28 Days Later
There's always a government. They're in, a bunker or a plane.
Directed by Danny Boyle
UK, 2002
The Long Good Friday, Patrick Keiller’s London, 28 Days Later – three films we have reviewed, all rooted in the capital. Cities have always played a starring role in cinema. Think of Los Angeles. Think of New York. But which city has the vast dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the world’s most famous clocktower we all call Big Ben (yes, we know that’s not its real name), and the iconic span of Tower Bridge? Surely, no city offers a cinematic backdrop quite like London. Just ask Tom Cruise.
In a lot of ways it’s aged terribly… In other ways it’s still brilliant – C
After the gruelling docudrama Threads, which portrayed a country devastated by nuclear war, ReidsonFilm are back with another film set in a post-apocalyptic Britain: 28 Days Later, written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle. There are no atom bombs here though. This time the world has been laid waste by a lab-manufactured mind virus – not the ‘woke’ one, this is the ‘Rage’ virus, engineered in chimpanzees. There are echoes here of Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange: the chimps are strapped in front of a bank of monitors that bombard them with violent images.
The virus is transmitted by blood, typically by bite, and within seconds its victims are transformed into zombies. Well, actually not zombies… although 28 Days Later owes much to films like Night of the Living Dead, these are not zombies but extremely angry people. So angry in fact that they are literally frothing at the mouth, driven into a hyper-aggressive frenzy with rage. And all of this, long before Twitter.
The storyline is straightforward. Cillian Murphy plays Jim, a cycle courier knocked off his bike who wakes from a 28-day coma following a head injury. In that time the virus has wreaked havoc: the hospital is abandoned, the corridors strewn with corpses. Dressed in hospital scrubs, Jim wanders through the streets of an empty London, a London deserted of its citizens but as he crosses Westminster Bridge, Big Ben and the London Eye loom silently in the background. Boyle shot the film using early digital video, often handheld, which lends the footage a grainy, lo-fi texture, reminiscent of VHS video or CCTV. There is an eerie sense of familiarity looking at these ghostly, barren, London streets. This is the world of lockdown Britain in the midst of the pandemic.
After a dust up with a crowd of the ‘infected’ in a church, Jim is rescued by two survivors, Selena (Naomie Harris) and a quickly dispatched companion who gets so little screen time his name escapes me. In one of the film’s most heartrending moments, they return to Jim’s childhood home to find his parents huddled together in bed, having chosen death by their own hand rather than suffer the fate of the infected. As night falls, the couple spot a flat in a tower block, illuminated by Christmas lights. More survivors, avuncular Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns), his teenage daughter.
Frank’s radio picks up a weak radio signal offering hope:
Salvation is here. The answer to infection is here. If you can hear this, you're not alone. There are other survivors. We are soldiers, and we are armed. And we can protect you. Our location is the 42nd blockade in the M-602...
Our makeshift family soon set off in a black cab along the abandoned M1 motorway, accompanied by the ambient sounds of Brian Eno. Ominously the cab resembles a hearse. All it takes is a random drop of blood in the eye to do for Frank who joins the brethren of the infected, but our trio are rescued with a timely intervention by the soldiers they were seeking. These men are holed up in a sanctuary of sorts, an isolated manor house fortified by razor wire and landmines, where they are led by a Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston). We get a hint that this may not be the home they are looking for when they are introduced to an infected soldier chained by a neck collar to a post in the gardens. And indeed, this is no sanctuary, the soldiers are a bunch of desperate incels and the radio message was a trap:
Major West: I set the radio broadcast, and I promised them women... because women mean a future.
After all, as Shakespeare wrote, ‘…the world must be peopled’.
28 Days Later now switches up a gear and we career off into haunted house territory. Jim knows he has to step up, and step up he does, by turning himself into a blood-spattered zombie, taking out the soldiers one by one – even gouging out someone’s eyes with his thumbs. Gruesome scenes, and yet there is something rather comical about the madcap nature of it all. There is a jarring romantic thread that feels contrived and Selena nurses Jim back to health after he takes a bullet in the gut. Given the setting it seems unlikely that he would have survived this, but I suppose the test audience scores won out in the end.
Nearly 28 years have passed since the film’s release, and its themes foreshadow today’s world. While for many Covid is a thing of the past, others still live in its shadow. Trust in institutions has collapsed and there has been a rise in populist rage. Danny Boyle is set to return to our screens with 28 Years Later this summer. The question isn’t just whether it will live up to the original – but whether we’re now too close to the world it imagined.
Once they go into the countryside it falls apart for me. The white horses, the chapel ruins and choral music, like an advert for shampoo, and then the finale… a cross between Shaun of the Dead and Blade Runner’s Roy Batty – S
This is quite a cooked take Dad – C
What is a cooked take? – S
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 82
T - 84
N - 83
S - 73
Thank you for reading Reids on Film. If you enjoyed our review please share with a friend and do leave a comment.
Now, speaking of plagues and viruses, if you are new to ReidsonFilm you may have missed an original production by one of our very own:
Coming next… Delicatessen(1991)
Great review ... and yes, another one added to the re-watch queue! Thanks!
I think I only ever watched it once, when it first came out, but so many scenes still stick in the mind. I guess that's the mark of a powerful film, for all its flaws.