28 Days Later - Lisa's Review

This week finally a movie I'm pretty familiar with and one I've seen a number of times.  Firstly, forgive me if my review comes across like this is a zombie movie.  This is exactly how I see this movie, although that wouldn't strictly be the case.  I'd be pretty surprised if many people hadn't seen this movie, but let's continue with a plot of sorts.

We start the movie in a research laboratory where animal activists are attempting to free caged chimps.  Unfortunately the chimps are infected with a deadly virus called 'Rage' which is spread by bites.  Anyone who is infected becomes, pretty much - zombies!  They like to eat flesh and don't seem to have much in the way of original personality or intelligence.  One thing does differ considerably though.  These guys are fast!  They move as fast as a fast healthy guy.  I know zombie movies which show the continuous slow, plodding zombie, which never seems to tire and follows you everywhere (and who will eventually catch up with you, even though you are running and it's shuffling) are more popular with most horror fans.  I however prefer these rabid, fast scuttling guys.  The 'infected' that you quite simply will never outrun (unless you're in training for the next Olympics).  So back to the research lab.  One of the activists is, of course, bitten by a very angry chimp and is immediately infected (yes, that's another thing I should have added, infection is immediate).  The activist in turn infects every human in the room and so it starts.

So I've told you where it came from, how it came to be and what we have running loose, what next?  As the movie progresses, we find out that the infection has spread throughout the entire UK.  Most people are either dead, infected or have left the UK.  There have however been reports of infection in other countries also.   To bring the title into play, our main character, Jim (played by Cillian Murphy - him of the bluest of eyes in an early feature role) has just woken up in a hospital in London 28 days after the initial outbreak of infection.  He has been unconscious following an accident where he was knocked off his bicycle (he is a courier).   As Jim leaves the completely abandoned hospital, we see the movies most iconic scenes.  The one's which make the hairs stand up on your arms.  The one's where you ask yourself "How the hell did they manage that?"   So many people asked themselves how this movies director managed to grind London not only to a halt, but to make it appear completely abandoned and desolate, that it's a question in Google if you type part of the question in.  We hear a wonderfully haunting piano play as Jim walks around London landmark after landmark, to nothing... nobody.  Flyers looking for missing relatives are pinned up in Piccadilly Circus covering entire surfaces.  The air of complete desolation and loneliness is palpable.

The movie follows Jim as he discovers his parents have committed suicide rather than suffer the inevitable infection.   He meets up with other survivors and tries to work out where to go and what to do.  Where is safe?  Something he does learn very early on, is that no matter how much someone means to you or how attached you are, if they become infected, you must immediately kill them.  The first killing of this nature is quite horrific and brutal.

Eventually Jims little team of survivors hear a pre-recorded radio broadcast from the army in Manchester, promising a safe haven. They claim to have a cure to the infection, so Jim and his compatriots set off to Manchester and here we have another piece of amazing footage - a massive expanse of the M1 completely deserted but for the car of our team making their way north.

I don't want to give away much more in case anyone reading (who am I  kidding?) wants to watch it. Needless to say the army camp isn't all it's cracked up to be and we see nastiness, torture and abuse of women, something not entirely out of place in a war situation in the real world and perfectly illustrated here.  Even with all the gore, death and mutilation, it is still the manner in which the women are treated that makes me feel most sick.  It's as if man has lost its last vestiges of humanity.

I'm not going to give any more away or hint towards it being a good or bad ending.  It's an ending.  To be fair, for me, I felt the movie started out much better than it continued and ended.  It lost it's oopmh a bit for me.  Even though I think the movie could have been better, it was still an entertaining watch, so a Recommended from me.