IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched on Blu-Ray
"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." An iconic quote from George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead", the pop-cultural significance of which is familiar even to non-genre fans, given how often this classic has been plagiarized, reconstructed and parodied. But what if, and Romero did not categorically rule out this idea in 1978, hell is not a mythical-religious place of torment that is ravished by reality, but the earth, our home, itself? In any case, we humans have always done everything we can to maintain this impression: We slaughter our own kind en masse, deprive animals of their habitat by cutting down entire forests, and confuse evidence of power with rigorous stupidity - nothing is sacred to us, there are no more companions, there is only competition. In Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later", the gates into the infernal maw can be located in Great Britain - but the horror is fed by a global nature.
In 2002, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland unerringly penetrated collective states of fear because they did not define "28 Days Later" as a zombie film that speculated on the pure splatter effect, but rather created a scenario that shocked with its oppressive topicality: there was constant talk in the media of new infectious diseases (SARS), while BSE was slowly but surely also (once again) allowed to make the rounds. "28 Days Later" picks up on the general panic about these diseases and transfers them into a sparse horror corset in which the root of all evil can be traced back to the so-called "rage virus": After a group of activists attempt to free a horde of infected chimpanzees from their cages, the highly contagious virus breaks out and declares London a ghost town in no time at all. There is something incredibly spooky when bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from his coma and wanders through the dead streets of the metropolis: the buildings look like relics of a bygone era.
"28 Days Later" constantly triggers a draining feeling of powerlessness: This England consists only of the ruins of what was once civilization, everything material has lost its value, the newspapers waving around read something about evacuation, the advertising pillars overflow with the faces of the missing and there has long been no comfort to be found in the church, but rather the very hissing terror that also leaps through your window at night: What remains is the fight for survival, nothing more, nothing less. Together with Selena (Naomie Harris), Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns), Jim sets off to follow a radio message promising food and shelter to the outskirts of Manchester. What awaits the troops, however, is exactly what they might find anywhere: Totalitarian power structures, violence and the acting out of the basest instincts. Where civilization falls, civilized behaviour dies.
The destructive primal urges to which not only the soldiers on the military post have succumbed, but also the anonymous hordes of the infected, because they (possibly?) metaphorically reflect the true nature of man, are constantly put up for discussion in "28 Days Later": is it really the infected who come closest to the essence of man hidden behind the domesticated façade, because they have completely rid themselves of the social masquerade of etiquette and modesty? After all, it's all about eating. And that's also where the soldiers fit in, although they are only interested in fucking. Is man fundamentally evil? "28 Days Later" does not want to affirm this question, but it leaves this interpretation open, even though it describes our protagonists as an intact community that preserves hope through love in this coarse-grained end-time vision. Ultimately, however, it is only nature that remains, that regulates itself independently, that offers contemplation and poetry, where man sooner or later extinguishes himself through his own fault.