Movie Review: 28 Days Later (2002)

Directed by Danny Boyle who also directed some other high-profile films like Trainspotting, The Beach, and later down the road Slumdog Millionaire, and “Steve Jobs” has done some fantastic work throughout his career. This one seems to be the odd one out, but he did a great job on it as well. 28 Days Later was a movie done on a low(ish) budget that absolutely killed it at the box office. The entire cast (including infected) were only a total of 37 people. To become a staple in the genre of “Zombie” or “Infected”, or whatever the kids are calling it these days, this film had to pull off a lot with not much to work with especially considering people were probably not expecting this from Danny Boyle, but they did it. And they did it well. Not to say that $8M is the smallest budget, but in comparison to some other films like the 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead” which was working with $26M, this film stood out, and pulled in just $20M less at $84M along with some impressive awards, which is an amazing feat that shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s an understatement to say that it was a success.

The story is centered around an outbreak, which happens when a chimpanzee is released by some activists that is having tests done on it and is carrying a deadly virus that the scientist simply calls “Rage” when asked by the activists who broke in to free what they thought were just poor animals who needed freeing. I guess the scientist could have chosen his words a bit better because when you tell someone not to free an animal because it is infected with “Rage” and don’t provide any additional information, they are going to release it. I mean, why wouldn’t they? “Oh, we can’t let it go because it has “Rage”? Ok.

So anyway, the inevitable happens, and they release the chimpanzee who instantly attacks and infects someone, and then patient zero is created. What you see next on the screen is “28 days later….” You then see the main character “Jim” wake up in a hospital bed, seemingly left behind by humanity. He finds some scrubs and starts stumbling through London looking for clues, and any signs of humanity left.

28 Days Later is a great film. It introduced a new vision of “zombies” as most of the time before this film, all zombies were just shuffling around, Romero style. The infected are just that. Infected. So they still have their motor functions and can move quickly. This hadn’t really been done too often in the genre before this film came out, and other films chose this style of zombie later down the line, such as the previously mentioned remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004, and then even later with ridiculous hordes of running zombies in 2013’s World War Z. Personally, I think this film pulled off the running infected thing well, but I think undead zombies should stay shuffling.

All in all, this was a groundbreaking film for the zombie subgenre. It brought a new “infected” look at what a virus could do to someone that isn’t actually dead yet, and there was some great cinematography that really emphasized the desolate landscape that was left behind when everything went down. This is definitely something any horror fan should watch and is a great horror film overall. We would almost say a classic at this point.