28 Days Later is a movie we've all seen several times before, with a story that will be familiar to anyone with a even a passing famililatiy with science fiction film, TV shows, or literature. Although it's not a bad movie, it is a pointless one. There was no reason for this film to exist.
The film opens with shades of The Omega Man. A young man named Jimmy (Cillian Murphy) awakes at a London hospital. It is clear he has surgery on his head recently. He walks through a completely deserted London until he comes upon two people in gas masks. There names are Selena (Naomie Harris) and Clifton (Luke Maybe), and they explain what's going on. Twenty eight days earlier, a strange virus called The Rage began to spread. The Rage causes its victims to go berserk and become little more than homicidal zombies, it is incurable and has only a twenty second incubation period. Infection is spread by the blood or saliva of an infected person entering the body. Nearly the entire population of Britain has either become zombies or been killed by them. This is the new reality that Jimmy must become accustomed to, as a small group of people who managed to avoid the plague sets out for Manchester, where an automated beacon promising a cure is being broadcast.
Writing about my objections to this film is difficult, sense it makes it sound worse than it actually is. The film is too generic and ordinary to be outreight bad, and Boyle keeps things interesting, so the movie is never boring (although the movie could have used a less slick visual style). There's just really nothing to this movie that's new. We've seen the post-apocalyptic future in The Omega Man, Mad Max 2, Things to Come, 12 Monkeys, Waterworld, and on and on. We've seen the zombie stuff in countless zombie movies (although these do move a lot faster). There is no suspense in the entire film.
Murphy is one the best young actors working in movies today, but he is given nothing to do as Jimmy, who is a pretty unremarkable character. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen a science fiction film Jimmy and Selena will develop a complete obligatory romance. Perhaps instead of a usual young male protagonist, the movie might have been improved if it had focused on two characters who join the couple in their quest: a father and his teenage daughter. How would they react to the end of the world?
For me, the most surprising part of the film was the closing credits- the movie was written by Alex Garland, who wrote one of my favorite novels of all time, The Beach, which was made into a (horrible) movie by director Danny Boyle. It made me wonder: was their any reason other than the financial a brilliant novelist would turn out a completely generic script? I think you know the answer.
28 Days Later (2002)