Woe betide the creative person involved in any perceived mishandling of some beloved intellectual property. Spin the wheel of public figures (who will it land on next?), and with alarming speed and vehemence, a horde of entitled strangers will rise up to criticize and condemn, even going so far as to harass people they've never met in real life for offenses both imagined and real. Behind a comfy keyboard, the same seemingly rational person who preaches civility in film discourse might then turn around and hurl expletives at a customer service rep or unleash a torrent of abusive words at a politician. Irate comments and tweets are certainly lamentable, but in the rush to keep up with deadlines and the online news cycle, members of the movie blogosphere are sometimes as guilty as anyone else of perpetuating the rage virus. On the Internet, as in life, no one's hands are clean. Itchy trigger-fingers have evolved to become itchy Twitter-fingers.Īs trite as it might seem to trot out social media as a movie monster, a damning picture of it does start to form when you view it through the blood-red filter of 28 Days Later. Now they're more likely to identify with the scene in Chef where Favreau's character sends out the tweet heard 'round the world. Neurotic singles used to identify with that cringe-inducing scene in Swingers where Jon Favreau's character has the answering-machine meltdown and can't exercise enough restraint to keep from compulsively calling back and leaving repeated messages. In that way, 28 Days Later is timelier than ever. The film's fast-moving, outside-the-genre-box zombies are an extension of our own frantic minds. That's something that has only gotten amped up more in the last decade and a half. Intolerance can certainly breed rage, but what Boyle also seems to be talking about here is people's need for instant gratification. When it's not delivered at the speed desired, people just lose it." You get it in hospital waiting rooms and you get it in airplanes and airports. There's a very specific social intolerance of each other. When asked what issues he was trying to explore with 28 Days Later, Boyle said: If nothing else, 28 Days Later is a film that keeps that social commentary tradition very much alive. Starting with Night of the Living Dead ( required viewing for horror newbies), the late George Romero proved adept at interweaving social commentary with his pioneering zombie films. If it isn't a zombie movie, then what is it? Slate called 28 Days Later a zombie flick turned humanist parable. Even today, hardcore fans might want to play semantics and say 28 Days Later doesn't truly belong to the zombie film genre (though perhaps one way of looking at it would be to say that it invented a new sub-genre). Films such as World War Z have since carried the fast-zombie ball further, but as late as 2008, you could still see self-identified zombie "purists" like Simon Pegg penning convincing essays for The Guardian about why zombies, as avatars of creeping mortality, should never be allowed to run. These zombies were runners, more like the galloping dead. Mercedes and The Leftovers, respectively.Īs a zombie movie, 28 Days Later bucked standards in its treatment of the way zombies move. Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston, both of whom play memorable supporting characters in the movie, were more established actors, but their stateside fame would increase, most recently landing them on Mr. Naomie Harris was also an unknown at the time but now she's recognizable for such roles as Moneypenny in Skyfall and the crack-addicted mother in Moonlight (the latter of which earned her an Oscar nomination). 28 Days Later introduced the world to Cillian Murphy, who would later don the Scarecrow mask in Batman Begins and a razor-lined newsboy cap in Peaky Blinders. The faces in front of the camera have since gone on to great things, too. These days, Boyle is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker who is preparing to take on the tentpole of the 25th James Bond movie, while Garland has come into his own as a director to rival the young Ridley Scott with his back-to-back science fiction gems Ex Machina and Annihilation. It just so happened to be one of the best horror films of the 2000s.
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