Films: 2000s
(2002) 28 Days Later
Saturday, October 14, 2006
28 Days Later
Director: Danny Boyle
Release: 2002
Family emerges in the early 2000s, with much the same salvation-themed ferocity as it did 20 years earlier in Tobe Hooper's "Poltergeist."
"28 Days Later," directed by "Trainspotting" alum Danny Boyle, is a brutal and swiftly moving post-apocalypse story. Its geography and implicated scoop verge on epic.
Animal rights activists break into a English research laboratory and unwittingly set free a man-made virus (aptly named Rage) that amplifies the animalistic fury locked within the brain.
Four weeks after the incident, bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a crash-induced head wound in a hospital. There is nobody around. Jim wanders the empty shell of London, scavenging for food and calling out for any living person. What he finds, and what finds him, is a rampaging horde of nocturnal infected. The victims of the lab virus tear through darkened buildings and nighttime streets, seeking to savage Jim. He is rescued, fortunately, by two survivors, Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley).
What follows is a gory and dilemma-plagued quest; from Selena and Mark's shopping mall hideout, to Jim's family home, to a high-rise in which a father and daughter wait for help and listen to a strange broadcast that promises safety and a cure from the north.
"28 Days Later" is part urban apocalypse, part road-movie and part prison film.
Jim learns quickly that life is suspect, that anyone alive is a potential Rage victim and thus a threat. Selena is a human reduced to survivalism, quick to kill anyone, friend or foe, who carries the bug. The cast of companions shifts from encounter to encounter, as Rage takes one protagonist or another and the remainder are forced to bludgeon or hack their friends and teammates to death.
In this boiling stew of carnage and apparent hopelessness,the abandoned survivors relearn the rules of interpersonal engagement. When Jim and Selena lose Mark, they find Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his 14-year-old daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). Holed up, dozens of floors above the ravaged streets, Frank and Hannah live in a sealed but supply-taxed haven. Christmas lights and holiday liqueur approximate the first civilized moments of the film. From there, Doyle and screenwriter Alex Garland reinvent the family in what proves the most touching segment of "28 Days Later."
Over the course of several hundred miles and a pair of harrowing encounters with the infected, Selena, Jim, Frank and Hannah learn that there is still validity to human existence in the changed world. Selena and Jim come to view Frank as a paternal figure in their lives, while they grow closer themselves. Hannah fits neatly into her sister role for the new pair, with Selena as defender and Jim as playmate.
Poised opposite this pastoral segment of the film is the military compound to which they flee. There, the family unit is instantly dissolved. At the threshold of the military territory, Frank is infected by a drop of blood from a crow-ridden corpse. Soldiers appear and shoot him down. Selena, Hannah and Jim enter an altogether darker scenario.
The concept that family is good and that the military-industrial world is bad is excruciatingly illustrated by the trio's experiences with Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) and company.
West and his men have decided all bets are off, and they've put out the radio signal that Frank and Hannah heard from their London apartment to lure women to the compound. With women, West hopes to keep his men from committing suicide or overthrowing his minor-league regime.
It is a gross exaggeration of class struggle, the hunting/gathering peasant thrown in with the country lord. It is also a condemnation of the system, the society which draws families apart, hypersexualizing and commodifying the individual until their particular skills and contributions are reduced to a bartering chip in a closed maze.
Escape is achieved when Jim transforms into an approximation of the infected. Exiled after escaping firing squad, Jim infiltrates the compound, becoming increasingly blood-soaked and murderous until Selena cannot differentiate him from that which she would normally kill in self-defense. His embrace of the effectual but horrific nature of the human beast is the tool that brings their journey full circle. The placidity of the family journey is then balanced with the violence of the paternal protector. Jim replaces Frank, moving to the head of the new three-person pack he must form with Selena and Hannah.
Perhaps this is the ultimate message of "28 Days Later," that the societal forces (be they subtle everyday pressure or pronounced outbreaks of literal infection), strip apart the individual.
In the wake of a rampaging reaction to the atrocities of structured modern existence (be it modern London or the survivalist camp of Major West) our loved ones become alien and frightening. Only in the hills and lakes and countryside can our family unit revert to its originally intended state - balanced and organic and unimpeded by constant stimulus, protected by an alpha.
In a sense, Boyle and Garland create a utopia in "28 Days Later," a London without the horrific throngs, a verdant English countryside, and then contrast that with the stone cold and grim environs of the civilized West.
"28 Days Later" is muscular not only in theme but in execution. Boyle's camera moves throughout the London cityscape and the rural landscape with ease - positioned anywhere a tableau can be created, be it from atop a high rise, at the edge of a lush green lawn or within a droplet of falling blood.
"28 Days Later" turns the zombie film on its head, suggesting that humans do not hole up in the face of apocalypse, they take to the road. Frank, Hannah, Jim and Selena are the post-20th century survivors, fleeing their home and city for the better life they were denied when civilization reigned.
Furthermore, the "zombies" of "28 Days Later" are no slouches, no lumbering horde. They are fast and emotive, charging from tunnels and doorways with the aggression and fury of caffeinated, cooped-up cubicle slaves finally given permission to rampage and reset the cultural odometer.
The ending of the film is ambiguous. The infected are starved and near death along the roadways. The trio is safely relocated in the deep countryside. A Finnish jet searches for survivors in the highlands. The trio, now living in a pre-industrial stone house, lay out their creation- an enormous sewn message: "Hello."
They do not write "Help," or "Here," just "Hello." When the jet passes, they smile. They wonder if the pilot saw them yet.
Are they asking for retrieval, or can we believe that their journey from the heart of Britain to the past-world in which they've made their new multicultural family has resulted in a sense of place and purpose?
Perhaps, in "28 Days Later," the survivor simply say hello from a new home - one which they've rebuilt from the now quiet Rage that previously gripped their world.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
28 Days Later, 2002
... the 'zombies' of '28 Days Later' are no slouches, no lumbering horde. They are fast and emotive, charging from tunnels and doorways with the aggression and fury of caffeinated, cooped-up cubicle slaves finally given permission to rampage and reset the cultural odometer.
