Hearing a radio message promising safety, the hardy band makes its way in Frank's cab to North England, where the survivors are threatened not just by roving sanguinary fiends but by their own putative saviors.įans of the zombie genre have already greeted "28 Days Later" with glee on Internet sites, extolling the film for its near-constant assault of blood, gore and morbid action.
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Together Jim and Selena try to survive while tracking down other survivors, and soon they are joined by a cheerful taxi driver named Frank (Brendan Gleason) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). He makes his way across a similarly empty London to a church, where he meets Selena (Naomie Harris), who is also uninfected. It's into this benighted world that Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakes in a trashed and deserted hospital, having been in a long coma. Within 28 days, England has become a wasteland haunted by angry red-eyed ghouls, one drop of whose blood can infect a healthy person and turn him into a red-eyed ghoul. Once the beasts are liberated, however, the context becomes clear: They've been injected with a highly contagious virus that produces murderous rage in all who become infected. Obviously the subject of some kind of test, the chimp is hooked up to a monitoring device until a group of masked activists enters the lab to free the animals. "28 Days Later" opens with a chimpanzee watching a bank of TV screens on which a series of violent images plays out.
It's "The Last Man on Earth" meets Romero's "Night of the Living Dead," with the shaky video-cam of "The Blair Witch Project" thrown in for heightened - and particularly ugly - realism. Here, Boyle exploits the salient late-20th-century theme of contagion to reimagine modern England as a post-apocalyptic necropolis. Viewers who idolize directors such as George Romero and the lesser-known Dario Argento may find merit in Danny Boyle's contemporized take on those directors' films. Blood spurts, gushes, drips, sprays and otherwise runs thick in "28 Days Later," a 21st-century version of the zombie movies of the 1960s.