A group of animal rights activists break into a research lab and release a highly contagious virus that causes homicidal rage in anyone it infects.
28 days later Jim wakes up from a coma to find London deserted and signs of catastrophe everywhere. Venturing into a church, he is attacked by only saved thanks to the interventions of two other survivors, Selena and Mark.
Back at the hide out, they fill Jim in on what has happened: He is the first uninfected person they have seen for six days. Get bitten or come into contact with infected blood and within 10-20 seconds you'll be infected. Fortunately, the infected don't seem to come out during the day.
Jim persuades Selena and Mark to accompany him to his parents house. He finds them dead in their bed, having committed suicide with pills. By this time, it is getting dark, so the trio decide to stay in the house.
During the night Jim accidentally attracts the attention of some of his infected neighbours, who attack. Mark is bitten and Selena is forced to kill him.
Later, Jim notices someone signalling from a tower block and he and Selena go to investigate. They discover Frank and his teenage daughter Megan. Frank has discovered a radio broadcast from an army base near Manchester, and proposes that they go join up with the other survivors.
After a hazardous trip through an silent English countryside, the group arrive at the rendevous. Frank gets infected blood in his eye (somewhat implausibly) and has to be killed. The other three are taken to the army base, only to find that their troubles are just beginning…
28 Days Later is a competently made survival horror piece that doesn't deliver on its promise.
The biggest weakness is the writing. It plays as if screenwriter Alex Garland watched a whole load of zombie pictures and felt that filtering them through The Day of the Triffids was all that was required. The film has nothing to say beyond the banality that normal humans can be just as psychotic as its infected zombies – a message that was old hat when George A. Romero's make-up man Tom Savini directed his colour remake/re-interpretation of Night of the Living Dead over a decade ago. Or perhaps this is the point, with Joe and Selena at one point discussing their oh so fashionably postmodern predicament that nothing new will happen from now on. Even if this is so, it's weak and lazy. One almost years for the ham-fisted message of a Zombie Creeping Flesh with its Swiftean 'modest proposal' that the first world manufacture a virus to make the poor masses of the third world cannibalise one another…
Shooting on Digital Video, director Danny Cannon gives the deserted London streets a ghostly, unnatural feel when something more concrete and realistic might have been better. Apocalypse chic, it looks too artful: just where are the rotting corpses in the streets, or the crashed and abandoned cars on the motorway north?
The film is skilfully edited, suggesting a lot but showing relatively little – a decision that looks designed to appeal to the mainstream/crossover audience but not to the splatter fan.
On the plus side, the performances are certainly better than their models.
All told, 28 Days Later feels like a cynical piece of opportunism. Nothing wrong with that, except you get the feeling the film-makers don't really care for the genre and feel themselves to be slumming it somewhat.
If you want a good British zombie movie get Jorge Grau's Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue or Gary Sherman's Death Line instead. Ironic that one was directed by a Spaniard, the other an American…
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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