Twenty Eight Days Later: Movie review and discussion
28 Days Later
reviewed by Meesh
Title: 28 Days Later
Year Made: 2002
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Starring: Cillian Murphy (Jim), Naomie Harris (Selena)
For more information please visit the film’s Wikipedia Page
Zombies are part of our culture, our collective psyche. As much as aliens, UFOs and monsters external to humanity were once all the fashion, zombies have now hit the different entertainment media with a vengeance. 28 Days Later is one of the better zombie movies I’ve seen.
London, England. Jim, a courier, was in a bicycle accident and was in hospital in a coma. During his time “away”, an animal rights group broke into the lab at the hospital and set free a chimp that had a disease the researchers called “Rage”. We know how this story goes. Monkey is set free. Monkey eats the face off the animal rights activists. Well technically, they’re chimps. But anyway, Rage spreads like wildfire throughout the country, causing widespread zombie-ism to overtake England.
Jim wakes up from his coma to find everyone gone. He wanders outside. London is deserted and he begins to wander and yell for people. He goes into a church and attracts the attention of some zombies who chase him down the street. Two survivors, Selena and Mark, rush to him to shut him up as he’s running from the infected. After filling him in on what has happened. Jim is shell shocked and wants to go find his parents and in doing so, attracts the attention of the zombies. It seems Jim still doesn’t know the rules for dealing with those infected with Rage. Mark is infected and Selena hacks him to pieces.
Selena and Jim try to find other survivors of the pandemic, humans ever wanting to commune with other humans. They find Frank and Hannah, a father/daughter duo, holed up in a high rise apartment, hoping that height keeps the zombies from noticing them. Frank has been hearing a broadcast from the military, saying they have the answer to Rage, giving coordinates. The quartet head out in search of this compound.
What they find is anything but a saving grace. At this point in the film, my anxiety level spiked tremendously, so I’ll leave the rest of it a mystery.
I saw 28 Days Later for the first time on television, on FX. I thought it was a made for TV movie and I was mesmerized. When I found it on DVD, I bought it immediately. I’ve watched it several times since, and it’s still just as good as the first time I saw it. I still sit with a pillow on my lap, ready to cover my head when bad things happen. I recommend this movie to anyone who loves a good zombie scare. Just be prepared for a brief full frontal male nude scene at the beginning. These are the things I like warning about, so I thought I’d pass that little tidbit on to you.
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