![]() Then came Steve Miner’s Day of the Dead (2008), the campy parody Zombieland (2009), and the television series The Walking Dead (2010). Zack Snyder launched his remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004. The release of 28 Days Later in 2002 sparked a decade defined by its obsession with the undead. The man, evidently, has slept through something big, but what? Is London now a nuclear exclusion zone? Was the city evacuated? Or worse? So is the next corridor, the hospital entrance and, chillingly, the streets outside. He’s lying naked on a hospital bed, hooked up to a web of tubes that presumably have kept him alive while he sleeps, though there’s no one around to explain what’s happened to him. the chance to capture the creepy, remarkable footage of a deserted London, with no discernable digital enhancement.Sunlight falls on a sleeping man’s face, and his eyelids flutter open. Not to mention that the quick-and-dirty shooting it allows gave Boyle and co. ![]() 28 Days Later was shot on digital video, and while this choice (like Night’s black-and-white filming) was dictated by expedience as much as aesthetic concerns, it gives the movie a raw, you-are-there feeling that has fresh relevance in this era of reality television. Up until the movie’s restoration for laserdisc and DVD, Night’s grainy look was cited both for giving its events a stark immediacy, and for tying its horrors (some explicitly echoing then-current concerns) in with the gritty film footage airing on television. There’s a link beyond the subject matter between 28 Days Later and Night of the Living Dead, and that is the way the roughness of its technical look contributes to its blunt effectiveness. ![]() Gleeson and Naomie Harris, as two of Jim’s fellow survivors, and Christopher Eccleston as a military man of questionable motivations are equally compelling, with Garland’s script never forgetting that we need to be interested in and care about the living in order to be truly concerned about what the almost-dead are up to. As audience surrogate and everyman, the unknown Murphy is well-cast and maintains viewer empathy right through to the end, as he inevitably comes to take matters violently into his own hands. The filmmakers have described Jim’s arc as an odyssey through a series of father figures who wind up failing him, and indeed, the supporting characters’ apparent abilities to take charge of the situation exist in inverse proportion to their chances for survival. Throughout, Boyle and Garland subscribe to one of Joe Bob Briggs’ key rules for horror films: Anyone can die at any time. And he also knows how to subvert expectations, as when Jim, taxi driver Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and the rest of their small band are trapped in a highway tunnel. Boyle works plenty of seat-jumpers out of their sudden, murderous appearances, but he’s not just out for shock effects the viciousness of these setpieces is genuinely bloodcurdling, and once we know what the “infected” are capable of, he builds plenty of suspense out of the threat of their appearance. Rather than slow, lumbering creatures whose numbers and implacability pose the threat, the “infected” move with superhuman speed, lurching out of nowhere to attack their victims. Separating them from the ghouls of Romero’s films and others of their ilk is the manner in which Boyle presents the attacks. As someone says in Dawn of the Dead, “They’re us.” They’re not out to drink blood, or eat brains-they’re driven purely by homicidal anger, which makes them very much of their time, a period when “road rage” and “air rage” are frequently in the news. The city is now deserted save for a handful of survivors and roving, raving packs of afflicted people, who savagely assault anyone they encounter. He soon discovers that a lot has happened while he was out: animal activists accidentally let loose a “rage virus” from a primate testing lab, and it has gone on to infect a very large percentage of the population. Dovetailing neatly and eerily (but coincidentally, as it was filmed before 9/11) with current concerns about mass human destruction and deadly diseases, 28 Days Later follows Jim (Cillian Murphy) a London bike messenger who wakes up in hospital after a month-long coma.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |