“Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects”
-- Roger Zelazny
-- Roger Zelazny
I will admit to having written a fairly scathing review of this movie in 2002, when it first came out. I realize now that was a mistake. Once you get past the somewhat cheesy opening and plenty of minor plot holes you'll have to look past, what you're left with is probably the best zombie movie to date (and if it isn't, it's second to the Dawn of the Dead remake). More mobile than most zombie movies, its episodic nature gives it quite a bit of strength as it can swap out characters and locales as it pleases, thus exploring more ideas than your standard zombie fare.
We open with the explanation for the zombie plague being monkeys that have been infected with Rage itself at least in part by being forced to watch the violence humans commit against each other on a loop. I get the message they were going for, but a quick reveal that wasn't the only part of the regimen would've made it a little less corny. We fast-forward to 28 days later when Cillian Murphy's Jim awakens in a hospital bed with the hospital around him obviously in disarray.
We open with the explanation for the zombie plague being monkeys that have been infected with Rage itself at least in part by being forced to watch the violence humans commit against each other on a loop. I get the message they were going for, but a quick reveal that wasn't the only part of the regimen would've made it a little less corny. We fast-forward to 28 days later when Cillian Murphy's Jim awakens in a hospital bed with the hospital around him obviously in disarray.
Is it weird that it should be obvious to Jim and anyone he relays his story to that playing dead (I suppose a coma isn't really playing, but still) is an effective defense and yet that never comes up for the rest of the movie? No doubt! Is it strange that Jim wakes up in an abandoned metropolis and barely pauses to read the headline "EVACUATION" before dropping the newspaper? Yeah! Is it a little sloppy to have a zombie ascend a staircase off-camera so fast that his footsteps sound like machine gun fire only to have him lurch through the door and spastically power-walk towards our hero? Of course it is! Are there 20-30 more little bits like this? Confoundingly so!
Quick tangent for my favorite of them all: our protagonist Jim meets a man named Mark who tells us that during the early days of the infection, his family tried to escape via airport, an idea they shared with about 20,000 other people. Mark describes exactly what we, the audience, already know is coming: the infection spreads like wildfire through a packed crowd like that and Mark momentarily escapes by climbing on top of a kiosk and surveying the carnage around him. That's it. That's the end of his story. If they made a prequel titled 17 Days Later: How Mark Got Out Of That Airport, I'd pay good money to see it.
Quick tangent for my favorite of them all: our protagonist Jim meets a man named Mark who tells us that during the early days of the infection, his family tried to escape via airport, an idea they shared with about 20,000 other people. Mark describes exactly what we, the audience, already know is coming: the infection spreads like wildfire through a packed crowd like that and Mark momentarily escapes by climbing on top of a kiosk and surveying the carnage around him. That's it. That's the end of his story. If they made a prequel titled 17 Days Later: How Mark Got Out Of That Airport, I'd pay good money to see it.
Anyway, why do I seem to be so forgiving of a movie I'm admitting has so many flaws? Because it's trying something that hasn't been done before. Like Bunraku or Inception, anything short of a plot black hole can be excused in favor of seeing something you haven't before, even if its disparate elements aren't new; only the combination is. And I can't think of a zombie movie that gives you half the themes 28 Days Later does. You've got the standard post-apocalyptic stuff, sure, but also abandonment, hopelessness, misogyny, the elements of humanity worth saving, totalitarianism, a little philosophy on humanity's importance, the idea that humans aren't that much less monstrous than the infected, and even something of a twist ending. A lesser movie would collapse under the weight of trying to juggle this many ideas, but 28DL pulls it off quite nicely.
Will it win any new converts to the zombie genre? Probably not, but it is an often over-looked zombie feature done right that only underscores how the recent World War Z and Warm Bodies fall glaringly short of their potential. The genre needs another film like this, especially given its laughably low $8 million budget.
Will it win any new converts to the zombie genre? Probably not, but it is an often over-looked zombie feature done right that only underscores how the recent World War Z and Warm Bodies fall glaringly short of their potential. The genre needs another film like this, especially given its laughably low $8 million budget.
A zombie movie that makes full use of the advantages inherent in the genre