This is followed in short order by an effective character building sequence in which the protagonists enjoy a picnic while ruminating about what, if anything, the future might hold. One sequence in particular - in which Jim and Frank race to change a tire while a band of infected relentlessly approach - generates as much tension as any other 2003 motion picture. Several scenes in which the infected attack are genuinely creepy. When Boyle wants to shock us, he has no trouble doing so. The film's "villains" have credible reasons for acting as they do, and the ending doesn't feel cheap or false. The situation is crafted in a way that seems almost plausible, and, once it establishes the rules, never cheats. The movie develops Jim, Selena, Frank, and Hannah into believable individuals. In fact, one of the things that sets this movie apart from many similar cinematic endeavors is its focus on characters rather than action. The film contains one significant twist, and Boyle adeptly blends elements of horror and drama with the science fiction. The second half is a more straightforward action/adventure. The first half of 28 Days Later is a road movie, as Jim and his companions make their way from London to Manchester using deserted highways and facing nearly constant attacks from roving bands of the infected. Soon, the humans are joined by a middle-aged man, Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his teenage daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns), and they elect to seek out a group of soldiers, led by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston), who claim to have the answer to the infection. They inform him of what has happened, and, after it sinks in, Jim decides to visit his parents' house. When he is attacked by one of the infected – a slavering, red-eyed, feral human being whose only desire is to draw blood, his life is saved by Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley). Befuddled and disbelieving, he staggers into the streets and finds London to be deserted. Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens in an empty hospital where he has been laid up, unconscious, since before the calamity struck. The movie opens with a brief prologue that explains the start of the plague (a misguided group of animals' rights activists release contaminated monkeys), then jumps ahead 28 days to a drastically changed world. And Boyle touches upon such potentially weighty matters as the fundamental difference between man and beast, and whether human beings are natural killers. The living are divided into two categories: the infected, who are more like mindless zombies than human beings, and the survivalists, who eschew making plans, realizing that "staying alive is as good as it gets." The allegorical nature of the movie is impossible to miss. Armed with a screenplay written by Alex Garland, Boyle's vision of humanity's twilight has mankind wiped out not by fire, brimstone, and nuclear fallout, but by disease. In fact, one of the most common science fiction subgenres (which gained popularity during the early Cold War era of the 1950s) is that of the post-apocalyptic survivor - an individual who lives through some kind of catastrophe (often a nuclear war) and must make his way through the hostile environment that exists in its wake.ĭanny Boyle, the director of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, has brought his off-center perspective to this story. And, since almost the beginning of science fiction, the apocalypse has been a popular subject. No less an authority than the Bible devotes entire books to the last days. The end of the world has always simultaneously fascinated and repulsed human beings.
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