28 DAYS LATER

5/10

UK 2002 : Danny Boyle : 100 mins

A young bicycle-courier named Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakes in hospital after an accident to find London deserted. As he wanders the abandoned streets, he discovers Britain has been ravaged by a mysterious virus that turns its victims into crazed psychotics. Among the few survivors remaining uninfected are street-wise Selena (Naomie Harris), and father-and-daughter duo Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns). Drawn by a radio announcement, the quartet make their way across country to the north-west, dodging the infected at every turn. But surprises lie in wait at their destination…

An unashamedly derivative but reasonably engaging entry into the well-worn post-apocalyptic genre of sci-fi horror, 28 Days Later reunites director Boyle with Alex Garland, the novelist behind The Beach. This is Garland’s first script written directly for the screen, and it shows – as well as various distracting basic plot-holes (where are all the rats?) the story too closely follows to its countless forebears in books and movies, especially John Wyndham’s original Day of the Triffids novel, with a resulting air of over-familiarity and predictability. No less damaging is the clunky dialogue – the hapless Harris seems to get all of the worst, most awkwardly expositional lines.

After a couple of badly-received TV movies, this is director Boyle’s first cinema feature made using Digital Video cameras – along with legendary ‘dogme’ cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, he comes up with some striking images of the city and the country. And the new medium proves surprisingly well-suited to what becomes, after the strikingly slow and eerie empty-London early stretches, a surprisingly fast-moving, intermittently gory thriller.

The latter stages, in which Jim and co meet a troop of soldiers under the patrician control of Major West (Christopher Eccleston), at times even recall the thick-ear, squaddies-v-monsters pleasures of Dog Soldiers. But this is a more accomplished picture than that rough-and-ready crowdpleaser – Boyle and Dod Mantle show an unexpected flair for action sequences that, if nothing else, keeps things moving along all the way up to a joltingly sudden, bracingly downbeat final freeze-frame… Except, sadly, it isn’t actually the end. Garland and Boyle tack on a limply optimistic coda, filmed on conventional celluloid, and it represents a crucial, fatal loss of nerve.

by Neil Young

-