28 Days Later (2002) [Widescreen Special Edition] – DVD

28 Days Later…
**½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras A
starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston
screenplay by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover 28 Days Later… is a film that shoots for resonance but is too shortsighted to hit the target. Its tale of an England beset by rage-crazed zombies is clearly a metaphor for something–but what? Timing rules out certain international disasters (9/11 happened as the film was shooting), and a certain opacity of intent clouds the entire film, making you reach out for something that you're never sure is really there. There are compensatory pleasures (a general creepiness, one smashing performance), but the film lacks something beyond its grasp, leaving you with an adequate, reasonably entertaining picture, and nothing more.

Jim (Cillian Murphy) has just woken up from a coma to discover there's no one left in London to tell the news. Having seen the extremely clumsy prologue, in which animal rights activists unwittingly unleash a rage-inducing disease on the populace, we know why; Jim, alas, was left out of that particular story meeting, and is thus surprised to find Piccadilly deserted and a church full of red-eyed monsters ready to rip him apart. The few survivors are embattled and bewildered: Selena (Naomie Harris) is untrusting and paranoid after one too many close calls, while the father-daughter pair of Frank and Hannah (Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns) are running out of ideas for survival. After a few nasty encounters with the diseased hordes, they're all ready for a change of pace–and think they've found it in a Manchester military encampment.

Alas, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland (who authored the source novel for Boyle's The Beach) do everything by rote. Their characters are nothing to get excited about: Jim is a cipher who exists to stand around looking stunned, and Selena is one of those movie 'tough broads' with a hard exterior that hides a soft, fuzzy female. And the film doesn't come up with an adequate allegorical referent for the zombies–there is "rage," of course, and an opening montage of riots and police to grease the wheels of portent, but none of this is connected to the social or cultural concerns that create such fury (George Romero's zombies were a sign of the brutal times; this movie's zombies are simply creatures of the plot). These hand-me-downs and fill-in-the-blanks are endemic of a general poverty of invention and keep 28 Days Later… from being more than a summer movie shot in pixel-strewn DV.

When the film finally does kick to life, it has nothing to do with the whole zombie concept. Reaching the Manchester compound, our heroes must then deal with Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) and his men, who hold onto their ranks and duties as if by a thread. Though West at first seems helpful and concerned, it turns out he has ulterior motives for helping our survivors. That's all I can tell you without dishing out spoilers, but 28 Days Later… is undeniably suspenseful at this point, forcing the blank-faced Jim to work against the soldiers and putting the female members of the band at risk. Full of ironic menace, Eccleston gives the film some edge, if still not enough vividness, in a career-best performance as the first friendly, then demanding military man. Originally published: June 28, 2003.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Fox's R1 DVD of 28 Days Later… contains three alternative endings (that's two more than were included in last summer's ballyhooed re-release in North American moviehouses a month after the film went wide) that will, according to studio copy, "haunt you for days." Time will tell (only just saw 'em), but in deference to the spoiler-sensitive, I've secluded my discussion of the film's quartet of denouements in a sidebar at left. The disc additionally features six deleted scenes with optional commentary from director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland wherein the former does most of the talking, volunteering meaningless but amusing maxims ("That's my favourite shot–you should always cut your favourite shot") and a better-than-average justification for many of the snips: to him, they didn't feel "epic" enough. Of course, that's a contradiction in terms (Boyle's specialty, you'll find), what with 28 Days Later…'s camcorder cinematography.

28 ENDINGS LATER: SPOILER MATERIAL! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

ENDING #1 (as seen in final cut): Jim, Selena, and Hannah drape an open field in an SOS sign. Although it renders Jim's wounding at the hands of Maj. Henry West moot, this is the most satisfying of our options. It's hopeful without being pat, it's in 35mm (a nice, Wizard of Oz-like contrast to the digital realm to which the rest of the film belongs), and it facilitates a smooth transition into Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)."

ENDING #2 – "What If…" (as seen in North American theatres as a post-script): Jim dies from a gunshot wound despite Selena and Hannah's attempts to revive him on a surgical table. A pointless downer. Thematically speaking, if Hannah lives, Jim and Selena should only survive as well to assume the role of her surrogate parents. Jim's death serves no purpose other than to preach against happy endings, a juvenile notion of pathos. In fact, its lone redeeming quality is a sense of symmetry: with this finale in place, we would meet Jim in the hospital, we would leave Jim in the hospital.

ENDING #3 – "Alternative Ending" (DVD exclusive): Jim has died, as in the ending described immediately above. Selena and Hannah drape an open field in an SOS sign, as in the final cut, but a chicken has replaced poor Jim. In their commentary for this sequence, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland laugh as soon as it's revealed that Selena is conversing with a chicken, and then marvel at how fast planes can fly. Yep, that about sums it up.

ENDING #4 – "Radical Alternative Ending" (DVD exclusive): Rewind! Frank's infected. Convinced that the elusive cure is within reach, Jim refuses to kill Frank, knocking him unconscious instead. Jim, Selena, and Hannah drag Frank to a Manchester hospital, where after much coercion a hermit advises that Frank's cure lies in a blood transfusion. Jim sacrifices himself so that Hannah can have her father back, trading his plasma for Frank's; the film would end even more symmetrically this way, with martyred Jim tied to an operating table, numbing himself with violent images from video monitors much like the chimp in the first shots of 28 Days Later…. Reconstructed from Brendan Houghton's gorgeous storyboards and script segments acted out by Boyle and Garland, this indeed radical change was conceived in post-production. Boyle and Garland take a break from their performance to illustrate that they have just written themselves into a huge corner (they never did solve it), and all this climax does, fundamentally, is turn a film that riffs on Day of the Dead in its third act into one that copies Dawn of the Dead, complete with Selena using a sniper rifle to pick off "infecteds" from a rooftop perch. The least successful but most intriguing closer of the bunch.

Boyle and Garland reunite for a groovy commentary track that runs the length of the main feature, and again Boyle dominates, though not to any particular detriment. As September 11^th fell early in the production (on the day the Christmas toast was shot), the pair suggests that it mutated the oppressive feel they were striving for into something all-too-authentic, while Boyle goes on to say that he stole a page from Ken Loach's book by shooting the picture in sequence, in order to give his novice cast the benefit of growing with their characters. Clearly in a chatty mood, Boyle narrates solo animated galleries of production stills (18 mins.) and continuity Polaroids (4 mins.) and returns as an interview subject in the interesting yet unwatchable "Pure Rage: The Making of 28 Days Later…" (24 mins.). The doc's makers chose to zoom in and out on a television showing this BBC special and present it to the masses as such, a post-modern approach that negates anything of value therein–at least when viewed with open eyes.

As for the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer of the film itself, detail is obviously lacking, given the nature of the source (a celluloid interpretation of near consumer-grade DV elements), though it is the spitting image of my theatrical presentation. Video registration issues abound and whites bloom–both problems anticipated, alas: Folks, this is as good as it gets for 28 Days Later…, so don't bother writing your congressman. I did enjoy the accompanying Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, which overcomes brittle highs with creative, aggressive usage of the rear discretes in the film's second half. Teaser and theatrical trailers for 28 Days Later…, a teaser, originally broadcast on the web, compiled from storyboards of the film's prologue, and a peculiar 6-minute montage of footage set to music by Jacknife Lee round out the platter. Fullscreen version sold separately.

113 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French Dolby Surround, Spanish Dolby Surround; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox