28 Days Later: A Great Take on the Zombie Film
Contains spoilers!
Do you ever want to watch a particular movie but, for some reason or another, time simply slips away from you? All that time, though, you hope it’s a good one so that the payoff is worth it? That’s my relationship with 2002’s 28 Days Later for me. Since this film’s release, 2 sequels have been released: 28 Weeks Later (2007) and 28 Years Later (2025). Directed by Danny Boyle, the film tells Jim’s (Cillian Murphy) story as he wakes up 28 days after a rage-inducing virus has caused society to collapse. In his efforts to survive, he teams up with Selena (Naomie Harris),a badass who’s unafraid to do what it takes to survive, as well as Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns).
What I admire most about this film are both the virus and the zombies/infected it creates; I say infected as Boyle doesn’t consider them zombies. When a person is infected in most zombie fiction, it takes a long time for the person to turn and start attacking others. Here, the film flips that, and it only takes seconds for the virus to take hold. It raises the stakes and forces our heroes to work quickly to neutralize the threat.
What’s ironic about this brand of world-ending chaos is its origins. The film opens with a group of animal rights activists infiltrating a research lab to free a group of chimpanzees that the scientists have been studying; these chimps are infected with the virus. One of the chimpanzees gets loose and attacks an activist, infecting her, and the virus starts to spread. Come to free chimps; stay for the world-ending virus.
We then cut to Murphy’s Jim, who wakes up in a hospital totally alone; you can hear The Walking Dead screaming, “Write that down, write that down!” Jim quickly realizes something’s amiss, and it goes to Murphy’s credit that I would’ve been alright if the entire movie had been Jim all alone, trying to figure where everyone is.
Selena is one of the first survivors Jim encounters, and she proves right away what such circumstances can do to someone. She’s willing to abandon Jim if he’s infected and demonstrates this when Mark, another person she and Jim are travelling with, is bitten. She immediately hacks him to death upon learning of his bite, and she does it without a second’s hesitation.
Frank and Hannah are a pair we connect with quickly, once the initial hesitancy against them is lifted. Frank is a man trying to do right by his daughter, and it’s heartbreaking when he becomes an infected by a drop of blood dropping into his eye (foreshadowing Mad-Eye Moody, anyone?).
Upon meeting Frank and Hannah, our heroic quarter decides to journey to a quarantine zone a group of soldiers have established near Manchester. The soldiers are led by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston), who is scarier than an infected horde. To maintain his men’s loyalty, West has promised his men that they’ll have women, meaning Selena and Hannah (a child!) will be used for sexual slavery. What adds to West’s creepiness is, before his ulterior motives are revealed, he and his men are charming, polite, and offer our heroes food and shelter. When he flips that switch, the initial warmth is gone. I had a suspicion that West was hiding something, but I wasn’t expecting this.
28 Days Later lived up to the hype for all the great reasons. I kept guessing how the story was going to unfold, and I give it props for that. On top of stellar performances, there’s a fantastic portrayal of zombies/infected. The movie, and the entirety of zombie fiction, begs the question: Why are we, as humans, so interested in depicting the end of our world?
Cast
Cillian Murphy as Jim
Naomie Harris as Selena
Brendan Gleeson as Frank
Megan Burns as Hannah
Christopher Eccleston as Major Henry West
