Eventually they encounter two other survivors: A big, genial man named Frank ( Brendan Gleeson) and his teenage daughter Hannah ( Megan Burns). Good-hearted Jim would probably have died if he hadn't met her. Selena becomes the dominant member of the group, the toughest and least sentimental, enforcing a hard-boiled survivalist line.
Not that we are thinking much about evolution during the movie's engrossing central passages. I think the movie's answer to this objection is that the "rage virus" did not evolve in the usual way, but was created through genetic manipulation in the Cambridge laboratory where the story begins. 10" in our minds at one crucial moment (b) it eliminates the standard story device where a character can keep his infection secret and (c) it requires the quick elimination of characters we like, dramatizing the merciless nature of the plague.ĭarwinians will observe that a virus that acts within 20 seconds will not be an efficient survivor the host population will soon be dead-and along with it, the virus. That 20-second limit serves three valuable story purposes: (a) It has us counting "12. (Mark: "OK, Jim, I've got some bad news.") Selena, a tough-minded black woman who is a realist, says the virus had spread to France and America before the news broadcasts ended if someone is infected, she explains, you have 20 seconds to kill them before they turn into a berserk, devouring zombie. Wandering London, shouting (unwisely) for anyone else, he eventually encounters Selena ( Naomie Harris) and Mark ( Noah Huntley), who have avoided infection and explain the situation. Jim is the everyman, a bicycle messenger whose nearly fatal traffic accident probably saves his life. Spend enough money on this story, and it would have the depth of " Armageddon." Alex Garland's screenplay develops characters who seem to have a reality apart from their role in the plot-whose personalities help decide what they do, and why.
The audience wouldn't stand for everybody being dead at the end, even though that's the story's logical outcome.ĭirector Danny Boyle ("Train-spotting") shoots on video to give his film an immediate, documentary feel, and also no doubt to make it affordable a more expensive film would have had more standard action heroes, and less time to develop the quirky characters. I suppose movies like this have to end with the good and evil characters in a final struggle. The ending is disappointing-an action shoot-out, with characters chasing one another through the headquarters of a rogue Army unit-but for most of the way, it's a great ride. In the end, it's clear even a bit of natural rage can be as lethal as one that's wiped out a country.So opens "28 Days Later," which begins as a great science fiction film and continues as an intriguing study of human nature. He's no longer the clueless newcomer to a world gone mad, but a savage willing to do anything to survive. Even more intriguingly, though, Jim's actions from here on show that he's capable of being as vicious as the infected. From here, we move to "Day of the Dead"-style territory, as the presumedly controlled threat shows that, in fact, it can't be tamed. This reflects the classic trope of a villain's plan backfiring, as Major West has kept Mailer to "try and understand them," not realizing he's quite literally kept the demise of his operation in his own backyard. Vastly outnumbered, Jim returns to save his friends using infected soldier, Private Mailer, to cause a distraction. This moment turns the assumptions of the zombie movie-loving audiences upside-down, because while it means the characters are stuck with the familiar isolation you expect to be present in post-apocalyptic tales, their situation is given the gut-wrenching twist: Jim is stuck in a living nightmare, and it takes only a look up to realize the rest of the world is ignoring it completely.