Before watching the movie:
The one thing I know about this movie is I’m pretty sure it’s the standard-setter for modern “fast zombies”. I don’t consider myself a horror fan, so I wasn’t that interested at the time. Now I’m doing a zombies month and dip into horror a few times a year on this blog so I guess my tastes have expanded, but it’s still not one of my top genres.
Looks like a lot of wasteland-type zombies, maybe similar to I Am Legend, which was a zombie movie even if the look in that one was more like vampires.
After watching the movie:
Amid a rising tide in riots around the world, a Cambridge lab isolated a virus causing increased rage and violence in humans and infected chimpanzees with it to understand it. Some animal rights activists attempting to free the “torture victims” get infected with the super-concentrated strain, immediately turn into bloodthirsty Infected, and lab containment is broken. Twenty-eight days later, Jim wakes up in a now-abandoned hospital after having been in a coma from crashing his bicycle, and finds the streets full of Infected before being picked up by Selena and Mark, well-armed and hardened survivors who tell him how quickly the UK government fell and how it’s been days since all television and radio broadcasts stopped. Jim insists on going to find his parents, and Selena and Mark agree to escort him for his own safety, where he finds they overdosed on sleeping pills in bed leaving a note begging Jim not to wake up. Staying in the house overnight, Jim accidentally draws Infected neighbors into the house and Mark gets Infected blood in an open wound, causing Selena to kill him without hesitation before he turns. Seeking shelter, Selena and Jim notice a light display in an apartment window and meet Frank and his teenage daughter Hannah, who picked up a radio broadcast claiming to be a military blockade outside Manchester with “the answer to Infection”. Mark, a cabbie, has the means and knowledge to get there, but was waiting for companions for safety. Though Selena has reservations, seeing how Frank and Hannah have each other and that makes the messed up world a little all right leads her to agree that the four of them can go together to investigate.
It’s very striking how much they were able to use the actual empty streets of London in the early scenes, especially considering the small budget that I’m sure didn’t have much room for what it would cost to actually close public places down. Of course, as the movie goes on and the production value gets more apparent, the spaces get much more controllable, but a few seconds of trashed and empty public squares go a long way.
I was really frustrated with Selena’s arc. She points out early on when she’s still a badass survivor disabusing Jim of his notions of easy endings that the two of them falling in love is a trite and diminishing fantasy, and then her process of opening back up to her humanity has its fullest expression in falling in love with Jim, and she as the pragmatic hardened zombie slayer ends up in the finale almost entirely helpless and needing Jim to save her, over a decade before we started noticing the trope of the awesome hypercompetent woman character being relegated to being at best the sidekick love interest to the boring useless everyman.
I like the themes this is trying to use, with the good survivors coming together, trusting and helping each other as much as is prudent and the bad survivors being the ones who became more monstrous than the more obvious threat, with a side of what’s left of State power, the military (an institution that does in some degree strip people’s humanity) being the last thing you should trust. However, I take a lot of issue with how they’re fully revealed as the villains and there must be less fraught ways to show them as irredeemably evil. I do note that I now know at least two fictional military leaders named West who are not to be trusted, which is interesting. I’m pretty sure the other one was a reference to Oliver North but I highly doubt that was the thinking in this British production.
Now this is a movie I can see the ingenuity of as well as reason for success (though the “fast” zombies are a bit overhyped, they aren’t any faster than a healthy human, just also not slower). I’m sure that the sequels are going to ruin the point of the end, but also I’m okay with continuing to explore this world more. It did so much with relatively little and overall exceeded anything that could be expected of it.
Yesterday's Movies 