28 Days Later

Review by Giovanni Varazzani

From the director of “The Beach” and “Trainspotting”, Danny Boyle tries with “28 Days Later” to resuscitate the British horror movie collapsed with the major film companies as Hammer (Dracula – 1958) or Amicus (Torture Garden – 1967) by the early ‘80s.
The movie opens with a scene where a band of animal right activist release from a science laboratory some chimps, unaware that the animals were carrying the most deadly virus man ever know. 28 days later Jim interpreted by Cillian Murphy (Scarecrow in “Batman Begins”) wakes up in an empty hospital. After he met a couple of survivors, he learns that the virus is terminating the country population where they will try to survive.
The main character will try to join an apparent army base in Manchester, but they will find that the key to survive is not with those soldiers, people that kill other people, but it is closed inside their humanity, so love and compassion will be again the ultimate weapon to win the virus.
In this film, zombies that are a not zombie but infected people, recall the zombies from the famous George Romero’s trilogy “Night Of The Living Dead”. The difference from the usual zombie is that those infected humans have unusual strength and speed.
In the film there is a big feeling of isolation that it’s made bigger in those scenes where London, the city where the virus start his devastation, is amazingly empty of the usual traffic and people. These scenes are opposed to those full of violence and gory thus to have a result a film quite scary.