The Long Road

06/30/2003 Archived Entry: "28 Days Later"

Here are some end-of-the-world type movies: Deep Impact, The Stand, Reign of Fire, and 12 Monkeys.

Deep Impact was a pretty good film, but I felt that the movie ended where things were starting to get interesting. The film shows us the end of the world with a large number of people being put safely away in underground tunnels. The lives of those who are saved is what I think would make a good film, to see how they adapt to subterranean life and, eventually, how they would restart society with most of humanity destroyed.

The Stand showed quite a bit of post-apocalyptic reconstruction but it was all very shallow and dumbed-down. The whole God vs. The Devil plot I found very uninteresting, cheesy, and silly. More on the workings of how people cope with the loss of 99% of the world’s population would have made it a better film (never read the book).

On the other hand, we have Reign of Fire which did a great job of showing what a small band of humans would be reduced to to survive after the end of the world. Star Wars becoming oral tradition is incredibly forward thinking in contrast to Star Trek where only stuff from the 30’s is “classic”. My problem with Reign of Fire though is that the whole concept of Dragons becoming the Top of the food chain is so cool that the movie sorta falls flat cause I was really really really really wanted to see Dragons battling tanks and helicopters to take over the world instead of seeing what the world would be like after Dragons took it over.

Anyways, so that’s where I stand on movies about post-apocalyptic life. I want to see one where rebuilding human society is given some serious thought and is the main focus of the film. This brings us to 28 Days Later. I didn’t know much about this movie, just that it’s about some guy who wakes up 28 days after some virus kills most of the people in England (and maybe the world). I was pretty hopeful that this would be a good film about coping with such drastic things. Then I heard it was a “scary movie” and had zombies in it. So I was all “oh my god… another Resident Evil… great”, so I wasn’t too enthusiastic about it anymore.

Turns out the movie is more about people than zombies! YEESSS! The people in this movie are in such an extreme situation that some of things they do are vicious, completely repulsive, and yet…they basically have no choice. What’s nice is that we see 3 sorts of people in this world, those who just wander around trying to get by on a day-to-day basis, those who’ve hunkered down waiting for something to happen, and those that have a plan to start over and have a society again. That’s what I wanted to see: methods of survival, people pushed to limits, survival instincts kicking in.

So ya, this movie isn’t really about zombies…they’re there but more because they’re necessary as part of the environment these people are in. These zombies aren’t really zombies in the living-dead kind of sense, they’re people infected with a Rage Virus. The zombie effects are pretty cool too; they’re not overdone in the Resident Evil way, but they’re more like very angry, feral looking people. One thing I don’t understand about zombies, especially these ones, is why they never attack each other. Meh.

The film has an interesting look to it; it’s a very grainy, blurry look. This is very different from the highly polished gloss of tradition Hollywood movies. Maybe the look is to convey the degradation of society. You know… like…they live in low tech world now so we’ll use a low tech look for the film. The action scenes are even MORE blurry! They’re shot so up close and the camera spins around so quickly that the confusion in all the action is shot so confusingly that I ended up pretty confused by what was going on. Maybe that’s what they were going for?

For being smarter than most zombie movies, I give 28 Days Later 8/10

Replies: 4 comments

I wasn't really sure what to expect from it from the trailers I've seen but I think I'll look forward to renting it at some point.

Posted by Romer @ 06/30/2003 09:29 PM EST

For a good post-apocalyptic read, get “Y: The Last Man” by Brian K. Vaughn. It’s about what happens to this guy after a virus kills everything else on Earth with a Y chromosome. It’s incredibly well thought out and intelligent and not what you immediately think it is…you know what I’m talking about.

Posted by Rayne @ 07/02/2003 04:45 PM EST

wow. i remember thinking from the trailers that they showed me nothing, and i had no idea what to expect from this movie. now i have an idea. and man, i really wish i didn't. seeing movies where i have no idea what it's about is so much more fun.

oh, and i was given some 28 days later stuff on saturday when i bought some stuff at the comic book shoppe on bank street. the poster and thingy-thing are currently in thai's office.

when i say thingy-thing, i mean... a rubber circle, thin as paper, that would stick to a smoth surface, like glass. it's like a sticker, but stickes imply having a sticky tape-like side... this has no such side, it's just rubber/plastic stuff.

Posted by shawnathan @ 07/03/2003 03:14 PM EST

You should stop reading what I write about movies...its bound to ruin it for you. The title of the entry is always the title of the movie so you should know better!

Posted by Rayne @ 07/05/2003 12:35 AM EST