Casual Cogitations

28 Days Later is not really a zombie movie in the traditional sense. One could honestly argue that it's not a living dead movie at all, since the disease, which renders mankind rabid, doesn't reduce its victims to blank faced slaughter machines with a thirst for blood and hunger for flesh. Society is not threatened by reanimated corpses, but by individuals infected with an illness that leaves them insanely angry and homicidal. The hordes here don't attack for food; they attack for fun. It's as if the lightning-fast infection burrows down deep into the archeological DNA we all carry and re-activates the hunter-gatherer gene in mega-spades. And the fact that one little drop of infected tissue, from salvia or a bleeding cut, can transform you in a matter of seconds significantly ups the anxiety ante.

28 Days Later establishes a new foothold in the whole end-of-the-world sci-fi fright flick extravaganza. It is a movie about a plague gone wild, an apocalyptic fable in the vein o The Stand, The Andromeda Strain, or 12 Monkeys. It does so without hardcore gore effects or shots of epic scope holocaust. At its core, this masterful but somewhat maddening movie shows us the more human side of annihilation, allowing its epic tale of the planet's possible end play out in small individual moments of quick, volatile rage. All hope may not be lost, but it seems to be available in ever decreasing supplies.

Director Boyle and writer Alex Garland use two different devices to keep the suspense level high in 28 Days Later, something that future cinematic shockers would do well to take notice of. First, they make it very clear, almost from the very beginning, that death and destruction can come at any time, from anywhere. There is no such thing as sanctuary (as a church filled with the infected freaks exemplifies), and just when you've come to trust a situation or person, horror can come crashing through a window or spray across the wall in a torrent of turmoil. Secondly, they make their "zombies" unconventional by turning up their rage and riot factors, removing the slow ambulatory security that comes in, say, Tom Savini's remake of the classic Night Of The Living Dead. There the main character of Barbara merely saunters by the reanimated threat, as if taking a casual, if cautious walk. But the beast brood here is fast and furious. This has a profound effect on the narrative drive of the film. It places the audience on its guard and makes every scene one of potential dread and disaster. They then follow up on the premise and payoff handsomely with each new threat or assault. From running corpses engulfed in flames to the hacking to death of a newly infected friend, 28 Days Later makes its savage world sing with a shattering sense of the unexpected.

In a modern global community filled with AIDS, SARS, and Ebola, 28 Days Later functions as an admonitory reminder that technology alone can only take us so far. As important as they are, computers and mapping the human genome cannot save us from simple biological outbreaks or chemical warfare. The universe is comprised of billions of germs and untold undiscovered viruses, and yet we waltz around the planet, de-foresting habitats and exploring unreachable regions, all in the name of science and advancement. 28 Days Later tells us that somewhere along the line we're going to mess with something that knows how to fight back hard, and when faced with this threat, the only viable means of resistance will not be those wonderful futuristic conveniences, but the tools of our evolutionary ancestry: the knife, the club, the projectile. Part of the reason for the film's unrelenting sense of terror is the idea that we are left utterly defenseless, that in a country without ready access to weapons (you can hear Americans in the audience wondering why these Limeys aren't loaded for bear against the hyperactive hissy fitters), your wits and your wallop are far more important. Even at the end, we learn that the more flash and gun powdered the protection, the more impotent the safeguard becomes. Technology may ultimately be responsible for what happens in 28 Days Later, but it's funny that it doesn't hang around to try and sort the problem out.

At its heart, therefore, 28 Days Later is the story of man's will to survive, about what it takes to face the fear of extinction and fight like hell to keep it from happening. The bleak tone and even darker message of humans turning on themselves magnifies the hopelessness and turns a terrifying film into something much more uncomfortable. And if we sit back for a moment and argue that all monster movies are a reflection of their times and creators, 28 Days Later has a great deal to say about us. Sure, there is an endearing desire to continue on, to find a way to overcome and compete against the riot of raging victims. But toward the end of the movie, a character states that this new world—where person kills person for irrational, uncontrollably instinctual reasons—doesn't appear to be so different from what society was like pre-infection. Perhaps 28 Days Later is the ultimate crime nightmare, a metaphorical depiction of a world where the felonious element is unstoppable and unflappable, impossible to control or understand. Or maybe it wants to comment on man's reluctance to resolve his inner demons peacefully, always wanting to work out his psychological traumas on the battlefield or street gang turf. There is definitely a desire on the part of Boyle and Garland to make a solid point about the fall of organized society, but the anarchy in the UK result seems fuzzy in its final determination.

This goes to a very real aspect of 28 Days Later. This is far from a perfect film. Indeed, it wears its flaws proudly and provocatively. As with most movies of this genre, the cautionary example about man himself being more deadly that the undead denizens of destruction around him gets a tired repeat here. Like the biker gang who infiltrates the Mall of Solitude in Dawn Of The Dead, the minute our survivors meet up with the military unit north of Manchester, you know we are about to see the terror turn inward. Too bad that the rationale for the soldier's redolent behavior is specious at best. When we hear what is about to happen to our heroes, especially the women, we wonder why the movie decided to take this turn, when better ones seem prevalent. Also, most fans of fierce, ferocious exercises in horror like their blood ladled on in huge buckets, not overcranked and strobe-lit artistic arterial sprays. There is good gore in 28 Days Later, but no great big globs of goo. In some instances, we don't mind not seeing everything; the technique provides more terror than an autopsy style glimpse of internal organs or dismembered body parts could ever inject. But to have a machete-wielding wild woman and a baseball bat-brandishing hero and to never once get a good look at their handiwork seems like a colossal gyp. This movie has tone and atmosphere aplenty (the opening sequences in a deserted London are memorable) but occasionally falls down where fans want it (and the body parts) to fly.

Despite its flaws, Boyle and Garland supply enough invention and insight to render 28 Days Later a real step forward in the zombie apocalypse genre. Many will still balk at calling this a living dead movie, and they are right. It's a living evil film. To make the movie as human as they do and yet never shy away from the ferocious nature of the beast waiting around every corner, to depict people as the ultimate threat to each other may be clichéd, but never before has the formula been so vicious. Their use of digital video adds a very vérité, realistic quality to the movie, even when the sequences are carefully storyboarded and choreographed. The minor image imperfections that a video element provides, everything from blurring to grain to pixelation, makes the experiment in cinema seem like a news broadcast from Judgment Day, a terrible transmission from a possible future shock. Unlike most films, the filmmakers here—obvious fans of the forefathers who destroyed the world before them—know how to keep an audience on the edge of their seat. Had they magnified the carnage and taken more chances with the narrative (perhaps avoiding the maniac military men all together), 28 Days Later would be a new modern classic, a film to move into the pantheon of the proud, like Dawn Of The Dead or The Exorcist , but this unusual take on the zombie genre tempers too many of its outer trappings to be faultless.