Review: 28 Days Later...(2002)

The young man opens his eyes. Where is he? On a bed. Restricted by tubes and tape. A hospital. But where are the nurses? The doctors? No one in sight. He gets up. Pulls out the tubes. Puts on some clothes. Stumbles down the hall. "Hello?" No answer. Not in the hall. Not in the street below. Not in downtown London. Not anywhere.

He doesn't know about what happened at Cambridge. He doesn't know about the monkeys. Or Rage.

Animal-rights activists break into a research lab to set the animals free. A tech begs them not to. Says the chimpanzee is infected with Rage. They don't listen. Open the cage. Set loose the Rage. Doesn't take much. A bite. A drop of blood in the mouth or eye. An activist is infected. Then another. Then another. The infection spreads. The dominoes fall.

28 days later, a young man walks through downtown London and thinks the city deserted. If only it were.

These opening moments of 28 Days Later... are bloody near perfect. The wandering young man--a bicycle messenger named Jim (Cillian Murphy) who had the misfortune of getting sideswiped by a truck and knocked into a coma just before the outbreak--gets to stand in for the audience. With the exception of the information about the breakin at Cambridge, where we get to see the first moments of contagion, we don't know any more than Jim does. We can deduce more--that the infection wiped out London at least, if not all of England--but Jim find this out soon enough anyway when he makes the innocent-enough mistake of walking into a church filled with infected Londoners. Blood-spattered. Red-eyed. Hungry. Jim, weak but sensible, runs for his life. Other survivors arrive. Jim gets to live. For now.

This is hardly fresh territory. George Romero defined the flesh-chomping zombie genre with his trilogy of Living Dead movies, but even he wasn't the first to play on this gore-caked ground. Richard Matheson's novella, I Am Legend, about a plague that turns much of the world's population into vampires, set the framework for much of what was to come and was itself twice filmed (as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price and The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, with a third film version rumored for years).

Director Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting fame) and screenwriter Alex Garland seem fully aware of the restrictions and expectations of the genre they're working in and attempt to work around them. Their most noticable--and most welcome--change to the plague itself. Victims don't die; they are transformed, and hence aren't really zombies at all (they're referred to regularly as "infecteds"). And the disease itself is specific in origin--a biological weapon experiment that goes about as wrong as it can go--rather than vague (a crashed probe in Night of the Living Dead) or entirely unexplained (Romero's two Dead sequels). The Rage virus also has a demonic logic to it: Turn it loose in a city or country you don't like and watch its citizens tear each other apart.

Boyle and Garland do acknowledge their predecessors, though, especially Romero. When a group of survivors--Jim, Selena (Naomie Harris), Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Frank's young daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns)--follows the directions on the one remaining radio broadcast and make their way toward a military outpost north of Manchester, they make stops along the way, including a shopping spree in a supermarket and a visit to a presumably deserted gas station, that echo heavily of Dawn of the Dead (which mostly took place in a shopping mall).

Unfortunately, the back third of the movie, which takes place after the survivors reach the outpost, also echoes Romero--but not in a good way. The soldiers, led by the deceptively calm Major West (Christopher Eccleston), prove to be a greater threat than the infecteds, just as the soldiers and scientists in Romero's third and least-effective zombie epic, Day of the Dead, wound up being more monsterous than the monsters could ever be. The shambling, slobbering things that were once like you and me might be out for blood, but only because it's now their nature. To be cruel, hateful, evil...these are conscious decisions. We, the survivors, the "normals," have a choice. The infecteds/zombies don't.

This last act may turn 28 Days Later... from a thoughtful study of characters under the ultimate strain to a more ordinary action/horror flick. But enough good will and interest in the characters' fates has been built (mostly through intense, sensitive performances, especially from Harris and the ever-underestimated Gleeson) that it's easier to stay with the movie until the end, even if that end could have been less cliched, could have been as finely detailed, thought-provoking, sharped-edged as the beginning and middle were.