| Posted by: NotKeyserSoze at November 16, 2003, 9:06 am | | Topic: Reviews: 28 Days Later Forum: JoBlo | | Spoilers etc. But then, you've probably seen the movie anyway... Hollywood has lost the knack for zombie movies. Not that it ever really had it - the really good ones, like Day of the Dead or Evil Dead, were always cult or B-Movies - but one look at the dull-as-dishwater exercise in trendy techo-dancing that is Resident Evil is enough to convince you that you'll never see a fresh, scary take on zombies. 28 Days Later is not really a zombie movie, but it's still a better zombie movie than Resident Evil. In fact, if you spliced the two together, fiddled the plot a little bit and changed the protagonist, this could be seen as a superior sequel. R.E ends with the heroine waking up in an apocalyptic Britain... so this one opens. Difference is, R.E's only striking scary image - poor Milla Jovonich wandering alone through a ruined city - was its last. 28 Days Later has a host of eerie images, and that's just the first. Leaning closer to The Omega Man early on than any monster flick, 28 Days Later focuses on far more than flesh eating monsters. It's even a little lazy on the plot (the details of "rage" are never fleshed out, and obviously we never see the horrific nationwide apocalypse, merely hear about it... which is far worse), with exposition coming in short, sharp bursts. But what 28 Days Later doesn't say and doesn't show is infinitely scarier than any CGI monster. The protracted silences, empty streets and horrifying sense of just being utterly alone is a numbing way to open the film - it's fantastic. The zombies (and they basically are, though they're known as "the infected") are not like anything you've seen. Squealing and in a constant bad mood, they're horrifyingly fast and driven, with only one thing on their minds: find someone who isn't infected and either gnaw them to bits or infect them. When the film pelts into life during these attacks, the sheer visceral shock of it is used over excess gore. Sure, there are machete hackings and eye gaugings - but these are done by the uninfected people. Indeed, a final point about there not being a whole lot of difference does come across in the final reel. These infected are not the big thing of the movie, though: surviving in the long term, and beating humanity's surprisingly dirty nature is the big deal. And it's scarier. The limited cast are incredibly effective. We're never sure who's next, too, after a main character is hacked to bits in the first twenty minutes. It's great that we know so little about these characters, as we're never sure what they're capable of. Brendan Gleeson's fatherly Frank is a warm, loving man, but when push comes to shove he's a malicious killing machine. The reverse goes for Selena - almost mechanically driven to survival, until meeting Frank's daughter drives her to humanity. Hero Cillian Murphy/Jim is wonderfully open about all of it, too, sharing the audience's sheer disbelief about it all. He's almost an antihero in the climax, causing more death in five minutes than we've seen so far in the film. You're still cheering for him, though. Almost all of it's shot on DV camera, too, lending the whole thing a security-camera realism. This doesn't often feel out of this world (only the clunky opening scene with the chimps, which is mercifully brief, feels greatly scripted), and the very horrible idea that such an apocalpyse would take well under a month stays with you. Overall, it's not quite as viscerally horrific as it could have been. Far nastier things are suggested than shown - always the scarier route to take in filmmaking, and something Resident Evil style gurus have yet to learn - and Danny Boyle's direction and selection of slow, building music is stonkingly effective. Interspersed in the doom are little moments of warmth and hope, that add even more humanity to what's going on. It's a big, horrible tragedy, that feels closer to earth than any cheesy zombie picture. Tragically underrated, this is a deeply impacting film. 8/10 |
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