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Dawn of the Dead 2004
A Review by John Reppion
Danny Boyle’s 2002 directorial follow up to Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle The Beach (not a patch on the book, apparently) took many people by surprise. Shot entirely on DV, 28 Days Later deals with a pandemic outbreak triggered when a group of Animal Rights activists free a number of infected chimpanzees from a London laboratory. Twenty-eight days later, Jim (a bicycle courier played by Cillian Murphy) wakes from a coma only to find, first the hospital and then the city seemingly deserted. After some brief exploration accompanied by some truly eerie shots of the forsaken capital, Jim wanders into a church and comes face to face with some of the “infected”.
The virus, known only as “Rage”, is communicable by bite or blood and infects its victims almost instantly, turning them into red-eyed homicidal maniacs with no discernable powers of reasoning. Are they zombies? Well, not exactly. 28 Days Later puts a satisfyingly plausible modern spin on the zombie genre; corpses aren’t returning to life as a result of some virus from outer space or a leaked experimental chemical. Instead, we have a disease, an easily communicable pandemic, like some horrific hybrid of Sars, Ebola and Rabies, spreading rapidly through the population. The “infected” aren’t invincible, there’s no need for an expert headshot or a screwdriver in the temple; they can be killed by any normal means. However, unlike the blundering undead, rotting and falling to pieces as they shuffle towards their victims, the carriers of this disease are pretty nippy on their feet.
Jim manages to evade the first sufferers he encounters thanks to deftly wielded carrier bag full of (no so) soft drinks. Luckily, it’s not too long before he falls in with a pair of more practically equipped survivors. Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley) explain the situation to Jim: No one was prepared for the outbreak and as people crowded onto buses and trains to try to escape the city the sickness passed from person to person, causing violence, mayhem and death.
Staying alive seems as good as it gets until our survivors run into a father and daughter holed up in a tower block. Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns) have heard a radio broadcast urging survivors to make their way to a military outpost in the north. The transmission claims: “The answer to infection is here”. After some deliberation the group decide to take their chances and head for the settlement, but can they really trust a recorded message?
Pick up any newspaper today, in 2006, and you‘ll find the source material for 28 Days Later: Bird Flu sweeping across the globe, “dirty bombs”, the increasingly apparent oxymoron of military intelligence, horrific viruses such as Marburg appearing without warning, governments unable to coordinate sufficient rescue resources for any significant crisis. As much as 28 Days Later is a very solidly put together horror movie there is something more to it; the film evokes the kind of post apocalyptic Britishness pioneered by TV programmes such as Survivors and Threads and somehow that manages to lend an extra air of believability to the whole production. The “infected” are certainly not zombies in the strictest sense but Danny Boyle very successfully uses his contaminated aggressors in the same way that Romero used the undead in his original trilogy: they are us unbound from social, economic and ethical constraints. “Rage” turns it’s victims into mindless psychopaths but throughout the film Boyle continuously reminds us that people are more than capable of acting like animals without being infected. This is made abundantly clear in the film’s dramatic climax, much of which leaves the viewer wondering if a certain character is actually infected or if they have just lost the plot a little bit.
All in all 28 days Later is an action packed and thoughtfully put together little gem of a film that provides some genuine scares as well as some intelligent pauses for thought.