28 Days Later…
| State of body | Oddly, appears to have been stung by a weird Triffid varient. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected twice. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | Seemed on the verge of complete recovery until last minute, when subject sunk into a genre cliche and was unable to escape. |
The plot and themes of “28 Days Later…” are widely cited (at least in the movie reviews I’ve read) as being rather derivative of the “Living Dead” series, and of pilfering from a number of other zombie films for good measure (the “zombie = being bitten by a monkey” thing being a reference to Peter Jackson’s wonderfully over-the-top BrainDead).
I dunno. The strongest inspiration I could see, was John Wyndam’s novel “The Day Of the Triffids”. Which, for me, isn’t a problem at all, as I’ve been hanging out for a new adaptation of The Day of the Triffids for years. There was a 1962 film that deviated wildly from the source, and a rather good (and very faithful) British mini-series in 1981 that frightened the boogers out of me. This is a lot of boogers. I was 11.
The similarities between 28 Days Later… and The Day of the Triffids are many, but the most striking is the opening – the whole “waking up into creepy scenes of a deserted London” *is* the beginning of Day of the Triffids, and the subsequent plot plays out with many similarities, climaxing in the realisation that the zombies/triffids are not the worst of our hero’s problems, it’s the other humans. There is, therefore, very little shock when the zombies/triffids come to the ironic rescue in the end by consuming all the bad guys.
I enjoyed the movie. It fulfilled my immediate triffid/zombie needs except for actually being shown triffids. Rattle, rattle. Slap! Triffids are great. Absolutely deadly when you don’t know they’re there, dead easy to knock off when you do, so all your average 11 year old kid has to do is be extremely alert and never venture into the garden without little sisters going out first. Fantastic! Had I seen “28 Days Later…” at the age of 11, I would probably have gotten even less sleep than I did after seeing “Poltergeist” at the age of 12. After all, there’s no real plausable way for an 11 year old boy to avoid the flesh-eating angry running zombies. As soon as he sees them, they’ll see him (it’s narrative causality) and heck, he’d better have Dad’s gun and a better aim than he demonstrated on the shooting range in Scouts that year, or chomp! Slaver, slaver, slaver.
On the bright side, he knows one thing: once he gets past the first couple of bites and slavers, he will be one of them, and will therefore be safe from further attack, as the zombies don’t attack each other in 28 Days Later…
This is a little bit puzzling to my 11-year-old self. The zombies only attack uninfected humans. How do they know? Maybe – just maybe – they’re smarter than they appear. Perhaps, in fact, the virus doesn’t just stimulate the gnarrr-chomp-roarrrr-aaargh! part of the brain directly. It just gives the infected some dreadful insight into life that makes them evangelise like crazy, and it has an unfortunate side-effect of making them look really, really angry, and gives them a terrible case of red-eye. Whatever the insight is, gets its message across in about 20 seconds, ’cause that’s how long it takes to turn into one of those allegedly slavering fiends.
Unfortunately, this kind of justification, this series of alternative explanations, becomes more and more necessary as the movie progresses. Tight plotting is not its major strongpoint. Right at the beginning, after the title credits (nicely done, by the way – there is an introductary sequence that ends in a bit of a shock, then a short moment of black screen and the title comes up – the first instance I’ve ever seen of title-credits that also served as explanatory text) the main character wakes up in a hospital bed, in a London hospital, after being in a coma for 28 days, many of them probably without electricity. For some reason, however, the drip in his arm still appears full and has not gone toxic. Perhaps the hospital was only abandoned a couple of days before. Still, this doesn’t really explain why he’s naked. We may carry our indulgence a little by saying that this is standard hospital practice in London when it gets too warm.
Never mind, never mind, it’s an effective image, though it pulls the viewer straight out of the film and into that little head-space that says, first: “He’s naked!” and then “In London. He looks cold. I hope so, for the actors sake, anyway.”
Time passes, and our initial objections gradually disperse. Our ex-coma patient arises, gets dressed, does a little Pepsi product placement, and wanders the empty streets of London. Alright! Superb! Pity the video is such poor resolution. It would be fine on a TV, no doubt, but seen on a great big cinema screen? I should probably have moved further back, because I could see the scan lines for the whole thing. The red colours did that bleeding thing (oh, the dramatic resonence).
The quality of the picture kinda makes me question my own vague intentions of making a movie on DV and transferring to a film print. Oh well. Maybe my someday-full-length-film will go straight to TV anyway. On channel 32, at 3:00am. Wahoo!
So, as you can tell, I’m getting pulled out of the mood of the film on a fairly regular basis. It continues to happen throughout. The running zombies are kinda cool, but the question keeps nagging – why aren’t they eating each other? Are they smart enough to drink water, or do they suddenly not need it? Then, there’s the behaviour of the main characters. We are told early on that the virus spreads very easily indeed – through blood or saliva, both of which are in abundence when the zombies attack. And, early on, several of the characters appear to take pains to avoid this – protective eye-wear, thick clothing, in one case, full police riot-gear and a riot shield. Invariably, however, they abandon these protective measures, and often for no particularly good reason. The full police riot-gear looked like good stuff – why’d they leave it behind?
Then, there’s the uncomfortable transition of the main female character from cynical arse-kicker to ineffectual maidan in distress. Near the beginning of the film, she hacks a man to death with a machete. By the end, armed with the same machete, she stands by and does absolutely nothing while the (previously totally ineffectual) protagonist becomes a ruthless killing machine. It is certainly a valid transition to have her become more caring while he becomes more ruthless – however, it reads too closely to the kind of cop-out we expect from sheer gutlessness, something I really didn’t expect from Boyle & co.
My main objection, though, is the utter casualness with which the characters treat their situation, at times in which they really ought to be more careful. Certainly, this is a standard of horror movies, but I don’t feel it is a good one. After a point, you start saying, “Oh, go on and get bitten, see if I care. Idiot.” I think you can generate just as much tension even when the characters are as careful as they can possibly be – after all, the threat is so very severe. The film could have generated huge amounts of tension from a moment, late on in the film, in which a single drop of infected blood falls on a character’s head. As it happens, he was looking up and it goes in his eye so, bang, infected. Wouldn’t it have been rather more tense if it hadn’t infected him right away? If, instead, it had fallen on his shoulder, or his sleeve, or, I dunno, a sandwich he was eating. Then, the film-makers could have drawn out the scene with great glee – will he or won’t he get infected? Don’t touch the sandwich! Don’t wipe your brow with that sleeve! – and a moment of lovely panic when the audience realise but nobody else does that one of the characters just got infected, and they can start counting down the twenty seconds… the opportunities were there, but I thought they were kinda wasted.
The film does have plenty of good points. The idea of the zombies works very well (though it would have been nice to see exactly how they survived for so long, and why they weren’t attacking each other – perhaps the zombies only attack people who aren’t as angry-looking as them? A kind of pecking-order thing, something instinctually understood by other zombies but not by the humans – you don’t look them in the eye, there are submissive gestures you can do to appease them, or even, you assert yourself in the pecking order by being more agresssive. Perhaps these strategies don’t always work – but, as a last resort, surrounded by zombies, (for example, in the last reel…) you could at least try. It seems clear that the zombies don’t actually eat people; they bite them and then leave them be (otherwise we’d have seen many more eaten folk) so perhaps the behaviour really is akin to pack-animal stuff – a nip from everyone who you don’t pay proper deference to. And unless your agression is really, really impressive, they’ll fight you, but only to first-bite. I dunno. This would probably act to reduce the booger-scares a bit too much, but at least it’d make sense of the zombie behaviour. Even just putting in enough hints – hell, maybe they did, and I’m picking up on those hints.
It could also have done with a couple more triffids.