Directrospective: 28 DAYS LATER (2002)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
Bike messenger Jim (Cillian Murphy) enjoying some social distancing.
Every movie is about COVID now, whether we like it or not. New ones, old ones. Movies about confinement, paranoia, mistrust, government malfeasance, loneliness, anxiety, boredom - these are about how we feel living with COVID. Movies about joy, community, friendship, love, hope, trust, restaurants, going to work, going to the store, going outside - these are about COVID the same way that THE RULES OF THE GAME is about World War II. Then there are just movies about living in a virus world. This is a really good one of those.
Smarting from the back-to-back boofs of A LIFE LESS ORDINARY and THE BEACH, Danny Boyle returned to television films for a while, one assumes to reconnect with his roots as a down-and-dirty English filmmaker of English films. He forged a real creative partnership on these TV movies, it turns out, with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and got a feel for the flexibility and verité authenticity afforded by new digital video cameras.
Having mucked up his generally well-liked novel with THE BEACH but apparently being pretty cool about it, Boyle worked again with writer Alex Garland, this time from Garland’s own original screenplay about a virus that turns people into fast-moving zombie-like maniacs. For the first time, Boyle would make a theatrical film without writer John Hodge, and one where his lead characters’ predicament isn’t explicitly of their own selfish making. He also did it with somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the budget of THE BEACH, in the neighborhood of two to three SHALLOW GRAVEs.
28 DAYS LATER opens with a group of animal rights activists breaking into a research facility and liberating a chimpanzee and the rage-amplifying virus they don’t realize it’s infected with. The film’s title doubles as an expository title card, and we find bicycle messenger Jim (Cillian Murphy) alone and disoriented in the hospital bed in which he has just woken up after at least four weeks unconscious. He’s also very nude, and ups the Danny Boyle Career Dong Count thus far to four. Jim wanders around an eerily deserted London - which desertion I did not realize I would so quickly come to miss here in who-cares-about-the-pandemic U.S.A. - until he’s chased by some zombies and then rescued by battle-hardened survivors Selena (Naomi Harris) and Selena’s friend whom she’ll have to machete to death in the next couple of scenes. They help Jim understand what’s going on and teach him about how his parents are dead - mercifully, we learn, having split a bottle of sleeping pills together rather than get infected. The old world is gone, Selena tells him, and you can’t have attachments anymore. Caring for anyone will just make it harder for you to machete them to death when they get bit by a rage zombie.
Jim’s not convinced of that last part, and they make their way to an apartment block where some survivors are making their presence known. There they meet Frank (Brendan Gleeson), a widower who has been trying to preserve something like normal life for his teen daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). But they’re running out of supplies, and Frank’s picked up a military radio broadcast urging survivors to head to Manchester. They do a little smash-and-grab shopping spree - the rare moment of indulgence as transcendent here as it is in DAWN OF THE DEAD - and take Frank’s taxi on the road. To Selena’s great horror, they all start to care for each other quite a bit.
It turns out Boyle’s native Manchester is entirely on fire and the broadcast was coming from a blockade outside the city. Despite all their efforts, Frank gets infected via the same stupid bullshit that I assume will give me COVID when an asymptomatic mask-denier’s brunch sneeze particle floats into my eyeball as I walk out of the pharmacy, and some soldiers show up out of nowhere to riddle him with bullets. It sucks! Frank was a nice guy!
These guys are not nice. They’re a bunch of horny morons led by Major West (SHALLOW GRAVE’s Christopher Eccleston), whose broadcast is actually designed to lure women to Manchester so he can have his moron squad rape them to repopulate the Earth. Ugly business, he knows, but he’s convinced that saving humanity sometimes requires one to be monstrous. Selena tries to give Hannah enough drugs to preserve her sanity - turns out she does care - but before the soldiers can begin their assault, Jim taps into his own rage and sets a chained-up zombie loose on them. He very nearly gets blown away himself before Selena realizes he’s not infected, just a little nuts. They escape and make a comfortable little domestic life in the countryside. Compassion wins out in the end. It also turns out that the rest of the world just let England go to shit rather than let the whole planet get zombified (sounds familiar), and some foreign jets fly over our gang’s big “HELLO” sign. Happy ending.
Faced with the dissolution of society, 28 DAYS LATER shows two competing responses, fittingly in line Boyle’s pet themes of self-interest and selflessness. One can shut out empathy in the interest of self-preservation, like Major West has and Selena has tried to, and end up losing just as much humanity as the infected have. Or, like Frank and Hannah and ultimately Selena and Jim, one can hold on to the compassion and generosity that a still-functioning society encourages, even if those don’t seem like the optimal survival strategy. Maybe it will get you killed, but at least you’ll die a human being. It’s no coincidence that Boyle and Garland’s “zombies” aren’t actually the living dead, just still-living humans stripped by a virus of everything but their most violent urges. Major West’s men aren’t too far from the rage zombies at all, and, if I may, neither are my countrymen whose individual right to do whatever they want at Costco is too precious to risk for something as mushy and frivolous as our collective well-being. Doomsday preppers always seem most excited for the part where they’re gonna get to kill people who come too close to the bunker.
The grainy digital footage of emptied-out London streets and Major West’s desperate-times strongman rationalizations felt deeply of the moment when they film came out a year after September 11, 2001. They were actually quite prescient, with most of the London section shot just before 9/11, and Boyle recalls learning of the attacks while filming the crème de menthe scene in Frank and Hannah’s apartment. It all feels even more prescient now, of course, living through a genuine pandemic, but also a bit naïve. Of course powerful men would use the crisis to seize more power, government response would be inadequate, and individual efforts to stay safe would be foolish and short-sighted. The part they failed to predict is where everyone got bored and tried to go back to normal with zombies still running around snarling blood.