25 Years Too Late

25 Years Too Late:

A Review of 28 Days Later

28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. 2003.

Director Danny Boyle's latest film is receiving a great deal of attention as a serious addition to the horror genre, on par with recent and equally serious additions such as The Ring, The Others, and The Sixth Sense. And in general, I applaud this recent trend, as the directors of the abovementioned films have made original and disturbing contributions to the genre. Alas, this isn't the case with 28 Days Later. While its not a terrible film (I'm not howling to get a refund of my admission price), it failed to deliver what it promised. Indeed, perhaps the title of the film should have been 25 Years Too Late.

28 Days Later imagines an apocalypse precipitated when animal rights activists free primates infected with a viral malady appropriately named "rage." Rage is easily transmitted to humans through the blood, within 20 seconds transforming them into snarling sub-humans who bite and infect anyone nearby. The film then jumps forward 28 days later to the protagonist, Jim, waking from a coma in the hospital only to discover no one is there. Jim walks through a deserted London picking up abandoned cans of Pepsi in his wake to quell his hunger, unaware that rage has ground to a halt civilization. He seeks shelter in a church, not understanding the significance of the warning painted on the walls: "The end of the world is very fucking nigh." Inside, Jim finds hundreds of people sleeping near the altar, and foolishly shouts to rouse them from their slumber. This only summons a rage-infected priest. Jim escapes into the street, chased by the infected, and is saved by two figures in riot gear, who take him to shelter and fill him in on what has happened during his coma.

Jim ends up seeking shelter in a London high rise with a father and his daughter Hannah, and Selena, one his rescuers, but soon it becomes apparent that the city isn't the place to be when there is no longer any electricity or running water. A generator powered radio picks up a signal from an army base in Manchester, announcing that a solution to the infection awaits those who will join this squadron. The four venture to the army base, losing the father to rage infection upon their arrival. At first, the base does indeed seem to be a better place to live. Inhabited by eight male soldiers with lots of weapons, the base has running water, limited electricity, and a store of food. But soon the Manchester base's motive for summoning people with their transmission becomes obvious. The commanding officer promised his he would get them women in order to start civilization anew men if they would follow his orders. Then the soldiers set upon Selena and the pre-adolescent Hannah, locking up Jim a rogue soldier convinced that the infection is confined to Great Britain as it cannot cross oceans, and that in America, they have electricity and are watching The Simpsons. From here, Jim escapes to rescue Hannah and Selena in scenes reminiscent of Apocalypse Now.

And it is at this point that I began to lose interest in the film. It's one thing for a film to be reminiscent of earlier ones. This one is the descendant of the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, where some mysterious force animates the newly deceased into mindless, flesh-eating zombies and civilization as we know it is toppled in a matter of days. It is also a descendant of John Wyndham's novel Day of the Triffids, another apocalyptic tale where the survivors must struggle to reinvent human communities. George Romero's film centers on the horror of being trapped by something that defies all known laws of nature, while Windham's novel deals with how humans are primarily social creatures, and reforming the lost civilization in some form is imperative for their survival. 28 Days Later attempts to combine these two themes, but ultimately doesn't do anything terribly original. The struggles of Jim, Hannah and Selena to survive, first in the city, then in a military community, and then in a rural area have potential, but aren't thought provoking. More attention is paid to the protagonists need to flee each of these settings than is devoted to how uninfected humans will form some sort of community to survive.

The disease that brings about the fall is potentially interesting. Rage seems to be a malady for our times, where too much structure, too much wealth distributed unequally, too many tasks to accomplish in one day already insight everyone to seethe with anger. But that too is unexplained. We only know that the scientist at the film infected his primates with rage. We don't know where the virus came from. Was it generated by perverse human intervention, as the film's opening montage suggests when we see a monkey with electrodes in its head strapped down to watch several televisions depicting real life violence? Or was this creature already infected with rage, and was this experiment designed to test the virus further? I kept hoping these narrative threads would be further developed in the last third of the film, and was bitterly disappointed when they didn't. Jim, Hannah and Selena's escape from the Manchester squadron is all so much action/adventure sequences where the fly-weight Jim suddenly develops super powers of jumping through windows and knocking out men twice his size.

28 Days Later is visually stylish. The rage-infected humans resemble a sort of super-animated zombies from Romero's film: instead of shuffling around as if they were escaped mental patients on a triple dose of thoarzine, they lurch and snarl as if they were rabid vampires. The scenes of eerily quiet abandoned landscapes occasionally punctuated by rage-infected humans are nightmare-provoking. Unfortunately, these elements aren't enough to sustain the narrative, and it lacks the punch of films such as The Ring, The Others and The Sixth Sense. The Ring is a wholly original story, even when it is considered how it reinterprets its Japanese counterpart, the Ringu trilogy. And The Others and The Sixth Sense add something new to their respective subgenre in how they tell the story from the ghost's point of view. Perhaps 28 Days Later would also possess this originality if it were made in 1968 prior to Night of the Living Dead, instead of 2003.