28 Days Later

2003 • Dir: Danny Boyle • St: Cillian Murphy, Christopher Eccleston

Premise: Bicycle courier Jim wakes up to find that London is deserted, except for those infected by the Rage Virus, people who have been turned into mindless, brutal killers.

Analysis: 28 Days Later was, I think, the only film that had a valid use for the sort of rapid, jumpy, quickly cut camerawork that has turned up in other horror films, most notably the remake factories. This style is prevalent in the film and is an integral part of the 'Rage Zombies', whose jerky, twitching movements, and rapid speed let you feel like you're getting an infected's-eye view of the action.

The film starts with animal activists breaking into a facility where chimps have been wired up to watch looped feeds of human brutality - wars, riots, hangings and so on. A lone scientist (obviously stuck working graveyard shift because he's the newbie) tries to warn the activists that the chimps are infected with rage, hatred distilled down into a viral weapon. Activists being who they are in films, they don't listen and let a chimp free, which promptly savages the crap out of the activist who let it free.

I have some issues with the way scientists and activists are sometimes presented in film. The military are more likely to want to weaponise rage, and I fail to understand what the experiment was all in aid of anyway. The activists also become the scapegoats for the release of the rage virus, which is pretty standard for a world that likes to shoot the messenger a lot more often than the author of the message. I would still point out that someone was trying to turn emotions into viruses, which sounds like the sort of idiot plan a corporation or military organisation is more likely to come up with. Who signed the work order on that piece of nonsense, that's what I'd like to know.

It's then that we cut to Jim (Cillian Murphy), waking up in hospital. What follows is simply breathtaking, as we follow him through a deserted, hastily abandoned London. A silent, empty London is quite unnerving. I lived there for a year, and I have to say - London is NEVER silent. What is perhaps most heart-breaking is when Jim finds a wall of final messages - notes from the damned. There are cries for the whereabouts of loved ones, photos of those who have been lost to the virus, letters, declarations, testaments, confessions, drawings. The few glimpses you get of each letter or photo ram home the idea that these are not numbers. Every Londoner killed or lost to the virus was a person with hopes, dreams and fears. This is quite atypical for a 'zombie' movie.

This is when Jim enters a church. As he ascends a staircase, we see graffiti on the wall 'The end is extremely f@#king nigh'. The church is also where we see our first Rage Zombie. As Jim is calling out, he sees the floor of the church littered with hundreds of bodies. His shouting attracts the attention of 2 people who simply stare at him wide eyed, faces contorted. Jim is distracted by banging at a door, and a crazed infected priest bursts out and runs at him, before Jim beans him in the head with a shopping bag full of pepsi cans.

The thing I found interesting about all this is that the film is slowly destroying every institution known to man. Science is destroyed by being shown as immoral, activism is shown to be misguided and foolish, and then the church is shown to be a refuge which only allows people to destroy each other. Think about it, who killed all the people in the church except the church-goers themselves? One drop of infected blood in there and it turns into a massacre.

Running for his life from the church, Jim is eventually saved by Mark and Selena, two other survivors. Jim's protestations that there must be a government or military doing something are flatly rejected, adding to the theme that human civilisation has been completely destroyed. Mark and Selena give Jim (and the audience) a potted history of the rage virus and its effects.

During an abortive attempt to find Jim's parents, Mark gets infected blood in an open cut. Selena, without hesitation, hacks him to death with a machete. This scene hits you like a sucker punch. It is raw, relentless, and once you think about it, absolutely necessary within the bounds the film has established.

There are three kinds of survivor presented in the film, that fit into three key arcs in the film. Mark and Selena's scavenging, ruthless, no-hope method is presented first. We see that the weakness of it is that it is without purpose beyond survival. They play a war of attrition just to live day by day. It is fitting then, that soon after Mark's death, we are introduced to two more survivors - Frank and his daughter Hannah, and the middle arc of the film starts. Frank and Hannah are introduced when Jim and Selena enter a tower estate block, that they have seen lights coming from. Running a gauntlet up a staircase, pursued by infected, they are saved by Frank in full riot gear who fights off the infected. Inside, the scene is quite a domestic one. They get to sleep, eat, drink, and Jim has a scratchy attempt at shaving.

Frank introduces us to a broader idea of survival. The tower block has been rigged up like an impenetrable fortress. He has every receptacle you can imagine on the roof to collect rainwater, although it hasn't rained for 10 days. He then reveals a plan. There has been a recorded message playing on the radio directing survivors to an army base, just outside Manchester. He admits that they need Jim and Selena more than they need him and his daughter, but he urges them to join him in heading north. Hannah then says one of the sagest things she'll say in the film - that Jim and Selena need them more, that they all need each other.

Hannah is correct. In their occasionally hazardous escape up north in Frank's London cab, the four of them get to feel normal again. They find connections in each other. Cold and ruthless Selena finds a little sister in Hannah. Jim finds a father figure of sorts in Frank. They stop in the ruins of an old church, and see 4 wild horses running free. Frank comments that they're a family. The connection between the survivors and the horses is an obvious one. The four survivors have also become a family.

It is appropriate then, that just as they are at their most blissful, everything is about to go straight to $hit again. They find the roadblock/army base and it is completely abandoned. Frank cracks up, the let down too much for him to deal with. Before long, Frank is infected, a single drop of blood falls in his eye. Frank pushes Hannah away from him, knowing what is coming, Selena screams at Jim to kill him, and finally Frank is shot down as the army make their belated presence felt.

The family unit is shattered. The weakness of their kind of survival is shown to be optimism. Their happiness had distracted them from the harsh reality they live in.

As Jim, Selena and Hannah are driven to an old country estate, now occupied by the remnants of the army, we enter the final arc of the film and are introduced to a third kind of survivor in the form of Major Henry West (Eccleston) and his men. They seem to have rigged up their stately country mansion as an impenetrable fortress as well - what Frank did, but on a higher budget. It's not long before we get the feeling that something is deeply wrong. Despite the initial sense of camaraderie among the soldiers, we are told that one has attempted suicide and another, Sgt Farrell is shown to be particularly bleak and at odds with the other men. West also keeps one of his infected men chained up in a yard, as a ruthless, but practical experiment to see how long the infected live.

A few hints are dropped, but finally West baldly informs Jim of his plan. There is no cure, no hope of rescue, so he has promised his men women. Selena and Hannah are to become sex slaves of his men. Jim and the dissenting Sgt Farrell are to be taken away and shot. When they are taken out into the woods, the spot they are taken to is already littered with bodies. An understated message that West and his men have been kidnapping and abusing survivors for a little while now. Farrell is shot, and in the confusion Jim escapes.

SPOILER (in black type below-select to read)

We have seen a desperate and ruthless method of survival that had nothing worth fighting for. We have seen a co-operative, happy method of survival, that proved to be too optimistic for its own good. Finally Maj West has shown us a cruel and delusional method of survival, where the survivors are little better than the infected. Now we see the lessons that Jim has learned from all of these methods.

Jim attracts both infected and West's men to the abandoned roadblock by sounding the alarm there. With brutal efficiency and a kind of guerilla warfare, he kills off a couple of West's men, before heading back to their base. In the streaming rain, he not only frees the infected soldier, but kills any of West's men he can get his hands on. He is out-soldiering the soldiers. Selena and Hannah meanwhile have been dressed up in pretty dresses, as a prelude to what the audience can only presume will be a gang-rape by West's men. Hearing noises, Hannah tells the soldiers that they are going to die. As chaos breaks out in the house, they try to escape, but finally Selena is trapped in a room with one of West's soldiers, as Jim comes in and brutally bashes the soldier's head against a wall, before ruthlessly thumbing his eyes out. It is extremely brutal, and Selena is initially unsure if he is one of the infected, as is Hannah who beans him over the head while he and Selena are kissing.

In their escape, they leave West to the tender mercies of his infected men, and Jim gets shot. We then cut to many days later, where Jim wakes once again, echoing the start of the film. Selena, Hannah and Jim have survived and have made a sign out of bedsheets to attract the flyover of an American jet. They will be rescued, finally.

The escape from West's mansion is, for me, the ultimate point of the film. Jim shows ruthlessness, even a degree of sadism, and finally complete rage to rescue Selena and Hannah. He has united Selena's ruthlessness with West's sadism in the cause of Frank's compassion. His final weapon is rage, the rage he uses to kill a soldier with his bare hands. He uses the weapon of infection without being infected. Finally it tells us that the infection is really a ruse. We don't need to weaponise rage, we only need the right cause to let it loose. The use of this potent weapon enables Jim, Selena and Hannah to escape and become the family they need to be to truly survive.

END SPOILER

The English, I feel, have a better grasp on the true bleakness of horror. They can reveal a number of subtleties in horror, that many American film-makers would bludgeon with hammy fists. 28 Days Later is the best non-zombie zombie film you can treat yourself to.

4 out 5 Stars