Danny Boyle is 62 flavors of awesome. I'm not going to list those 62 flavors, as I don't know what they are, but trust me, the man's work is all you need to focus on. When I found out that the director of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave was going to be doing a plague movie, I dragged my ass out of my recliner and packed it into a cramped theatrical seat with a bucket of popcorn bigger than the stomach I'd be cramming it into, and a gallon of Diet Coke that cost more than a keg of beer. I'm talking quality beer too, not the trailer park piss-in-a-can shite. If just attaching Mr. Boyle's moniker to a horror flick is enough to get a notoriously anti-social creature like me to wade through the teeming masses and suffer through the horror of a Saturday afternoon theater crowd and spend half a day's wages on an onslaught of empty calories and enough soda to shorten the life of his teeth by a good 8 months, you know it's gotta be something special... and all for a measly eight mil.
In an effort to find a pharmaceutical cure to anger, a London (as in England) based group of scientists first create a synthetic rage virus that makes a gang of test apes into psychotic berserkers so that they can throw together this Super Valium. Well, before they get the chance to finish up their Super Valium a posse of shithead animal activists break into the lab and set the beasties free, not bothering to do their homework first and find out exactly what it is their furry little friends are carrying. Then again, you gotta place a healthy chunk of the blame on the scientists too, considering they not only created a virus that infects its host with unbridled rage, but THEY MADE IT HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS... by Osiris, I hope real-life scientists dicking around with this type of shit aren't so terrifyingly incompetent. Big brains do not equal common fucking sense...
Of course this leads to a massive outbreak under which London is turned into a post-Apocalyptic wasteland while places like Manchester are just one citywide inferno. Our focus is 28 days after the outset of the plague (yes, we have a title!). The streets are barren, cars are abandoned in the streets, and thousands of abandoned newspapers are gently carried across the sidewalks by a stiff breeze coming from just off camera. In an abandoned hospital somewhere, comatose bike messenger Jim (and his penis), played by Batman Begins and Red Eye villain Cillian Murphy (and his penis), returns to the land of the conscious just in time to have no idea what the fuck is going on. With no one around to keep up his hygiene for him, Jim has grown quite the mangy looking grove of facial fleece. He's also left to yank out his own tubes (the catheter alone is the stuff of nightmares), dig up some scrubs (I hate Zach Braff), and figure out where the Hell everybody went off to. For some reason he finds the streets absolutely bare... I guess that despite being infected with a virus that makes you insanely with violent rage, the plague victims not only still need to sleep, but have created a socially acceptable time for everyone to sleep? Don't get me wrong, it works for dramatic purposes to see Jimmy Dean strolling the naked streets of early morning London, but you'd think the infected wouldn't stop rampaging. Are there levels of their anger? Do they rage and smash shit all day, looking for uninfected to spread the infection to, then head to bed when they tire out? And when they wake up, do they start the day off in a state of absolute rage, or do they have to grab some coffee first and work up to a full head of hate steam like the rest of us do? Finally, why do the infected only attack non-infected? If they're driven by blind, violent rage, why don't they just beat each other to bloody pulps too? Is this a metaphor for egocentric groups who only lash out and attack people who are different than themselves, like religious extremists or hillbillies/Republicans? Sorry if I'm coming down too critical and nitpicky here, but sometimes the rational mind kicks on the walls of my skull until I let it say its piece.
Despite all the noise he's been making up to this point (shouting "Helloooo!" and setting off car alarms), our hero finds nobody. Eventually Jim comes upon a church, which leads to one of the movie's most stand-out sequences as he enters to find the floor of the building littered with bodies. As soon as he says "Hello?" though, two of the bodies rise at attention like animals catching a whiff of something in the air, staring with gaping mouths and wide eyes locked on him. You hear a sound like someone running elsewhere in the building, when suddenly a pair of doors are thrown open near Jim Bob and an infected priest appears, twitching and obviously off his fucking pew. An intense chase breaks out and Jim's chased through the streets like a gay Muslim man in the middle of Houston. He's saved by a pair of Molotov hurling peeps in gas masks named Mark and Selena who catch our man up on all the happenings while he was out. Jim goes through the inevitable "but my family could still be alive!" phase of denial, which promptly ends when he finds mom and dad dead in their bed, the big sleep brought on by a bottle of red and pills of white. From here it's a search for survivors and a way out of town. Meanwhile, I guess the rest of the world is just leaving England to implode in on itself... or they're still too preoccupied with trying to work political alchemy by turning a cauldron of shit into barrels of gold... or oil, whatever’s got the higher price tag these days. You know how it is, when George Bush wants something it’s all, “I love you Tony Blair, you know I love you baby. Don’t you love me?”, but once he’s got what he wants it turns into “Oh, I want to return the favor Big T, but I got a dentist appointment in the morning and you don’t want me going in with that on my breath, ya know? Good night baby. Love you!” It’s sad really.
Beyond the physical confrontations that come with surviving in a world of crazed infectious monsters, our heroes go through a moral struggle too. Salena's determined to look out for herself and leave behind anyone who will slow her down, killing any and all infected along the way, whether they be little kids, old people, or her own family. Meanwhile, Jim's been out of the loop since this started, so he hasn't had his emotions and sympathies burnt and picked off of him like the scorched skin of a marshmallow. He still has hope that something can be done, that the otherwise innocent people don't need to be killed in all this madness, and that anyone still alive deserves to be helped so they can continue doing so. Along the way, the good guys pick up the surprisingly jolly father and daughter duo of Frank and Hannah, and given that this is a Danny Boyle flick and therefore not about to end on a happy note, you can pretty much bet your briskets that one or the other won't be sucking wind by the time the end credits roll... The gang picks up a broadcast from an military outpost beyond the city limits who say they have "the answer to infection". So, they pack into a taxi and head for the hills... surprisingly enough finding little-to-no resistance from the throngs of infected that are supposed to be crawling all over the place as they're driving through the streets. In one of the three alternate endings to the movie, the message was originally going to lead them to the abandoned facility where the plague started from and a lackluster cure was in fact discovered. Instead, the crew decided there were too many problems with this ending, so they scrapped it and went with the military outpost idea. Sticking with the cinematic fallback that military personnel are all self-centered pricks who only know how to kill and take what they want from people weaker than themselves, I'll leave it up to you to guess where the rest of the movie takes us from here.
For a movie that sounds like it's either about a woman's menstrual cycle or a sequel to the Sandra Bullock abortion 28 Days, anyone who doesn't look at the description first is in for a lot more blood than they bargained for... then again, given those other two options for a movie titled 28 Days Later, that might not be so true... Anyway, despite all the action, this is one hell of a horror movie. The general consensus for plague movies is usually one of two themes: a super virus that kills people or an infection that turns people into the shuffling undead. Believe me, I didn't forget such memorable plague flicks as Return of the Living Dead or City of the Walking Dead that bucked tradition and went for something a little more overwhelming, like infected dead who could still hoof it just as good as any nominally healthy twenty-something, but 28 Days Later presents it in such a severe and realistic sense that you fear something like this could actually happen. Imagine if, instead of crippling your immune system and leaving you open to rot from the inside out thanks to common illnesses, HIV instead turned you into an unintelligent engine of destruction set on nothing but mauling everyone in sight, including friends and family, and vomiting your diseased blood on them, spreading the epidemic further. Now throw in the violent anal bleeding of something like Ebola and you get what I'm trying to say. Pretty freaky, right? Of course this isn't some kind of Republican spook tactic to make you shit your pants and take up your shotguns in preparation to kill off people with AIDS, it's just a "what if?" scenario to show how horrific this movie really is if you think about it. It gives you chills to think that people can put together an artificial version of Polio with items snagged off of eBay, let alone what a few morally bankrupt individuals with big brains can do on a military budget... Thank you Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (the writer, sorry I didn't mention him earlier), for filling my nightmares up with something other than zombies and man-eating eyeball creatures from Venus. Jerks.
Beyond the concept, the execution of the movie is what'll really knock you on your ass. There are so many spectacular shots of the city, the countryside, and just generally visually infectious images, all accompanied by an intense, emotionally wracked soundtrack. Because the whole thing's shot on cheaper, digital handi-cam format instead of film though, there's also an added "washed out" quality to the movie that, despite the happy parts, always reminds us that there's depression and suffering standing right outside of those happy moments, no doubt having sex with all the happy moments' stuffed animals, burning all their photos of family trips to Disneyland and eating all their Skittles. I'd rather give Danny Boyle $150 million to make 20 movies than waste it on Michael Bay pinching out one useless log of special effects laden Hollywood bullshit.
