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Death beautiful in '28 Days'
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Coasting through a vacant London I see corpses piled on the roadside. In the stepped-down, washed out digital world of "28 Days Later," death is beautiful. This genocide is art. This wasteland is wonderful.
"28 Days Later" takes a thankful step away from the glossy finish of modern filmmaking to capturing the apocalypse with budget DV equipment. Like my first rented, almost not viewable tape of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "28 Days" has a grainy, low-fi video-quality that is nothing less than beautiful.
Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle goes macabre with his "Dogma" look (Celebration, Julien Donkey-Boy), bleeding the colors to gray. Gray like London must be, or so I've heard. But in the London of "28 Days Later," everyone is seeing red.
Red-eyed zombies bolt voraciously from dark alleyways, rise from the floors of fallen churches, stalk the corners of ramshackle flats. These aren't the zombies of George A. Romero's "dead" trilogy ("Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," "Day of the Dead"). "The infected" make zombies of the '70s seem downright geriatric. The stiff, sputtering, moaning hordes of "Dawn of the Dead's" shopping mall are replaced by rabid human husks, violently slashing, vomiting and sprinting, existing only to spread the infection and to kill, kill, kill.
Jim (Cillian Murphy) is a wounded bicycle courier who wakes from a coma to find the hospital deserted, as well as most of London. Rage, a hyper-infectious disease carried by monkeys, has been accidentally unleashed by environmental terrorists. In 28 days, nearly everyone in England has been either eviscerated or evacuated. As for the rest of the world, no one knows.
Jim and a handful of survivors must discover what is next for the human species. This takes them across the English countryside to the only faint beacon of hope, a military outpost broadcasting promises of a cure for infection.
Much of the plot has been cribbed from the Dead trilogy, but more importantly so has the film's pace. A viewer whose zombie experience comes only from "House of 1000 Corpses" and "Resident Evil" won't be able to sit through "Night of the Living Dead," a film that predominantly deals with a house full of living beings and the inhumanity between them. Following in that vein, "28 Days" is a lethargic Romero zombie, lumbering through the empty streets of London, giving plenty of time to ponder human nature, war and infection like a zombie Socrates pacing the empty forum shops of a modern apocalypse.
This meditation comes with perfect timing. What better time to ponder fear of blood-born pathogens when terror and paranoia are sanctioned by the U.S. Government (what level of terror alert would a zombie infection be?) With momentum from our media-enforced fears, "28 Days" churns the horrors of AIDS and Hepatitis into an indomitable case of hemophobia. All it takes is one drop.
Directing is the beached drug film favorite Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting"), resurrecting himself with a film that could very well resurrect a genre.
Ever since "Scream" escaped into the main stream, the new wave of teen horror-suspense has spread just as fast as the "28 Days'" infection. Some could speculate that it's close to eating itself into extinction. Could Boyle's film be that splinter military group entrenched in a burnt countryside? Are they weathering the storm, waiting to rebuild a genre? Or will irony prevail and the forces within the encampment become the downfall of the outfit? This has me asking as the encamped men do in the film, "How long does it take for the infected to die?"
ALSO THIS WEEK..."CHARLIE'S ANGELS"
The biggest triple-star vehicle of the summer is credited to a director with three letters in his name and no vowels. McG, who debuted with the original "Charlie's Angels," strikes back with "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," a spectacle of T&A, Kung Fu, loud music, costume changes and dance numbers that rivals Las Vegas.
Natalie (Cameron Diaz), Alex (Lucy Liu) and Dylan (Drew Barrymore) return with a new Bosley (Bernie Mac) and a new devious plot to quash. A pair of titanium rings containing the encrypted identity of every person in the Witness Protection Program falls into the wrong hands. On their way to the bottom of this caper, the angels will have to face their "favorite assassin" the Thin Man (Crispin Glover), a fallen Angel (Demi Moore) and Dylan's deranged ex-boyfriend-no, it's not Tom Green, it's Seamus O'Grady (Justin Theroux).
Breaking up to speed with a brilliant Indiana Jones-style opening and proceeding with a mixture of rushed dialogue, dance sequences and wire-fu, "Charlie's Angels" is an intensely enjoyable, for the first hour. Nearing the film's conclusion I find myself confused. I think I like this movie, but now I'm tired, my brain hurts and I can't get "She's got looks to kill" out of my head. I feel like the victim of a brutal two-hour lap dance. I feel like the Alex character from "A Clockwork Orange," forced to watch hour after hour of sex and violence. Even for the most desensitized viewer, sometimes too much really is too much.
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