It started off as rioting. But right from the beginning you knew this was different...
28 Days Later is directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland. It stars Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Megan Burns, Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Ecclestone. Music is by John Murphy and cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle.
When animal liberation activists break into the Cambridge Primate Research Center, they come across a scientist who tells them that to release these chimps would be insane. They have been injected with a test serum known as "Rage", and it's highly contagious and spreads easily and quickly. Ignoring the warnings, one of the activists opens a cage and is attacked and bitten by a chimp and rage quickly spreads among the group...
28 days later...
The amazing thing with Danny Boyles's 28 Days later is that although it owes a huge debt to the likes of George Romero's zombie films, and John Wyndham and Richard Matheson's writings, it still feels fresh and exciting. Film is quintessentially British, as evidenced by the rightly lauded use of a depopulated London for the starting point to the terror, yet there's an earthiness to our small band of survivors. These are flawed characters that are ill equipped to deal with the infected implosion, there's nothing remotely Hollywood about these people or the landscapes that frame them (CG is minimal, where hand-held digital cameras are the order of the day).
There's a realistic feel factor that is rarely seen in other films of this ilk. Yep, sure there's implausibilities, but with the infected creatures running at a fair old clip, becoming scary creations in a stark stripped back land, there's too much fun being had - and nervous tension being burnt - to even begin to start nit-picking. Besides, the last quarter alone is a lesson in energy fuelled horror as the survivors, having seemingly found a safe house, find that monsters aren't merely confined to the infected human kind. It's a cracker-jack of a finale, bloody and bloody frantic, all backed by Murphy's simple but totally potent musical arrangements.
It's easy to see why America made it a monster hit at the box office, after just making a small profit in the UK, film went to America and made it big. Americans, you have to feel, enjoyed watching something raw in a sub-genre of horror that was at the time reliant on Romero rediscovering his mojo. Worldwide the film made over $70 million in profit, and those are the kinds of figures that speak volumes. The success ensured a sequel would follow, where Boyle and Garland bowed out of the main chairs and into producers roles for "28 Weeks Later". It's not as raw as "Days", but it's gorier and itself also a fine "infected" horror movie, and certainly a worthy follow up to what Boyle and Garland clinically created in 2002.
A great cast and premise get down and dirty In a sharply executed infected based horror. 8.5/10
