Hey folks, Harry here... While many of you readers out there overseas have already seen this film, many of us here in the struggling to stay United States... well we have not. With future shitty zombie movies on the way like HOUSE OF THE DEAD or the inevitable turd bomb that'll be RESIDENT EVIL 2... or the joyless news that Universal has hired a slick commerical director to remake DAWN OF THE DEAD - especially when they had experienced horror directors that were vying for the job, whom they shut out.... sigh... Well at least there's the inevitable Peter Jackson UNTITLED ZOMBIE PROJECT and this film on the horizon! This review isn't a rave, but even with all the nitpicking, after reading it, I just want to see it more!
Hi, Harry. Big fan of the site, as always! I just caught a screening of 28 Days Later, and wanted to drop my two cents.
In the stunning first ten minutes of Danny Boyle's new film, a man slowly regains consciousness to find himself in a deserted hospital. He walks out into the streets of an equally abandoned city, reminiscent of Tom Cruise at the beginning of VANILLA SKY, only on a grander scale. Who is this guy, and what the hell is going on? Seems a virus has swept the nation, has wiped out government, electricity and humanity. Nothing left except the occasional corpse, or people still living with the infection of ìrageî, which has turned them into zombies.
The man stumbles upon a handful of survivors, and they go searching for any others, making sure to keep indoors when the sun sets; as we all know, the common rule with monster movies is they only come out at night. 28 DAYS LATER, Boyle's second collaboration with author Alex Garland, is certainly an improvement over their first (what wouldn't be?). It's an uneven film, beautifully directed and shot; photography here is sometimes breath-taking. John Murphy II's score haunts.
But, there's something not quite right about the story. If civilization has indeed been eliminated, it should take even longer for this man with no identity to come into contact with anyone else. The film sets a tone that is ominous and strangely poignant, but doesn't care to maintain it very long. I wasn't ready for other survivors, or coming up with ways to stay alive with all those zombies roaming around. Or, the journey to that quarantine. Just a bit more hopelessness, some desperation for good measure even, and then advance the plot. We are told of an evacuation that wasn't wholly successful.
If so, why are there not any dead bodies to be found at all?
Wouldn't anyone left be either a zombie or a survivor?
Wouldn't anyone in between have gotten to safety?
And, don't even ask how the chimps were infected, or why it only took twenty-eight days to plague out an entire nation, or how disease could kill electricity (?). We only know the survivors based on the circumstances they are in, so there's nothing to care about outside the situation and asking ourselves what we would do if it were us; some of them will live, some of them won't, and it's only a question of how long they'll last. When they go, it's of no great consequence. Are we affected when the old stand-by parable about the nature of man -- which is worse, them or us -- presents itself during the quarantine segment? What with the instance of rape, or the way we treat the things we do not understand? I don't think so. Since the film is a modern day take on NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, anyway, couldn't we see it coming?
Perhaps I AM LEGEND will give us a more fully-realized version of the same general idea. If it is ever ever made.
J-Man
