“Happy the man who reads this prophecy, and happy those who listen to him, if they hold fast to all that it says – because the Time is close.”
— Revelations 1:1-3
With 28 Days Later, the Time is close, in an impending apocalyptic, Book of Revelations parable that uses even the bricks and mortar of London’s cityscape to suggest dread and terror at every turn – in an internal and external counterpoint. Director Danny Boyle continues to find resonance with marginalized characters forced to see what will win in a game of self-destruction versus modes of survival – be it emotional, spiritual or physical.
Anagrammatic as it is of previous horror archetypes, the “rage-disease” that extinguishes the UK populace at an alarming rate in 28 Days Later may as well be the heroin pandemic in Trainspotting or the quiet epidemic of greed in Shallow Grave.
In the mid-1990s, Boyle gave us pensive grit with those first two films (that took an adversarial stance with audiences, conditioned to expect a film like his latest). The critical mass was disappointed when Boyle chose two tepid follow-ups: A Life Less Ordinary and the Leonardo DiCaprio-flick The Beach – in which the only selling points were Leo’s return and how he would gel with his co-star – a bluestocking French ingénue, Virginie Ledoyen. Both films, nonetheless, fit neatly into his thematic oeuvre, whereby self-destruction and survival play seesaw. Boyle also gave us Ewan McGregor (and Christopher Eccleston if you were paying attention). With 28 Days Later, he gives us Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris and Megan Burns – a thankful combination of actors (with the addition of Brendan Gleeson) that play as a unit in this agoraphobic New Age.
Beginning with what looks like an animal-rights-watchdog allegorical stroke, a team of activists apprehends a research lab and its chief scientist, forcing him to release monkeys in bondage. Ignoring the beseeching admonitions of the would-be venal scientist, forewarning of the animals’ disease, the activists free the first monkey, only to see firsthand the type of sickness the scientist warned against, and then become infected themselves. Through the wrath of screams, and next blackness, comes Boyle’s creepily wry intertitle: 28 days later…
That’s when Jim (Murphy) wakes up in a deserted hospital, mirroring the position of some of the sick lab monkeys. It’s Boyle’s first visual clue that Darwin’s youngest species in his survival of the fittest paradigm, the hominid, is in serious peril. Jim awakes to a world of anti-population – a world whose emotional and spiritual evocation is wielded with angst-ridden-rat-race heavy metal strumming and the doom-laden, antiseptic colour patterns of Claire Denis. When Jim does find survivors in sparse amounts, they’re either deranged or paranoid – a potential post-Information Age. Wading around this semi-netherworld for less than a day, it looks a lot like man’s earliest stage of evolution when survival was the biggest tier in the pyramid, and introspection was a liability. It’s Boyle’s fleer at the Information Age, where physical survival’s place in the pyramid is smallest – a snicker at those to whom a gagging error-message online is tragedy.
As the film progresses, Boyle’s mood piece loses some of the mood, and what initially seemed plausible begins to fray. Nevertheless, Boyle resumes his antagonistic pose – and this time, with an audience that was expecting the easy resolutions of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. I could almost see Boyle’s smirk spread to a grin every time a teen viewer remarked something to the tune of, “I told you we should have seen Tomb Raider,” giving Generation Y its comeuppance with a slice of hard-to-dissolve 1980s-like, self-reflexive horror.
