I first saw Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002 when it was released. I wasn’t taken with it at the time. It’s since attained semi-classic status though—and a sequel’s just been released. So I thought I’d revisit the original and see if I missed something.
I don’t think I did. The film is derivative and predictable, in both plot and theme. The protagonists are charismatic, though, and in our current post-Covid gallop towards fascism, its particular misanthropy takes on a new resonance which makes a rewatch worthwhile, if not exactly necessary.
The film opens with a nod to John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, as bike messenger Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes in the hospital to discover that all of Britain’s been infected with a highly contagious zombie rage virus; everyone who can has evacuated and just about everyone else is a bloodthirsty monster. Jim stumbles on a few exceptions in the form of jaded survivor Selena (Naomi Harris) and father and daughter Frank and Hannah (Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns). The four leave London after hearing a radio broadcast that there are other survivors near Manchester. They find a handful of soldiers led by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston)… but they discover humans are just about as bloodthirsty and dangerous as the zombies they’re trying to escape.
Again, except for the way that the zombies run rather than stagger, most of the twists here were around long before 2002. The tied-up zombie held for research purposes is from Day of the Dead, along with the untrustworthy soldiers steeped in toxic masculinity. There’s a shopping scene nod to Dawn of the Dead as well. And the horror/action tropes are followed religiously enough that you can tell who’s marked for death, and who’s likely to make it to the end, almost as soon as they pop up on screen.
The fun in these movies is often less innovation than how you play the standards. Murphy as Jim is a compelling hero, making the transition from ectomorphic hapless nerd to ectomorphic stone-cold killer with convincing enthusiasm and a glint in those captivating, ice-blue eyes. The romance arc works pretty well too; you can believe Selena falls for him over a couple weeks, because he’s one of the last guys on earth and he looks like Cillian Murphy.
The Romero zombie moral that zombies are “us, that’s all” is restated with satisfying relish by Major West: “This is what I've seen in the four weeks since infection. People killing people, which is much what I saw in the four weeks before infection.” West is talking about himself there, primarily; he’s committed to rape and murder even though he’s not technically infected. But he’s also talking about Jim, whose campaign of violent revenge—culminating in a suitably gruesome eye-gouging perpetrated while shirtless and covered in blood—causes Selena and Hannah to think he’s been turned.
The movie isn’t as ruthless about that insight as Romero often was. 28 Days Later has more survivors than a Romero movie typically does, just for starters. More, the viewer and Jim himself always know that he’s human/a good guy/not corrupted by his own violence. He’s doing what needs to be done, and despite a feint or two, the film isn’t really interested in questioning that.
On the other bloody appendage, the movie’s raging, animalistic zombies are more gruesomely on point than Romero’s after a pandemic in which we watched our neighbors turn on us in a rabid grotesquerie of fascism and paranoia, culminating in the election of someone significantly more bloodthirsty and unhinged than Major West.
The 2021 film The Sadness picks up on that in ways which are more brazenly sadistic, more disturbing, and more impressive in its depiction of public health emergency turned to public orgy of sadism. Still, The Sadness probably wouldn’t exist in quite the same way without Boyle to build on. The earlier film deserves some credit for that, and for a bleak vision that captured something of the bleak future we’re living in. 28 Days Later is still not a great film. But from 20 years on, it has its virtues.