Review: 28 Days Later (2002)
It has been over two decades since Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s post-apocalyptic horror film, 28 Days Later, burst onto the movie scene like the Infected, the people transformed by the film’s Rage Virus. In spite of the film’s modest budget—only $8 million—its initial impact was big. Rewatching 28 Days Later today confirms its legacy as a significant film of the 2000s.
28 Days Later was released in the United Kingdom in November 2002, and it generated a lot of buzz, so I was very excited to finally see it when it arrived in theatres in Canada and the United States the following June. Because of the building anticipation as well as good word of mouth when it arrived—plus the indie cachet Danny Boyle’s name lent the film at the time—28 Days Later would become one of the sleeper hits of summer 2003.
The film opens in a disturbing way, with images of violence, destruction, and mobs on television screens; a chimpanzee is strapped to a table, evidently being forced to watch the horrific images of rage. When animal rights activists break into the lab to free the apes, a terrified scientist tries to warn them not to release the creatures, as they are infected with a virus. The scientist also tries to justify his research with a few lines that suggest gain-of-function research had been conducted at the lab to create the Rage Virus—a small moment that has an added gravitas in the post-Covid world. Of course, the apes are let out, one will bite someone, and the chain of infection and rage begins to spread.
Twenty-eight days later, Cillian Murphy’s Jim comes out of a coma in an abandoned hospital room. As he stumbles out into the ravaged, barren streets of London, it gradually dawns on him, as well as the audience, that Jim has slept while the world ended. Jim will eventually meet up with other survivors, learn what happened, and try to stay alive, avoiding the packs of crazed, ravenous Infected that roam post-apocalyptic Britain.
Today, 28 Days Later is widely credited with kickstarting the zombie revival, even if Boyle, who directed, and Garland, who wrote the screenplay, never allowed the word “zombie” to be spoken in the movie, and denied it was a zombie movie in interviews. In retrospect, it was precisely the filmmakers’ efforts to distance the film from prior zombie movies and existent zombie lore that made it such a distinct, fresh take on the genre. The film’s uniqueness spawned a pack of imitators and transformed zombie movies.
Instead of dumb, lumbering zombies—the walking dead—28 Days Later gave us fast, frenzied human beings who have been infected with a virus that severely distorts their behaviour. The Rage Virus is something like an amplified version of rabies. Most importantly, the Infected are alive, which means that they can starve or be killed. The difference completely distances the Infected from any associations with the original undead zombies of Voodoo legend and other mythology. Accordingly, the virus doesn’t need a person to die to transform him, and the transformation doesn’t take very long—only 10 to 20 seconds. “Faster and more furious” seems to be the governing logic behind the changes. When Zack Snyder remade Dawn of the Dead the next year, in 2004 (which I retrospectively reviewed for the site in 2021), Snyder’s zombies would bear many of the traits of the Infected in 28 Days Later. Thus, we can say the film was the birth of the fast zombie.
The immense influence of 28 Days Later on subsequent zombie movies and TV shows (such as The Walking Dead, with its protagonist, Rick, also waking up from a coma at the start of the story) cannot be denied. However, revisiting the film today also clarifies that it is better understood in the context of a related but broader genre: the post-apocalyptic. The primary intertextual reference points for Garland’s screenplay make this clear.
Even more than George A. Romero’s zombie trilogy, I would argue, 28 Days Later draws on John Wyndham’s 1951 post-apocalyptic novel, The Day of the Triffids (which was made into a movie in 1962, and has been adapted for radio and television numerous times). The most obvious similarity is the brilliant opening premise: having a man wake up in a hospital after having been unconscious during the cataclysmic event that changes everything. The opening stretch of 28 Days Later is justifiably celebrated for its eerie portrayal of a deserted London (which Boyle realized by shooting quickly on digital in the early hours of the day), but it is Wyndham who came up with the basic idea. Garland’s skill is in seeing further possibilities for Wyndham’s clever storytelling device.
Less often noticed is how both Wyndham’s novel and Garland’s screenplay eventually turn their attention from the external threat—the Triffids, mobile carnivorous plants, in the former, and the Infected, in the latter—to the politics of survival in human communities. One of my few and big complaints about the movie when it came out was that the third act retreated away from the Infected to focus on conflict between survivors within the soldier camp. Now I think this narrative turn not only underscore’s Garland’s reliance on Wyndham, but it also shows how the film is more interested in the post-apocalyptic than in zombie horror. In the wider context of British speculative fiction, 28 Days Later also seems to borrow from the later, less remembered portions of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, a novel that spends many pages on the practicalities of survival.
I have spent a lot of this review discussing Garland’s screenplay, but Boyle’s direction is equally important for the film’s success. Boyle’s indie aesthetic gives the film a signature look and feel. First, Boyle shot on pre-HD digital video, which, to be honest, looks extremely low-grade on today’s 4K television screens. Nevertheless, it gives the film a distinct, raw visual scheme. Second, Boyle relies on the quick cuts that would come to dominate the indie aesthetic imported into the period’s action films, especially in the works of Paul Greengrass (for example, in 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy).
In terms of his use of narrative strategies, Boyle isn’t a master at generating suspense in the traditional sense, that is, apart from the film’s most purely suspenseful sequence, when the survivors have to change a car tire while the Infected hordes approach. That scene is still genuinely gripping! Other times, Boyle favours the abrupt alarm of an Infected person bursting through a window, sometimes intercut with quick, shaky POV shots of the attackers rapidly approaching. The frenetic camerawork complements the subject matter and establishes the gritty tone. Although these devices would become overdone in the following years, they still achieve their effect in 28 Days Later.
The film is also notable for being the introduction of Cillian Murphy to movie audiences, who had only done smaller productions before this. Murphy brings his unique appeal to the character of Jim; he is not always likeable, which reveals the range of emotions and vulnerability many of us could see in ourselves in such scenarios. He wakes up bewildered, mourns his parents’ loss, acts irrationally at times, tender at other times, and is filled with rage and anger in moments. With a gross, scratchy beard half the movie, he is neither a conventional leading man or action hero, which makes his efforts to survive more compelling. In terms of the rest of the cast, Naomie Harris is notable as the ruthless survivor who teams up with Jim. Brendan Gleeson’s likeable father is memorable, albeit he is in less of the film than I remembered.
Lastly, the film’s low-budget aesthetic, which in a way is an extension of the found footage approach of The Blair Witch Project from a few years earlier, also recalls something of the appeal of another landmark of British horror, The Wicker Man (1973). As well, both The Wicker Man and 28 Days Later are famous for their proliferation of alternative edits and endings. In a way, both films’ imperfections add to their unique appeal. 28 Days Later might not be the equal of The Wicker Man, which is a truly great film, but it does hold up and it has earned its place in the annals of British horror.
9 out of 10
Directed by Danny Boyle; written by Alex Garland; starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston, and Brendan Gleeson.
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