28 Days Later 2002

A man wakes up in an abandoned hospital, to realize that the world has been taken over by zombies.Well that’s a story we all know? Just turn on the TV and of you go with the Walking Dead. However, 28 days later was released in 2002, it plays in London, and even though everybody is absolutely positive about it being a Zombie movie, it is actually never said they are Zombies. In contrary, we don’t have living deads, or walkers or what you want to call them, but actually an epidemic! Scientists searched for a cure for range (which as the prolog to the movie reveals leads to our typical destructive behavior, such as riots, fighting, looting, etc. However something goes wrong and instead we get a Virus that enhances rage in a way that the being is transferred into a state of full, pure, unconditional and extremely enhanced rage that makes the being irrational and let them lust for blood and flesh. And by being bitten you get infected too - so yeah, basically Zombies. But the focus lies on the Virus that is in the blood, so even a drop of blood into any body opening and you get infected too, in just seconds.

We start with nearly soundless scenes, the quietness is depressing and horrifying, the camera has a number of cuts to show in different perspectives the vast emptiness and loneliness of this situation. We then get to see the empty London, the totally abandoned and our main character making sense of it. Even with this entry scene we get a sense of how ingenious this movie is - the great camera work consisting of many cuts from the same scene that give us the feeling of being lost, the fast pace, the great pictures and the absolutely fabulous use of great music - from starting soundless, to a very slow and quiet music that nearly is just a beat, to the build up that is somewhat absolutely dramatic and hits when it hints the main character of what has actually happened. We get a number of these, and even though we are reminded all the time that this actually is a low budget movie by the quality, you also get a feel that here someone is making a movie that knows what he is doing and that creates great thrilling scenes and enthralling story lines regardless of the money.

Also the actors are great - we have the till then unknown actor Cillian Murphy who has his break-through and will later be seen in high-profile movies such as Christopher Nolans Dark Knight Trilogy, as well as Inception, Transcendence and lately Free Fire and Dunkirk. Naomie Harris as the female lead was also unknown till then and also her career skyrocketed afterwards, with roles such as two Pirates of the Caribbean-Movies, as well as in the new James Bond movies (Skyfall and Spectre), Southpaw, Moonlight and the coming Jungle Book. Other actors chose different career paths, such as Megan Burns who is now the lead of a rock band. However even she does great in the movie. And a few stars could also be acquired, such as Brendan Gleeson. So all in all we have a great cast of unknown actors who did so well that afterwards they where considered for all the big movies in Hollywood.

So great music, great camera, great actors - what about the style and story? You would probably file this movie under horror. However, it has elements of a lot of different subgenres - there is the apocalyptic movie aspect, there is a road movie aspect, and then we have something of an revenge thriller at the end. Further more interesting, we have different aspects of the rage idea - on the one hand we have the zombies who are the extreme regarding rage - on the other hand we have our main character, who is actually a pretty decent guy - the one that comes back for you even if it means to risk his own life, and who in doubt would always help. On the other hand, we have the female lead who is full of rage and heartlessly butchers everyone down even for the slightest doubt of him being effected. And we have that turning point, where she gains hope while in the same time he gains rage (the revenge part of the movie) and this is important because otherwise the group would have been lost. 

So if you want, you can start asking philosophical questions (and yes, there are scientists who did and who quote this movie for their assessments) about whether and to what degrees rage is good or bad.

So in the end considering all the aspects, this movie is ingeniously great and this is actually a low budget flick; for me this is a 9/10

I am really surprised at how average this movie is. I had heard that it's a favorite of a lot of critics and moviegoers alike. Outside of the impressive shots of a deserted London, there was nothing here that stood out much at all.

The story was nothing new. Perhaps if I had seen it when it was released, I might have thought it to be exceptional. The "zombies" or those affected by the "rage" virus were speedy, and the almost stopwatch accuracy of infection were different twists on the Romero "Dead" movies of horror lore, but really this isn't that overwhelming. Maybe it's because zombies aren't my favorite Horror threats.

The movie was loaded with annoying quick cuts and super close-in shots of the action. It was tough to decipher just what was going on. I watched this on Blu-Ray and maybe the format accentuated the film grain more than it should have. It got distracting. The lack of scares was surprising as well. I watched this alone in a darkened room and it didn't put me on edge in the least.

I've spent most of my time knocking this movie and I think it's because it was so highly recommended. Even after all of my griping, it's clearly better than the majority of Horror films that have hit the theaters over the last decade.

I actually think that this film has ridden the test of time pretty well. Yes, some of the dialogue and camera work isn't top-notch, but it's also not terrible, and really doesn't detract from the overall excellent quality of the film itself. Like everyone else who's commented on this post, the first time I watched 28DL I also thought that they were zombies. However, they are not. Zombies are - in every other depiction ever - people who have died and then been reanimated, hence the term "undead". In 28DL "the Infected" are NOT dead, they are living people that get infected with a mutated virus that - like Covid-19 - gets spread contagiously via bodily fluids such as saliva when people sneeze/cough into other people's faces or open-mouth-kiss them, bite them hard enough to break skin, or else via contaminated blood. The virus heightens their rage levels way beyond controllable levels, inhibiting nearly all reason or logical thought. Hellfire, it's even called "The 'Rage' Virus" by the scientists that created it! It does the precise opposite of what it was apparently supposed to do, which was inhibit rage. So they are not undead zombies, they are living people possessed of uncontrollable, murderously psychotic rage. They also do not eat the flesh of their victims.

All of the above info is provided in the film itself, as I discovered when I watched it for the second time this Halloween.
More detailed information about the exact nature of the Infected can be found at https://28dayslater.fandom.com/wiki/The_Infected

One thing's for sure though, these Infected rage machines were fast, relentless and vicious. If the zombies in "The Walking Dead" had instead been the Infected from 28 Days Later, everyone would have died within the space of a couple of years at the very most. There would have none of the 'covering yourself in blood to fool them into thinking you're one of them' / herding them en-masse to attack enemy settlements, people surviving on their own for months whilst living off the land / pretty much anything else that ever happened in TWD, where it was possible to easily outrun and outsmart the walkers. Perhaps it would have been better if they had been like in 28DL as it might have encouraged the few who did survive to actually work together against a common existential threat, rather than the only existential threats being from other survivors, most of the time. The only disadvantage of 28DL Infected is that they don't eat anything, so will eventually die of starvation, whereas TWD walkers, being already (un)dead, will last more or less indefinitely if left alone, until the ravages of nature and time eventually cause them to disintegrate.

A true zombie movie that maybe inspired 'The Walking Dead' comics slightly and paid homage to many of this films inspirations like the '78 'Dawn of the Dead' and others in the 'of the Dead' series. It stands on its own two feet though. With a solid cast and performances, it brings life to a movie that has sadly aged badly due to its cinematography and filter of grittiness that really shows off its early 2000s-esk style.

Through my first viewing several years ago, I found this movie boring and basically okay. But after rewatching it I found it gripping for both its intense moments and character study it leaves you with. As a zombie movie that focuses on character phycology over gore and action, it felt refreshing after having binged the 'Resident Evil' series and a verity of other zombie flicks over the years.

But as I said before, the cinematography as a lot to be desired, but indie horror in the early 2000s wasn't really high-budget for setting and film. As it looks like they spent their money on a star cast. With Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston it really used its cast well. As they all gave terrific performances.

For a fan of different takes on a tired genre, it really made an impression on me from my second viewing. Taking me to a place I didn't know I wanted to explore, with the mindset of survivors and the corruption that follows.

Danny Boyle rethinks the zombie subgenre, modernizing several of its sillier conventions to create a more pressing, lethal threat. 28 Days Later doesn't discard the pertinent bits - movies about the undead have long depicted desperate survivors as an equal or greater danger - but instead sharpens the axe, so to speak, by cutting out all the shuffling and moaning about brains. These monsters are aggressive, athletic and sharp-witted, an overpowering physical peril that should be evaded, not confronted.

That's not the only thing that feels different. One of the first major films to go all-digital, it still comes across as unusually intimate and street-level, especially in comparison to its more refined, traditional big-budget contemporaries. We've seen empty cities and abandoned highways before, but never with such a pervasive sense of stark, haunting reality. Early scenes of an abandoned, wind-swept downtown London, littered with trash and eerily silent, are a major highlight; a chillingly effective method to set the stage without an overwrought narrative explanation.

This is a film that excels at such tension - its constant sense of imminence is delicious - even after the enemy changes faces in the third act. A few awkward pieces hold it back from achieving loftier heights (I really didn't need the hammy exposition of the prologue, nor the tacked on feel-good ending), but it's still a daringly effective, and necessary, step forward for the whole category.