28 Days Later

People give me really funny looks when I tell them that 28 Days Later is one of my favorite movies. So I'm going to spend some time defending this intelligent modern zombie movie. (spoilers, in case you want to watch it. but if you don't, maybe this will make you interested in it :))

The cinematography is not your run of the mill Hollywood shoot-em-up flick. It's art. When the main character wakes up, 28 days after he got hit by a car and went into a coma, he can't find anyone. London is empty. He wanders around the city for awhile and walks into the main part of a church. The camera shows us that the pews are filled with dead bodies, or so we think at first. The bodies, in the lighting and the colors, reflect the stain-glass window perfectly above them. Something about the similarities between the church and the dead bodies gives us a thrill of cosmic terror. There are interesting shots like this one throughout the movie, that allow the movie to rise above Dawn of the Dead and others like it.

The story, portrayed by great actors, is also much more interesting than a regular old zombie movie. A group of four people get together in the story and hear a radio announcement that says that there is a group of military men who say that they have a cure to the rage-infection that has swept London. So the group heads to the military base, only to find a group of men that bother us from the beginning. Something just seems wrong about them. Again, this is nicely done--subtly, so we're really not sure if we're imagining it. Until we find out that the commander feels that he should let his men rape the 20something year old women and the 13 year old girl that are part of the group we've been following. He tells us that, after only 28 days, he feels that they need to feel they have a future, and a future means women and continuing the race. The main character does not agree, and so they arrange to have him killed. He escapes, however, and when he does he sees an airplane. That's it. Just a shot of an airplane. Subtle. And then we know that the apocalypse is not really one after all. It cannot have reached the whole world if he's seeing an airplane. And he goes back to save the girls anyway. He ends up fighting one of the military men to get him off of the girls. He's so enraged by their behavior, that the girls wonder if he has been infected by the rage-virus when he brutally kills one of the military men. The symbolism is interesting in that this group survives all the zombies, only to meet the true threat: other people. When even the main character seems like he could be as violent as one of the zombies, we see the darker truth the film is telling us: there's a blood-thirsty part in all of this. This movie is intelligent in that it is reflecting real, human problems by using the zombie genre.