28 days later... - 2002

It wasn’t bad, as a movie in general. Not sure it’d get high praises from zombie-fans because there’s very little of that… it’s not living-people against living-dead, and it’s not humans against monsters; it’s more like a handful of decent humans against shitty humans, with a small side-dish of zombie-with-the-rabies.

Everything starts with three stupid people breaking into a lab: experiments on monkeys are conducted there, but when a man tells them that the monkeys are very dangerous because they are infected, they have the rabies, the ‘animalists’ just don’t care, or don’t understand, or can’t be bothered to think, and go on opening the cages. The first monkey, as soon as her cage is open, goes straight for the girl! Once bitten, the girls coughs bloods (lots of it, or at least I thought it was blood) and attacks others. 

28 days later appears on the screen and we see a man waking up at a hospital. He’s completely naked, don’t know why… it seemed rather weird, but moving on. He wakes up, finds some clothes and tries calling for help, but the hospital is totally empty, and also in a rather messy state.

He goes out, calling for help, but London is deserted as well, not a soul anywhere. A newspaper titles “evacuation” and speaks about an ‘exodus of British people’… Still confused, the man enters a church and sees a lot of people apparently asleep together, and when he calls out a priest comes stumbling quickly towards him, his face all bloody, clearly not well :-p and he runs away. Now everyone in the church has noticed his presence and they all go after him: luckily for him a man and a woman save him.

Now he can talk to someone, and we learn that he’s Jim (Cillian Murphy) and his saviors are Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomi Watts). They tell him what happened, about the epidemic spreading so quickly, everybody died. Jim can’t believe it, and wants to visit his parents’ home. He only remembers having an accident and nothing more. At his parents home, he sees their corpses: they killed themselves leaving him a note that reads something like ‘now we sleep with you, do not wake up’. It was actually a very touching note.

During the night Jim lights a candle to look around and think of them (it all happened so fast, he probably couldn’t catch up so quickly.. ).

The ‘infected’ see the light and break into the house. They all fight, but Mark gets hurt in the arm, so Selena kills him before he changes.

They start walking around as soon as it’s daylight, and see lights up on a building. They go there and meet Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). There’s no water but Jim still shaves his beard, cutting his face: sure he looks better and is now cleaner, but that doesn’t seem to me the smartest move… now he doesn’t need to be bitten, to get infected it’d be enough for some blood to be spilt on his face… anyway, this is a movie and appearances matter more than reason.

Frank has a power generator, and has them listen to a message on repeat saying that a group of soldiers have a cure and can protect anyone going there. Frank think it’s worth trying, because they can’t stay there forever.

He has a taxi, so they all go. They take a tunnel, had to change a tyre there, they go on, stop to get some fuel, and Jim enters the place alone, mumbling that Selena’s worries are annoying, but of course she’s right, and he gets attacked by an infected child and has to kill it. They go on, stop to get some food at a supermarket, then they eat in a field, and finally we see Selena’s smile, so pretty :-)

They finally arrive at the coordinates given in the message, but see nobody. Frank is desperate, loses his mind, shouts at a crow (I think it was) trying to scare him away while he was feeding on a corpse, and while Frank is looking up a drop of blood gets in his eye, and he changes. Selena shouts at Jim to kill him, but he doesn’t need to because soldiers appear shooting Frank dead. They take them all to the camp, and you could feel that something was not right when the soldiers used their radio to tell the camp that they found a man “and two women”… just the way he said that, and I thought “a woman and a girl…”

Major West (Christopher Eccleston) shows them around: it was not what they expected. There are less than a dozen soldiers there, West keeps an infected soldier prisoner to see how long it takes for him to die, and finally he tells Jim that to keep his soldiers alive and hopeful he had to promise them women! 

Jim tries to escape with Selena and Hannah, but they’re stopped. Only sergeant Farrell (Stuart McQuarrie) tries to help them, and will be killed for it. While still prisoners, Farrell tells Jim “think! actually think about it. What would you do with a diseased little island? They quarantined us” and “just people killing people, he’s insane!” talking about West.

When they kill Farrell, Jim manages to escape them. He runs away, and sees a plane in the sky! 

He activates an alarm to lure them out; he knocks one down (kills him I think) and takes his weapon. Goes back to the camp and frees the infected soldier by shooting at his chains (pretty good shooter! is it so easy?), so now the soldiers die one by one. One of them tries to hide in a room, and when he sees Jim he says crying that he has no bullets, begging him not to leave him alone, but of course Jim goes away, he has things to do (how could they not think about how many bullets they were wasting, I can’t understand how stupid they were..).

Jim reaches Hannah and Selena, and it’s a lovely moment when she’s about to hit him and he stays very still, and she doesn’t, and he tells her that that was longer than a heart beat, because she always told him that if she thought he was infected she’d kill him in a heartbeat… that moment reminded me of the Saiyuki moment when an out-of-control Hakkai is about to hit Gojyo but stops when he sees him very still, looking at him… awww

The three of them run away, get into the car but in the backseat there is West: “you killed all my boys” and shoots at Jim. Hannah starts the car, reverse towards the soldiers where the infected pull West out of the car, then she drives on, stopping only for Selena and Jim.

28 days later… Jim wakes up :-p he’s living in an isolated house with Selena and Hannah. They use all the cloth available to sew together a big thing (well, Selena is the one doing the sewing of course, because she’s the woman…). When Hannah hears an helicopter approaching, they spread it across the field, a lot of cloths spelling the word Hello very very big, so that they are finally seen :-)

(wasn’t the hello sign all white? didn’t they use any kind of coloured cloth they could find?…)

Anyway, the film ends here but it’s clear that the world has not ended, the infected are dying of starvation because there are no more people around, and now someone will come for our three survivors :-)

ITA 28 giorni dopo