28 Days Later

(Screenplay: Alex Garland; director: Danny Boyle; 2003)

By Sviatlana Piatakova

October 29, 2009

28 days later (2003) is not your run-of-the-mill horror flick. Nor is it sci-fi/zombie apocalypse as we know it. The movie plays genre as a dizzying balance of pseudo-realistic horror, classic drama, post-apocalyptic dystopia, a tragic romance, for good measure. Its pace and mood are breathtakingly meandering: in the midst of rushing, rasping and running for your life (with blood pumping in your veins) the movie has time to stop and reflect on the beauty of naked and mute London and the ugliness of a human being, stripped of normality and hope. Dopy tranquillity, nightmarish speed (a blur of eyes, feet and frothy mouths), total defamiliraziation and oh-so-familiar dread are mixed into a whirlwind of shuddery cinematic pleasures. You will check your door locks, you will draw the curtains. You will have the main theme (In the House a Heartbeat) and the rest of the paranoid John Murphy soundtrack pump in your temples for days later. Because this movie goes unpleasant places and reminds us of the ultimate isolation, the beast inside and other horrors writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle touched upon in The Beach (2000) but failed to deliver convincingly. In 28 Days Later the tandem works magic and the result is an instant horror classic.

Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from his lucky coma to find he had missed one hell of an event – the end of the world, or Britain, to be exact. After a group of eco-terrorists break into a Cambridge lab and free the apes infected with man-made Rage virus society collapses under the unforeseen pressures of a zombie pandemic. Jim wanders around the empty echoing London, picking up cans of soda and the pieces of the horror tale he missed together – an evacuation special of The Evening Standard, ‘missing persons’ flyers, photos of lost loved ones, and later, a suicide note from his own parents. The first infected he meets is a starving and emaciated but still-on-both-two bloody-eyed reverend – a vision so terrifying it fills you with dead-end horror to the brim. From there the chase is on. Only a band of survivors, the indomitable Selena (Naomie Harris) and dorky Mark (Noah Huntley) secure Jim’s life and all-too-knowingly fill him in on the events of the last twenty eight days.

The movie goes many places, in terms of genre, pace, character development, setting and mood, places you’d never expect horror to go. 28 Days Later wrecks your nerves and messes with your head. It’s all of those things: sombrely slow and adrenaline druggy, trashy cheap and picture-perfect cool, funky fresh and predictably derivative, drawing on zombie and postapocaliptic film classics.  The intertextual halo around the film takes nothing away from its edgy freshness. This is simultaneously a comeback and an update of the zombie genre. The zombies here are strangely new on many levels, the DV cam completely disorienting (a bad download? a pirate copy? a joke?) and, there is very little literal gore for a horror movie, but plenty of the blood-clotting fear of classic 20^th century dystopian tales. No wonder Danny Boyle referred to this movie as a drama in a sci-fi horror setting. This isn’t for gore addicts exactly; it’s for anyone in love with strange and disturbing cinema.

The genius of Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is salient in the already classic London scenes without which this wouldn’t be the masterpiece it is. The sequence from the time Jim flaps his sunshine-lit eyelashes in the hospital room to his entrance into the darkness of the holy place is pure perfection. The DV knocks you out and leaves you with sand in your eyes, and images you fail to scratch away, something out of a recurring nightmare. It’s disorienting and paradoxical: sometimes film grain, sometimes pixelated mosaic, sometimes ocean ripple, sometimes Gaussian blur. If anything Mr. Mantle is filming light here, light shining through things, light reflected onto things, light reflecting things. This is an impressionist moving painting that has both Monet’s blurred softness and Seurat’s pointillist exactness. The edge of one object becomes the beginning of another as if light were fluid. In that interim space light particles stumble into each other, twirl, swim, dance, become one. All things will melt into each other, the fluids of the infected with the fluids of the healthy, and with a little struggle, something new will be born. In 28 Days Later the boundaries to objects material as we know them are gone, and the claustrophobia this engenders is simply terrifying.

The prevailing colours in this tour de force sequence are yellow (the rising sun and its multiple reflections onto objects), green (Jim’s robe and vegetation) and brown (Jims hair, the overturned furniture, the buildings and monuments). In the shot from the hospital window onto the parking of abandoned ambulances that failed to save anyone, you see the leaves on trees moving with the wind, and the pixels making up these leaves moving within them. London Bridge, yellow in the rising sun, is reflected in the quietly simmering waters. Between the orange Houses of Parliament and the immobile London Eye the light swims pink and pretty. Big Ben is grey, Jim’s robe robustly green. The Lion is peachy soft. The double-decker is a welcome splash of red – more of that color to be unwelcomingly embraced later.

The only soundtrack to the dizzying picture that prompts you to wonder if you are losing sight altogether, are Jim’s idiotic helloes and later the droning, schizophrenic John Murphy’s score, crescendoing when the alarm on the deserted car makes you jump out of your skin – every time you watch the goddamn scene. The girl on the billboard bleach-smiles at the non-existent humanity, the Statue of Liberty has no one left to set free. Jim, as the (supposedly) last human being is ticking off the boxes: science (hospital) – useless, Westminster  (government) – useless, the Wheel (entertainment) – useless, the Lion (art) – useless. Transport (double-decker), communication (hanging down receivers), commerce (bleached billboard smiles), democracy (Statue of Liberty), mass media (The Evening Standard) and memory (Shaftsebury Memorial) are all rendered meaningless in the face of this ultimate Armageddon. But Jim has one last sanctuary to flee to, one last chance, fragile and dim, to take. And with a sack of clinking pop soda in his hand he enters the church (Danny Boyle aspired to become a priest in his youth). After that moment Mr. Mante’s dizzy, simmering light, literally and metaphorically, goes out of the movie. 

And out of the darkness the zombies arrive. These are strange in many ways. Boyle’s monsters will never compare to lifeless, apathetic and pitiable creatures of Romero’s franchise. Boyle’s ghouls are superhumanly fast, strong, agile and leapy, murderous in a wink of an eye. Their frantic, slashing movements are a cross between spastic semian recklessness and blood-drooling butchery of a hyena on an inductive diet. They don’t eat and savour the flesh, meticulous at every chew and rip, they puke, bite, run and puke some more, all in a matter of seconds. They seem to evaporate into clouds of bloody bodily liquids as fast as they appear out of nowhere, and you feel like wiping the smears away from the totally innocent screen. A mere flash, you barely get a glimpse of them, yet they fill the viewer with a terror that is to linger long after the titles have rolled.

The nausea here is stronger than in Romero classics or the gorier Day’s own sequel 28 Weeks Later. Boyle doesn’t need zombies tearing flesh off human bone to get his message across. He doesn’t poke at your guts with inordinate portions of spectacular and unnecessary gore. He works at your brain like a Chinese water torture, drop by drop unwillingly bringing you to conclusions fit to drive you insane:

Civilization is a dreamed up construct, artificial, non-existent. All order evaporates in the face of disaster. The government is a joke. Science – a spastic spaniel playing with its own tail. Religion wants to eat you. This is the end.

Romero’s movies were critical of a certain very precise sin of humanity: Dawn was anti-consumerism, Night – anti-racist, Day – anti-militarist, Land – anti-capitalist and Diary – anti-sensationalist. Boyle is simply anti-everything. No meta-narrative comes out unbitten and virus-free, that’s why it’s one of the darkest of zombie horror observations so far. Besides the totally inappropriate finale, Boyle gives humans no hope. And unlike Romero, he is unable to squeeze any humour out of the inglorious, ugly occasion. Rage just happens. No purpose, no meaning, no justification. Humans kill humans. Not for food but for kicks. The virus is just there. It doesn’t make sense. And it shouldn’t. Because the world is absurd, existence meaningless and chaos is the only order we deserve.

The movie has a very distinct anti-war ring to it (picked up later in Weeks but substituting the generic anti-military with the trite anti-American ring to it). The vision of the dead outside the car window is clearly the (subconscious) memory of the Holocaust. How was that different? Wasn’t that the textbook definition of meaningless rage? Boyle sees the military as a bunch of sex-crazed half-wits obsessed with looking serious, putting on their hero-out-of-a-myth faces and guided by a crackpot who is all-man, all-hero and all-saviour.

It’s also important to remember that the so-called zombies here aren’t zombies at all. They are people infected with a virus, whose meaningless rage was begotten from human behaviour at its extreme. And humans here are scary all right. The moment when Selena is offering Hanna a drug to sedate her in the face of a sexual onslaught is queasy with unspeakable terror. And somehow the movie almost has a feminist aftertaste. Strictly speaking, this has little to do with the zombie genre, except for the homage it pays to Romero’s Dawn and Night. This is an intelligent drama speaking the language of zombie metaphor.

What rage does to humans is no pretty site. In the beginning Jim is a big-eyed apish figure, fragile, anorexic, stooping, echoing stupid and futile helloes into the empty air, clinging to religion, family, community. He bets on the church, insists on checking with his family, he encourages Selena to take Hannah and Frank on. The light goes off, however, and the transformation begins. He is forced to murder a child. Frank is killed, the girls are threatened with sexual slavery and Jim himself nearly escapes execution. By the end of the movie you have muscles of steel, inhuman speed, vicious cunning, split-second decision-making and murderous survival instinct. Jim’s eyes are bloody, his mouth frothy, sweat rolls down his torso and drool slides down his chin – rage, of a different kind, has gotten to him as well. Cyllian Murphey is brilliant here, as well as the beautiful and heartbreaking Naomi Harris. Brendan Gleeson is a joy as always, a faint ray of light in the midst of stifling dystopian hopelessness that this movie offers. For the existence of people like Frank, whom Gleeson eloquently portrays, humanity could almost be forgiven.

The bright red and green ending is a Hollywood burp, I’m afraid. It’s nice, it’s comforting, and it offers a sense of false respite after the nauseating terror preceding it. But as you turn off the lights and close your eyes, everything will come back, the grainy images, the frothy mouths, the screeching sounds.

The world will die of a virus. But when it happens, there won’t be quietly buzzing planes in the blue-blue sky.

Running Time: 112 minutes.

Rated R.

Lessons In Stupidity

One lovely morning (very early morning, around two) I went on to save another chapter of the nonfiction I was writing. A folder popped up, and funny enough it was empty. ‘That’s odd’, I thought. I quickly opened my Writing folder which had other subfolders in it (Short Stories, Warwick, Nonfiction, Reviews, Songs, Novel, etc.) and gasped. There was nothing in it. Except for the document I had saved five seconds previously, it was empty. Everything I had written since 2007 was gone.

Let me backtrack a bit and tell you at which point in my life I was when this happened.

It was (and still is) a few months before I would cross the invisible line, climb that steep mountain, become officially grown up by Western standards and irreversibly old and desperate by Belarusian standards, etcetera, etcetera – I was turning thirty come November. So I was very full of myself and my great accomplishments at such a tender age. I was thinking how I would be justified to argue with rude taxi drivers having turned all big and mighty. I replayed Beyonce’s I Was Here around the clock, bathing in all the glory and drama of the upcoming event. I had thought of how I always had this wisdom in me but only by turning a certain age society permitted me to demonstrate it – and the time was near! I daydreamed of how I would use real creams that actually did something. I thought how I would no longer be stuck in this limbo of still being in my 20s but feeling like the fun wore off a long time ago. And so on down the list. You know me. Drama Queen.

I was going to celebrate on my blog with a little speech full of pathos and then present a list of dry statistics of what I had done in my thirty years on the planet. I was going to count everything I had written and let the numbers do the talking: how many stories, plays, novels, poems, songs, essays, reviews and copywriting pieces I had written, how many pedis and manis I had (1:1), how many men I had slept with, how many serious relationships I had been in (easy one: zero), and so on. All I can be proud of is that I do remember the number of men I had slept with, which is commendable in this day and age. Everything else, at this point, is a mystery.

I remember reading an interview with Leslie Marmon Silko were she talked of the Western obsession with written word and the Native American reliance on the spoken word. The story that lived on had to be strong and potent; it had to evolve as it moved from person to person, from generation to generation. If stories died out, if tribes died out, there were no regrets. They weren’t strong enough. They didn’t deserve to be. (I know there is a correlating theory by a famous bearded man from the West, according to which my strongest work had indeed survived, but because I was born in the Soviet Union and have a general distrust of men and bearded men in particular, I would like to stick with Leslie’s beautiful stand on things.)

Maybe a personal apocalypse (from Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil" or "revelation") is what I deserved in my elevated state of mind. The panic, fear, shock and disappointment that came as an aftermath brought me down to earth. Thanks to supporters from LinkedIn I did get computer genius help and had most of my old files recovered, but not the 50000-word nonfiction I had been writing for the last year, the most important achievement of all. At first I felt liberated and light, almost lifted off the ground, knowing it was very emotional in places, very raw, and knowing I had been given a chance to write it from scratch as a consistent piece of work. As reality sunk in and I began to realize that all the sweat, blood and tears that went into it, the sleepless nights, the hungry days, the research, the horrors of it, the honesty of it, would have to be repeated, with the same intensity, I felt tired and dumb.

I know it is my test, and I intend to pass it.

My tirade against journalists and immediate writing sits on my blog and laughs at me. Because I had kept things to myself for so long, thinking ‘It’s not good enough’ or ‘It’s not the right time’, all I have left now is the stuff I had shared with friends and colleagues, stuff I had printed out for my portfolio (creative and copywriting), or posted on my blogs. I don’t know why but in my head the Universe is a beautiful ghetto girl with a cool do and lots of bracelets as loud as her mouth and she keeps waving her hands at me yelling ‘U think u fly butchu aint all that, bitch!’ I know, I know, I got a little carried away, like a girlie in a new dress staring at her own reflection for too long and walking straight into a lamp pole. I gotta admit – it hurts.

I still think the best thing I had ever written is an essay/review on 28 Days Later. And the Universe seems to agree, because it had survived. So I’m not gonna wait for anything to happen to justify its right to be. I am posting it here and now. Because the lesson is learned.

Photo session with the great Evgeni Attsetski

Photograph: Evgeni Attsetski

 

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The adaptation of the adaptation of the adaptation is what we get for a summer blockbuster in a world where culture was proclaimed exhausted a while ago. Planète des singes was a sci fi dystopia written by Pierre Boulle in 1963 which was adapted into a 1968 classic Planet of the Apes directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, which subsequently spawned a totality of seven films, a TV series and a few comic books. 

The story is now revisited by Rupert Wyatt in a 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a reboot of the film that started it all. Many directors are interested in the question of what defines humanity: George Romero dived into the subject headfirst with the still nauseating Night Of The Living Dead and an array of money-makers masking greed behind bogus postapocalyptic agenda (Carriers or Resident Evil: Afterlife) have tapped into that uncomfortable territory as well. All in good fun, of course.

The premise of curing a disease while releasing apocalyptic danger into the air is not new. Here the cure for Alzheimer's Disease which Charles (John Lithgow) suffers from is in the making. Will Rodman (James Franco), Charles’ son and a promising scientist, discovers a virus that helps the condition but proves threatening to humanity because thousands of apes become ‘infected’ with intelligence spread by the first guinea ape Caesar (motion-capture performed by Andy Serkis). If only this virus could be disseminated in the schools and universities around the world, I am thinking, yours truly could sleep more peacefully. Alas, the side effects of being smart are not just having no date for the prom (can anyone believe the winner of ANTM’s Cycle 13 Nicole Fox was never asked?) but it’s also the possibility of the total annihilation of humanity. As Will and his pretty girlfriend Caroline (Freida Pinto) grow more and more attached to the chimp, the monkey begins to display a few signs of teenage angst and wants to know who he is. There are moments of true joy in the film when Will’s father Charles gets a temporary respite from the disease enjoying the clarity of his days with the people he has missed in the daze of Alzheimer’s. There is poetry in nature shots and childhood events of Caesar’s life. This is a film not afraid to show emotion.

The trailer eloquently portrays what to expect from the movie, but it’s not one of those teasers where the best parts of the film are stuffed together and there is nothing to look forward to during the main course. The best of the film is the film itself. As part of the Planet Of The Apes franchise it stands its own ground and has a proud and distinct voice.

The movie starts with the cruelty of humans and ends with the cruelly of apes. Caesar, the plucky chimp warrior, is neither the first nor the other, and the inner conflict tears him apart. Besides the well choreographed actions sequences, the viewer may look forward to a colourful home-jungle sequence mirroring the bliss of Caesar’s childhood, a utopian sequoia forest full of sounds and surprises as well as the occasional pop of colour and elegance here and there (the leaves falling off the trees like snowflakes from the violent movement of the branches).

Some of the chimp education sequences reminded me of Romero’s terrifying Day Of The Dead and his most ‘civilized’ zombie Bub. Who indeed are humans and what makes them different from the rest of the animal kingdom? The gradual built up of threats from different directions (the apes are getting angrier while the people are getting sicker) creates credible tension and there is a touch of old school horror to the film which is a great thing in an era where too many thrills depend on stupid outbursts of action as opposed to skilful levelling of suspense (but there will be a few unintentional laughs too).

Below the surface of the perfect summer blockbuster one can unearth uncomfortable topics such as the omnipotent maternal instinct (one angry mommy is having a really bad day when her baby seems to be in peril), the identity crises adopted children are inevitably faced with, the problem of isolation of the Other, the futility of prison sentences and the dangerous castigation of ‘evil’, the psychology behind any dictatorship and so on. But that’s if one squints really hard.

There are references to the original 1968 film. There are the clichés: the greedy corporation sharks, the sadists that happen to work with animals day in day out, the cool guy next door and his flawless girl. The pacing is good, with every subplot getting satisfactory resolutions at a rhythm that keeps things interesting without rushing it or piling plot twists on top of each other. The ending is a bit of a downer. Maybe the real problem is that after the first ending, there is actually the real ending, but by that time half of the audience is out the door (the poor ticket lady trying to scream over the heads of early leavers). You have been warned.

Do not leave viruses lying around in the fridge. Who knows what can happen. For some pure fun, thrills and a few frowns, go see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, in theatres August 5.