A Film Canon

The strongest instance of the 00s zombie revival, and equal to anything in Romero or Raimi's back catalogues, 28 Days Later is a remarkably eloquent reconsideration of what the zombie might mean politically, and how that meaning might be subverted. From the beginning, Danny Boyle likens the zombie 'rage' that decimates London to a working-class insurrection, leaving a city that's poised somewhere between its two main inhabitants - zombies and commodities - and their respective suggestions of a socialist utopia and an apotropaic placement of products against just this possibility. Boyle's digital camera works exquisitely for this alternation between hypnotic stillness and hyper-movement - for the former, the digital resolution is just poor enough to imbue the hypnotic, luminous vision of a deserted metropolis with a visual hush; for the latter, it succeeds in condensing the zombies to so many bundles of energy, making it clear that the real object of horror isn't ultimately the zombies themselves (gore is kept to a relative minimum), but the rapidity with which the rage virus spreads, its ability to conflagrate a group of disparate people into a single, unified crowd, to instantly transform potential into kinetic energy: "...and then it wasn't on the TV anymore. It was on the street outside, coming through your walls." With the second act, this sublime ambivalence becomes even more marked, as Boyle draws on long-time collaborator Brian Eno's score to suffuse a small group of survivors' movement north with a strange nostalgia for the future, seguing a socialist utopia into a pre-capitalist paradise; a summer holiday to Albion. But it's with the third act that Boyle cements his vision, as the survivors finds themselves incorporated into a fascist, militaristic pastiche of Englishness, placed in much the same experimental and objectified position as the laboratory gorillas that open the film - that is, in the position of the zombies themselves, one of whom protagonist Jim (Cillian Murphy) sets free, in the radical gesture that leads to the conclusion. Even the conventional, concluding spectacle of American salvation is offset by the second ending, which screened after the credits in most theatres, but is relegated to a DVD extras menu. It's an extraordinary effort, confirming Boyle as one of the 00s directors most interested in understanding digital cinema in terms of sublimity, and producing a surface so fragile and poised that even a distant vapour trail might puncture it.