“A piece of punk-rock movie-making”: 28 Days Later reviewed in 2002

After the mainstream meanderings of The Beach, this back-to-basics genre hybrid finds director Danny Boyle on home ground, delivering exactly the kind of pacey entertainment that once earned him the title of “the future of British film”. Based on a script by Beach-boy Alex Garland, 28 Days Later… cannibalises a wide range of popular culture, drawing on novels (H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend), movies (George A. Romero’s Dead trilogy, Jorge Grau’s Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue), and even television (disaster-soaps such as Survivors and Threads). The result is a thoroughly modern throwback to tried-and-tested fantasy formulas of yore, given a tense 21st-century edge by Boyle’s stripped-down visual aesthetic and (presumably) producer Andrew Macdonald’s continuing mandate to think big on modest budgets. (At a reported $10 million, this is less pricey than The Beach yet far more richly rewarding.) On this evidence, two of the wheels of the Trainspotting team are back on track.

Having found himself at home with the increasingly misused medium of digital video (which seems to have offered as many constraints to filmmakers’ creativity as freedoms), Boyle here brings the promise of his television films Strumpet and Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise to cinematic fruition, using DP Anthony Dod Mantle’s extraordinary mixture of technical nous and artistic flair to conjure a daringly ragged vision of a devastated world. The early scenes in particular, in which a wasteland-like London is laid out before us much as T.S. Eliot’s proverbial “patient etherised upon a table”, are striking not only for their practical accomplishment (is it a digital effect, or are those streets really empty?) but also for their hauntingly poetic resonance. Rarely has the West End, cleansed of human traffic, seemed so terrifyingly tranquil. 

When the action moves north of the Watford Gap, the film’s palette changes, balancing some ironically bright and expansive rural interludes with scenes of the kind of dark claustrophobic horror traditionally associated with post-Night of the Living Dead terror. Top marks too to editor Chris Gill, who cut the BBC’s recent runaway adaptation of Crime and Punishment, and who here handles the transition from scenes of languorous intimacy and creeping tension to explosive action with ease.

Boyle and Macdonald’s casting choices are, despite some wandering accents, impressive. Rising star Cillian Murphy sheds the untrammelled histrionics of Disco Pigs to harness his oddly ethereal charm in a manner that is engaging rather than irritating, while Naomie Harris treads an instinctive line between tough posturing and tender protectiveness. As the gruffly loveable father figure Frank, Brendan Gleeson lends much-needed ballast. But it is spiky stalwart Christopher Eccleston (the true star of Boyle’s feature debut Shallow Grave) who really gets the dramatic bit between his teeth, swallowing his borderline-psychotic soldier role with ease, and politely spitting it into the audience’s face in a measuredly menacing performance. It’s a credit to Eccleston that while his character Major Henry West never quite slips into the realms of self-parody, he still exudes a larger-than-life quality in keeping with the generic roots of the material.

For those who loved the home-grown independent spirit of Boyle’s first two pictures, it’s tempting to see 28 Days Later… as a return of the prodigal son, chastened by the bland excesses of American film-making (although both A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach were, on some level, ‘UK productions’). Certainly the upbeat chimes of the Clash’s ‘Hitsville UK’, which played over the closing credits of test prints of 28 Days Later… strengthened this impression. Although the song does not feature in released prints, the echoes of its celebration of home-made entertainment (“a mike and boom in your living room!”) can still be heard ringing out across the post-apocalyptic landscape on screen. Despite being co-produced by 20th Century Fox, this remains at heart a piece of punk-rock movie-making – quintessentially British, sneeringly aggressive, appetisingly meaty.