28 Days Later…
I think now I have to compare 28 Days Later… to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. The big deal about the latter movie is Friedkin’s comment that you take out of The Exorcist whatever you bring to it. If you’re having a bad day, bad week, The Exorcist will make it worse; if you’re on the up, The Exorcist will only help. That’s why audiences continue to be divided over it and some say the Devil won while others disagree. That’s its genius. 28 Days Later…, I’ve just found, is just the same.
When I first saw 28 Days Later…, I was having a really bad time (I forget why, I was just having a really bad time, that I know), and after seeing it, I barely slept that night, I was crabby, I was generally, severely, despairing about mankind in general (now I think about it, it may have been 9/11/Bush/war-related anger upsetting me). It took me a whole day after watching the movie to realise that it was the movie that had made me feel so bad, like I’d blocked out the experience and was only aware of the effects. 28 Days Later… paints a bleak picture of the worst aspects of human beings. It’s nothing to do with the “infected” – it’s the last half hour that does it, and I won’t go into details here.
So I’m amazed that I just watched it and I saw something that I was clearly blind to on that first viewing – the immense optimism and hope contained in the film. I’m nowhere near as down as I was back then, and on this viewing, the movie was completely different. It left me still shaken, but much more optimistic about our future. Some will call these moments in the movie “Cheesy”... they are particularly cheesily done… some will say the young girl in the movie can’t act, but I’m actually thinking her flat tone is entirely intended, whatever, it works for me. She’s that sane voice of childhood against the insanity of the adult world. Her small “speech” at the beginning, “you need us as much as we need you,” is just bizarre in its delivery and the perky music that supports it… but it’s all about a bizarre hope, that we’ll survive this crazy adolescence the world’s in right now. Like I said, on this viewing, it really worked for me.
Once again I was seriously impressed by what Danny Boyle did with the DV format, especially the visual effects which I put on my small list of the very best (and really badly overlooked) in movies ever – they match the format and style of the movie entirely, serving only the story.
This movie is not for everybody but I want to say everybody should see it. It deals with a very real and possible (if exaggerated) situation, very realistically, and deals upfront with the real horror that there are certain types of people in this world who are genuinely evil, not only that, but the idea that evil may be inevitable. This is real horror.