*Contains spoilers*
As a Brit horror film, and one with some interesting concepts at that, 28 Days Later is a movie I want to lavish with praise.
Unfortunately, it's a good film in parts, but it can never seem to fully scramble over that wall to solid, consistent quality. It comes close to having some really poignant and creepy moments, and then shoots itself in the foot with some really bizarre and crippling plot and logic flaws.
It's a significant step above films like The Hills Have Eyes, which don't even try to pretend that they're not rehashing old cliches, yet it gets stuck in third gear somewhere along the way.
This film was one of the (if not THE) first to feature "fast zombies". As if being set upon by hordes of shambling zombies wasn't bad enough, 28 DL features living humans infected with a virus that is like Rabies on crack. Victims generally become very violent and sprint around screaming. On top of that, even a droplet of infected blood is enough to convert you. These are all ideas that crank up the creepiness in a genre that generally sticks to the beaten track. Good start!
Let's continue through the plot.
Things look promising as the main character, Jim, wakes after a traffic accident...only to find the hospital he is in is completely empty. There are many haunting shots of Jim wandering around London, which is equally deserted, an apocolyptic event apparently occuring 28 days before he awoke.
Of course it is gradually revealed that the Rage virus (freed from lab animals in the intro) has decimated the UK in that time.
Here is my first minor niggling logic irritation. Maybe the military cleared some of the corpses away before they got overrun, but how come there are only about three dead people on all of London's streets? Why are the motorways almost TOTALLY empty in this film? Surely there would be some kind of mass panic, and they would be jammed with cars and bodies?
I can overlook that though, because the imagery is intriguing. Fair enough, artistic liberty and all that.
Soon Jim startles a bunch of Infected, and meets up with Serena and Mark, two other survivors who are apparently geared up for fighting. They save his hide. Serena seems cold and efficient, Mark is a little warmer to Jim.
They go see Jim's parents the next day, and find that they died relatively peacefully, commiting suicide by pills some time ago.
Infected break into the house and attack Mark, who Serena mercilessly kills with a big knife before he even starts changing. It's left ambiguous as to whether he was actually infected, or she was just being paranoid, but presumably it's the former.
Moving on, Serena and Jim are chased into an abandoned apartment block, where they meet Frank and his daughter, Hannah.
Now, this is logic flaw number 2, and it's harder to pass this off as artistic license instead of poor writing/horror cliche. Frank fends off the Infected by defending the stairs of the apartment as Serena and Jim go into the flat.
Frank competently holds them off. He's wearing full police riot gear and has a baton. Sensible man! My goodness, did I just praise a horror character for being clever? What madness is this?
Of course, good things can't last. When the gang decides that they are running out of food and must leave the apartment, Frank leaves wearing a T-Shirt, and doesn't bother to take the baton either. Double-you-tee-eff.
It's about this point that the film goes into the second half, and I find my previous 4-star plus opinion wavering considerably as the writing starts to go a little nuts.
Firstly, we have the gang driving up to a road. There are two routes - one through a pitch-black tunnel, and one through a safer route. They decide to take the tunnel, because it is faster. Okay, it's not sensible, but at least there is an explanation. They enter the tunnel with grim looks of determination.
Then, driivng through the tunnel, and bouncing over bits of wrecked cars, they start laughing. Yes, you read that right. Laughing. Why, I don't know. Presumably it was meant to be that kind of "relief" laughter, juxtaposed with the tension before the scene.
Unfortunately they didn't really carry that off, because I was left totally confused as to why they were all laughing like morons as they drove over wrecked cars and corpses. Regardless, they idiotically wreck their tyres while doing this and have to get new transport. They also get attacked in the tunnel. Totally didn't see that coming.
Now, from here on Frank gets infected, shares a quick speech to his daughter, and is then shot to death by the military. He gets infected in a stupid way - shouting at a bird eating a corpse, which then drips blood into his eye as it moves off.
I'd be terrified of being infected in that situation, so you could count me cautious of blood and dead bodies. In this film though, running over to corpses and aggravating feasting birds is the clever thing to do.
Here is where the final act really plummets off a cliff. Any subtlety the film has is abandoned now, and we learn the soldiers were just luring survivors to exploit them rather than help them. The Major in charge explains: "I promised them women!"
Yes, that's correct. The soldiers have been fighting for less than a full month, and they have become insane women-craving lunatics with insatiable libido. WTF.
Since Brit soldiers have been fighting in Afghanistan for 8 years without developing a tendency to hump anything that moves, I really don't understand why in this film apparently it makes sense for trained men to go nuts in 28 days.
Of course, the Major, with all his years of army experience, doesn't just tell his men to stop acting like dicks, he promises them women. Sighface.
Needless to say there is much gratuitous violence, the soldiers die, and the gang escapes Britain. The end.
Final Word:
A really intriguing first and second act is sadly ruined as it falls into the realm of stupid plot devices in the second half. The film attempts to show that "Man is the real villain", but instead totally discredits the tension and atmosphere built earlier in the film.
My one tip to horror movie developers - don't cheat. What I mean is, if Frank had worn the riot armour for the second half of the movie, but been killed anyway, that would have been cool. It would have preserved the atmosphere and made sense.
The fact such an apparently important item suddenly disappears just to make the group more vulnerable in later scenes takes an axe to everything that makes a horror film good.
Rating: 3 out of 5
[*] [*] [*] [ ] [ ]
No comments:
Post a Comment