whole the rest of the film, we see the world through his eyes.

 

The hospital is trashed and empty. As he wanders outside, the normally bustling parts of London, Westminster Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, Horse Guards Parade, Oxford Street, etc, are desolate. This sequence evokes, and for the first time in a half century, surpasses, the most praised sequence from the 1959 end-of-the-world film, “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.” Like its predecessor, it was shot shockingly cheaply. The film crew closed off sections of street for minutes at a time on Sundays and had about 45 minutes after dawn in which to shoot before the influx of traffic and pedestrians.

 

Jim’s forlorn vulnerability is expressed as he calls out again and again, "Hello," to the empty streets. That call proves a mistake when the Zombies finally hear him.

 

After a wild chase, he’s rescued by Naomie Harris, as Selena, and Noah Huntley, as Mark. In another nod to “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil” we now have two men and one woman, two Whites and one Black (Harry Belafonte was the Black in the older film, but it’s the Harris, the woman, who is the Black here). Both films concern a love story that couldn’t evolve had the world not ended, but in this case, the racial issues are raised only to make the point that race is not as much an issue as it was 50-years-prior (Romero’s first three Zombie films had a similar commentary on changes in racial dynamics). The challenges for Harris’ character, Selena, when it comes to Jim isn’t the color of his skin, but temperament and socio-economic class. She’s tough-as-nails to his initial passivity, and she’s highly skilled (a pharmacist) compared to his slackerdom (a bike messenger). There’s some deftness in their awkward, hesitant, attraction, and when they finally do kiss, the scene includes a hilarious line of dialogue that could only take place in a Zombie movie.

 

The film is filled with beautiful set pieces. My favorite is during the transition between the second and third acts. The survivors are trying to get to Manchester by car. They are at the bottom of a hill. The audience sees them through the windshield, and their shocked expressions reacting to what is ahead, which we’ve not been shown. Then the film cuts to a rear view of the car, we should be able to see what the characters’ saw but we can’t, because the rising incline of the road, and what is most important is beyond the upper-border of the screen. The camera starts to pan up, achingly slowly, as it does the ribbon of road keeps playing out, but it’s such a terribly long time before we see the horizon, and¼

 

I gotta stop a moment and explain something: There’s a scene in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974) which is said to demonstrate his genius more than any other. The camera is in one room, looking through a doorway to a guy in the next room who is talking on a phone. The guy steps to the left and he disappears behind the doorframe. It is said the audience was so enraptured that they leaned to the right, trying to peek into the second room.

 

Goddamnit if, during the slow-pan in “28," I didn’t lean forward and try to look under the upper edge of the screen to see what was revealed at the top of the hill.

 

Hint, hint: 1974’s “The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue” is a semi-famous Romero-inspired Zombie film, and like this film, has no scenes actually set in Manchester.

 

Like almost any Zombie movie worth its salt, the Monster is the Zombie, but as the tale unfolds, the Zombie evolves to represent the force of indifferent nature, and the real Evil is always revealed to be more conventional Mankind. Zombie movies are about the frailty of civilization and the need to balance a pragmatic moral relativism with a core of moral absolutes; if you fail to find the balance then you will become either Zombie, a worse Beast than Zombie, or perhaps both. We’re given the choices of bullying Authoritarianism, where violent selfishness is a virtue and might-equals-right, and a compassionate social Liberalism pursuing a generous equitableness among those all in the same boat. The Authoritarian’s survivalist skills and force usually, initially, win-out, the kind-hearted but weak-willed die early in these films; but soon the Authoritarians unleash new genies from their bottles, and then we watch them self-destruct. Those who combine strong-will and generosity display a better chance of survival (though it is remarkably frequent that everybody dies in these movies).

 

The entire cast is solid (this proved a break-out role for Cillian Murphy) but by far the strongest performances are from the men who represent the opposite poles of this moral dialectic. Brendan Gleeson, as Frank, is good natured, a loving father, generous to strangers, and represents the possibility of the reestablishment of a domestic normality – such men never survive long in Zombie films. Meanwhile, Christopher Eccleston, as Major Henry West, is a Beast who has so lucidly justified every single crime he commits as a necessary means-to-an-end that he’s rendered his immorality seductively bullet-proof.

 

Major Henry proves one of cinema’s finest articulations of the “banality of evil,” a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt to describe how the great Evils in history are generally not committed by exceptional Beasts but fairly ordinary people who accepted a series of corrupt and shallow premises that lead them to view vile actions as normal. Arendt reached this conclusion watching the dull bureaucrat of Genocide, Adolf Eichmann, while he was on trial in Jerusalem. Many objected to the phrase, suggesting it trivialized the Holocaust, perhaps indicating they really didn’t understand the point she was trying to press; but in fairness to her critics, she watched a prisoner-Eichmann safely through bullet-proof glass. While Eichmann had power, I’m sure he didn’t seem banal to those on the receiving-end of his crimes.

 

This film’s Eichmann is far more handsome and better spoken than real-word Eichmann, and he ceases to be banal the moment Jim realizes what is planned for him and his companions.

 

Across the film, Jim and Selena evolve:

 

Jim grows strong, and becomes brutal in the defense of those he’s responsible for. There’s an especially dark scene when he kills his first Zombie, and what we see what he doesn’t, is that it may not have been a Zombie, just an uninfected child driven mad by trauma. But even with this child-murder, there’s no sense he’s cast aside his core-decency.

 

Selena, on the other hand, sticks to a credo she offers early in the film, “Staying alive is as good as it gets,” and it serves her well as she and Megan Burns as Hannah (the character is obviously younger than the actresses’ 16 years), face an indefinite sentence of slavery and nightly gang-rape. Trapped, Selena offers Hannah some pills:

 

Hannah: "To kill myself?"

Selena: "No. So, you won't care as much."

 

But Selena not only survives, she is released from slavery, and with the crisis receding, finds that there more in staying alive than merely being alive, and that there are things worth caring for.

 

Which brings me to the one piece of Science the film got right, and how deftly it was worked into the narrative, and how it set up the resolution. This virus goes full-blown in 20 seconds, if that had actually been possible it would’ve created a serious Darwinian disadvantage for itself. Any disease that shows it cards that so fast inhibits its own ability to spread (CV19 can be passed before it is symptomatic). The film’s virus was clearly imagined as Ebola-on-amphetamines, with rupturing blood vessels and the vomiting of sticky, wet, infection. Ebola epidemics are the stuff of End-of-the-World nightmares except that they tend to be short in duration and restrained in geography (the worst out-break in history, 2014 – 2016, only became epidemic in three countries with shared borders that were far more ruined by incompatence and corruption, it did not significantly spread into other countries that also shared those boarders who took intelligent steps quickly). Ebola deaths generally came within days of the development of symptoms, it was so bad, so brutal, it burnt itself out. It’s badness was so explicit, it was eminently containable.

 

In “28 Days Later," the Zombies are dying the whole time, just not fast enough to save the local social order. The characters simply need to outlive the force of indifferent nature because this storm will pass. The last shot of the Zombies strip them of all their malignant power because they are gasping and withering from exhaustion.

 

Major Henry could easily be seen as the embodiment of the failed Governments of Guinea, Serra Leone, and Nigeria, while our Heroes have a chance of ultimate triumph because the apply decency and common-sense to pragmatic decision making, like the Governments of Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal.

 

When writing a short story, it is often considered a neat structural trick to have the last line similar to the first, but only the meaning has been transformed by the events of the tale. This film had at least four alternate endings, but the one chosen for the theatrical release was the best, having this elegance of a closing a circle with Jim’s first scenes in the film. The epilogue opens with a shot of Jim in a comfortable bed, composed identically to how we saw him the hospital bed at the very beginning, but instead of waking into a nightmare, he’s waking into a better day. And his first spoken word returns, “Hello,” but this time, instead of bring the Zombie horde down upon him, it brings about rescue. (The other endings were grimmer.)

 

“28 Days Later” had a sequel, “28 Weeks Later” (2007) Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, and Written by him in collaboration with Rowan Joffe, Enrique López Lavigne, and Jesús Olmo. It is impressive.

 

While the first was the ultimate homage to Romero, the latter explored new conceptual territory. “28 Weeks Later” shared with previous film’s third-act cynicism for Military-mind-set for problem solving, but doesn’t not have the former’s anti-Militarist posture. In the sequel (which was clearly influenced by America’s experience in Iraq) the Military at fault for everything that went wrong only because it was the Military took responsibility for the crisis when no one else was left to do so. It becomes increasingly obvious there was no way the situation could’ve been controlled no matter what they did. Though kinder to the Military, it’s more deeply nihilistic, because the noblest motives led to all the worst mistakes.

 

Trailer for “28 Days Later”:

 

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/28-days-later/trailer

 

Trailer for “28 Weeks Later”:

 

28 Weeks Later (2007) Official Trailer - YouTube