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Time to Get Ill
The Village Voice
24 June 2003
By Michael Atkinson
To every creatively frozen, summer-movie ice age comes a little heat lightning, and these gray dog days it's Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later.... On one hand a seat-o'-pants digital-video quickie designed for blunt trauma, and on the other a veritable index of classic genre-stuff, Boyle's film creates an acute sense of movie-viewing danger. You're never sure that what you'll see will be completely safe and blockbustery. Because it's cut-rate, star-free (supporting players Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston are as close to marquee names as it gets), outlandishly edge-conscious, and 100 percent British, the movie has a frontier charge built in. It's no landmark—it's too derivative and, finally, tasteful—but unassuming ticket buyers may be spot-welded to their seats with an unfamiliar intensity.
Screenwriter Alex Garland literally drops in the name of the film as an intertitle following a disastrous animal lab liberation in which eco-activists release virally infected chimps into the world. Four weeks later, naked nobody Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a hospital to find London an empty maze of post-apocalyptic silence, wreckage, and broodingly useless landmarks. It doesn't take long for him to stumble upon a dozing mob of the "infected"—essentially, George Romero-style cannibal zombies, distinguished by their red contact lenses, body-snatcher screech, and rigor-mortis-free speed—or to be rescued by Mark and Selena (Noah Huntley and the redoubtable Naomie Harris), a pair of no-nonsense vigilante humans brimming with exposition.
England, it seems, has been wholly evacuated; exactly how far beyond its shores the plague spread is a matter of conflicting rumor. It hardly matters—the scenario quickly boils down to Dawn of the Dead hack-or-be-chomped. The jittery social collapse in Night of the Living Dead, Romero's first Dead film, is conveniently hopscotched, but even so, that seminal nightmare's upcoming teen re-remake is now rendered altogether moot. Returning after the H-bomb crater of The Beach to an ultra-cheap guerrilla moviemaking he'd never actually experienced, Boyle allows the digital fuzz to despoil powerful post-apocalyptic tableaux, as if the film itself were news footage, and offers up only fleeting glimpses of historically suggestive imagery (an inert Payloader full of gray bodies is a mere reflection in a passing car window). He also overemploys the ubiquitous Saving Private Ryan shutter-strobe effect during action scenes, using its eye-upsetting tumult to economically disguise the fact that very little of the flesh-rending and limb-hacking is actually on-screen. (This technique is also forgiving to drooling zombie actors.) The subjective approximation of a hysterical, head-shaking frenzy, it's a presumptuous strategy that gets under your skin anyway.
It's a shame Boyle and Garland took only what was easy in Romero (the ecstasy of shopping in an unpoliced world, the unambiguous joy of mowing down subhumans) and didn't dig for metaphoric frisson. Romero had Vietnam and post-industrial consumerism; what do Boyle and Garland have? The threat of instant infection—Gleeson's jovial dad meets a decidedly outrageous fate, seen from the inside of a falling drop of blood—only evokes itself. Pick your virus. There's nothing as transgressive in 28 Days Later... as the Night of the Living Dead moment in which a newly resurrected child zombie eviscerates and cannibalizes her own mother, or, for that matter, Night's final evocation of mid-century Alabama. Garland's script has the kernel of an idea in the third act, when the survivors find Eccleston's army brigade holed up in a country mansion, ready to restart the human race. As in Romero's severely underrated The Crazies, the dread of military enforcement outweighs the fear of what it's meant to control. For Naomie Harris's wary, fierce machete-maiden, the prospect of being a jarhead concubine and gunpoint baby factory makes the landscape of man-eaters look reasonable.
