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28 Days Later... I still didn't need to see male nudity:  28 Days Later...

by Christian De Matteo

HUGE

        Well... some of this was pretty frickin' gross.  Which is why I went, of course.  I was hoping for some serious gross-out, violent, brain-sucking Zombie action.  That's kind of what I got... but what kind of formula could one expect from the director of TrainSpotting and The Beach?  None... and that was cool.

        An indictment of pretty much everything human, blaming humanity for all evils on the earth and almost treating us like the Viruses the Wachoski Brothers having been trying to convince us we are in the Matrix series.  Using Zombie mythos (though never, ever uttering the term zombie) Boyle paints a desperate picture of man as his own worst enemy, sick and twisted beyond anything we could ever imagine in a supernatural realm... while giving us this lesson in a supernatural realm.

        Filming in a gritty and depressive style, the film plays like the end of time, even the film degrading like society in front of your eyes.  Using the camera like the beasts at times, we get to feel their attacks, feel their feeding and Rage.  Boyle paints a bleak picture on the screen, making, for awhile, the stars of the film desperation, hopelessness and death.  Well done.  As events progress, Boyle hammers in some of these points, backs off on others and is mostly only cautiously optimistic at best of times... of which there is little to none for most of things.

DVD

        Boyle also makes a smart move here with this casting.  The use of little known actors give the Everyman feeling to the film, the idea that there is no specific criteria for being a survivor and that few of us are very different in most things.  It isn't exactly that each and every human is inherently evil, there is more hope than that, but more that the capability for violence resides strongly in all of us... though mostly in the males of the species.  Cillian Murphy who plays the "star" Jim, is our perfect Everyman.  Mildmannered, but with a personality, quite, accepting, but not willing to die.  We see the film through him, visually and emotionally.  A very good job.  Naomie Harris, Selena, is a female with survival instinct, some mothering instinct, but diehard desire to survive.  She represents the rest of us.  And then we meet HOPE:  the father and daughter survivors played wonderfully by Brendan Gleeson and Meagan Burns.  Together they are the parts of humanity where there may still be hope.

        Using these touchstones as our frames of reference, Boyle throws us into the horror, the evil and the disgustingness of things that could never happen... kind of.  The zombies are pretty much just plague victims, and nothing they do is overly different from acts of violence happening every day in the world anyway.  Filming in the horror style, the horror of our reality is that much more... well, horrifying.

        Very enjoyable, though at times slow, 28 Days Later... gives what it promises deliver:  Zombie horror done art house style with an intelligent core and some frickin' disgusting visuals.

        Nice.