28 DAYS LATER (2003)

"This is is the movie Resident Evil should have been."

- Carl Lazarevic

(5/5 Stars)

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Before I start this review I'd like to get a little rant off my chest, in order to watch this film I had to go up to the city center and watch it at a theatre that I absolutely hate going to. The place is so small, and there's a 10 minute wait between the end of the trailers and the start of the film. They constantly mess up the music that's supposed to set the mood while you wait for the film to start, and worst of all I sat on a bus for 20 minutes to get to this cinema when the biggest and best cinema in England is just a 10 minute walk from my house!

Sorry about that I just felt it was important to let you know just how much I wanted to watch this film. You see the first time I even heard about this film was when I saw the trailer at a showing of Resident Evil, (Coincidence?) and while Resident Evil was fun crap, I wanted something a lot better. I wanted something with a few half decent characters, a lot of believability and some big scares. Thankfully 28 Days Later has not disappointed and has ended up being everything Resident Evil promised before Paul Anderson took over the project. I always knew it would have been better with an English director.

The films story opens with a group of animal rights activists breaking into a lab to rescue the chimps that are being experimented on. Once inside they come into contact with one of the scientists who keeps telling them not to free the chimps because they are infected. When asked what they are infected with he simply replies "Rage". They naturally disbelieve him, since they figure he's probably just trying to stall them until security shows up, so they open the cage. Unfortunately the scientist was not lieing and the chimp attacks one of them, thus infecting her. It then skips forward 28 days as a naked man wakes up in a hospital bed, after being in a coma for 4 weeks. He is confused as to why there are no doctors around and so after getting dressed he heads outside to find London is deserted. He eventually takes refuge in a church where he finally finds some people, but they are acting very aggressively and so he has to flee for his life. He then meets up with another 2 people who reveal to him that those people were infected with a virus and that everyone else in the world has suffered the same fate.

Now while this may sound like the sequel to Resident Evil (and the opening is very reminiscent to the end of Resident Evil), what needs to be remembered is that the similarities end there. Resident Evil was a zombie movie made to appeal to the masses, it focused on the action and the Zombies were all given a CGI makeover to make the film more expensive. However with 28 Days Later the action takes second place to the tension, and while there is still a fair amount of action in the film it is always preceded with some form of build up. Before one of the infected attacks you're always treated to a few camera angles that indicate there's one around. These camera angles are every bit as unnerving as they were in the Resident Evil games as they never allow you to quite make out whats coming until it's already there. The other thing to remember though is that these angles have also been used to give the film a more realistic look. No-one is ever going to accuse Resident Evils stylistic excesses of being real and yet here everything is filmed with a much more natural feel to it. It's camera has the feel of a hand held camera, and while this film is certainly nothing like The Blair Witch Project it still has the same sort realistic feel to it that succeeds in placing you right there in the action, thus being much scarier. The difference is that unlike The Blair Witch Project, 28 Days Later does have monsters that appear on screen, so that you can be creeped out from start to finish without ever getting bored.

The thing about these monsters though is that they are far scarier than you originally expect. You've probably noticed that throughout this review I've neglected to call them zombies instead referring to them as the infected. This is the same term that the characters in the film use for them because technically they're not Zombies. For a start they are not dead, these are not creatures that have come about through the reanimation of corpses. They are humans who are still very much alive but have been driven into a perpetual state of uncontrollable rage. In this regard the infected also move differently to zombies, because while a zombie will slowly walk towards you these things are capable of running full pelt, and attacking with fearsome speed. This means that throughout the film you never quite feel like the characters are safe, because there is no warning before an attack. They don't have the comfort of hearing a groan before a creature comes slowly towards them, because when these creatures attack they can appear from nowhere and move so fast that the characters often can't defend themselves.

What you have to consider though is that when you use monsters as fierce as these it makes it necessary for your film to have a measure of violence. With this in mind I'd like to congratulate the director on the films gore level. He has certainly not been squeamish in his depiction of these events, and yet he has still managed to keep it all tasteful by not going over the top like the zombie movies of the past. He never focuses in on something violent but instead allows it all to happen just out of the camera's view (similar to the technique employed in the movie version of American Psycho). This probably has a lot to do with the natural camera angles, but it would have still been easy for him to spoil the film by showing the gore in it's full glory. I have often found that I can view the really big gore without any feeling because it always looks fake, yet the approach in this film was able to shock me. I was constantly wincing and it all works together in making the film more disturbing.