For much of the beginning act of 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle's highly influential zombie film, we primarily follow Jim (Cillian Murphy), a bike courier who awakes from a coma to find himself in a seemingly abandoned London. It's a haunting sequence, watching Jim stumble through the empty streets, gathering food and money with no knowledge of the danger that could be behind any corner. It is, admittedly, undercut by the music (we'll talk on that in a bit) but it's a scene that immediately establishes exactly why 28 Days (not to be confused with the Sandra Bullock film) stood out so well from the glut of zombie media that overwhelmed everyone in the 2000s. Boyle directs with a resounding patience, letting tension rise naturally as we wait for somebody, anybody, to break Jim's solitude. It's moody, almost dreamlike in the unnerving quality of the empty streets, and a film a lot more willing to sit and let you sweat on things a little bit.
Of course, the film never loses this momentum as other survivors enter the fray, and it settles into something a bit more familiar, a story of a group of unlikely people forced together in the face of horrific conditions. There's an easygoing chemistry between the group, comprised of Jim, fiery Selena (Naomi Harris), fatherly Frank (Brendon Gleeson, always a delight), and his daughter Hanna (Megan Burns), and the film becomes something of a road movie as the quartet make their way to an apparent safe haven. Boyle's patience is a virtue here, allowing us to sit with the characters and really feel for them, getting to know them without necessarily overexplaining who they are. In one particularly great sequence, doomed Mark (Noah Huntley) talks about losing his family to a zombie horde, giving a bit character genuine pathos that makes his (in hindsight) quick demise even more shocking and injects a sense of real tension to every interaction. We want these people make it, and the fact that the infected (not zombies!) could be lurking around every corner makes for incredible tension.
Boyle, one of cinema's most creative and versatile directors, milks this tension for all it's worth, with standouts being the group attempting to fix a tire as a rabid horde pursues them through a tunnel and a genuinely striking shot of a soldier moving from a window to reveal an infected staring at them. Even the loss of Frank, a single drop of infected blood leaking into his eye, feels like a natural endpoint of a world so inherently dangerous, and a way to bring an end to the heartfelt middle act into something a lot more terse.
There's some debate over the film's third act, whether Boyle's reverence for the Romero-esque "humanity are the true monsters" dragged it's effective pace to a halt or gave the film a more tangible antagonist. I find myself in the latter category, both out of a general fondness for seeing Christopher Eccleston in things and also because the film never loses the intensity that makes it so strong. From the moment we meet Major West (Christopher Eccleston) and his men, there is an immediate sense that something is wrong. Glances held too long, jokes with just an undercurrent of intimidation underneath them, all things that Boyle and writer Alex Garland use to establish that the safe haven. The classic morality play of "what do you do once the rules don't matter" come into play, as does the film's spectacularly violent, tense third act, a bloodbath that sees Jim become just as feral as the infected. It works well enough, and I'm even a fan of the film's shockingly upbeat ending, one that Boyle and Garland had to be dragged into making.
If there's anything of the film I don't love, it's the score, maybe the epitome of early 2000s musical scores in that it's comprised largely of thudding guitar riffs. It's certainly not terrible, but in a film built so heavily off of long stretches of silence being shattered by surprise attacks or scares, it undercuts the tension. (Much like the ending, this was added because test audiences found the film too nerve-wracking without it. Sometimes test audiences don't know what they're talking about!)
Minor quibbles aside, it's easy to see the influence on 28 Days on so many modern works, and after watching it, I can't really blame anyone inspired by it. It's a grungy, dreamlike thrill ride, a standout in the very strong career of one of our modern auteurs, and I'm certain that it's sequel will happily carry the torch.
NOTE: The reviewer has not watched 28 Weeks Later.
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