28 days later

Summary

Three animal advocates go to a laboratory to deliver monkeys to strange experiences of violence. Despite the warnings of a scientist on the virulence of the virus of the fury that was injected, they release a monkey who, furious, bites a person. The animal is immediately killed but the victim becomes enraged and throws himself on others. Twenty-eight days later, Jim (who was in a coma) wakes up at St. Thomas Hospital in London , where the locals have all disappeared.

Jim leaves the hospital and walks the streets of a totally deserted city. He enters a church and discovers there a macabre spectacle of bodies piled up. He then draws the attention of people to the strange, red stare that begins to pursue him. He receives the unexpected help of two people who take him to their shelter. His two saviors, Marc and Selena, present themselves as survivors of a disaster: a disease that turns infected people into bloodthirsty murderers has spread at an incredible speed throughout the country, has caused a mass exodus of people and the quarantine of the island. Some isolated survivors still escape those who are infected with the virus of “fury”.

The next day, Jim insists on going to his parents’ house, and discovers that they killed themselves so they would not end up contaminated themselves, with a word of farewell addressed to their son. The three survivors are getting ready to spend the night in the house, but some of them are coming in and attacking them. Mark is wounded in the arm, and is immediately killed by Selena before he transforms.

Jim and Selena leave the house and are attracted by lights coming from the balcony of a building. Again pursued by infected, they owe their salvation to Frank, a taxi driver living with his daughter Hannah and who repels the infected with riot gear. Frank welcomes Jim and Selena with joy. With the resources short, the newly formed group decided to leave London by car: Frank picked up a radio message informing the survivors that the solution to the contamination would be in a base near Manchester . They fail to be caught by the contaminated during a puncture in a tunnel, but escape in extremis and manage to leave the capital.

Near Manchester, devastated by a terrible fire, Frank receives a drop of blood from a corpse in the eye. At the moment that Frank is contaminated, soldiers spring up and shoot him down. The three survivors are taken to a nearby castle where a small troop of soldiers has been entrenched. Under the command of Major West, they claim to start from scratch and represent a new departure from civilization. The major is indeed convinced that the contaminated, having no intelligence, will eventually die of hunger.

But Jim ends up understanding during a conversation with the major that they have no solution to the contamination and that there is no reason to think that civilization could get up: the major then reveals to him that what makes his men, it is the promise of women that the small group has indeed provided them. Trying to escape with Hannah and Selena, Jim was immediately neutralized by the men of Major West and taken to be shot with one of the soldiers who had defended them. But the two soldiers charged to execute them argue between them after the execution of their comrade, and Jim takes advantage of their distraction to cross the wall of the castle. His pursuers, the believer condemned with all the contaminated dragging around, abandon the pursuit.

When the siren sounds from the roadblock, the soldiers understand that Jim has survived and Major West decides to go there personally, accompanied by a soldier. Jim ambates them and kills the subordinate. Selena and Hannah are about to be raped, but Jim, who has joined the castle, releases a tainted soldier that his brothers in arms had kept chained to study. This one sows the panic in the castle: the contaminated one transmits the virus to one of the soldiers and together they kill one by one the other soldiers. Jim also kills two soldiers and takes advantage of the chaos to free Hannah and Selena. The three survivors manage to leave the castle not without having first left Major West, who seriously wounds Jim by shooting, to be killed by his own men.

The film wrapped up a few weeks later as the small group fled to a home away from home where Jim recovered from his injury. A military plane passes over starving critics and then spots their giant emergency call banner.

Technical sheet

• Original title: 28 Days Later …
• French title: 28 days later
• Director: Danny Boyle
• Scenario: Alex Garland
• Sets: Mark Tildesley
• Costumes: Rachael Fleming
• Photography: Anthony Dod Mantle
• Editing: Chris Gill
• Music: John Murphy
• Production: Andrew Macdonald
• Production Companies: British Film Council and DNA Films
• Distribution Company: 20th Century Fox (Worldwide)
• Budget: US $ 8,000,000 ¹
• Country of origin: United Kingdom
• Language: English
• Format: Colors – DV and 35 mm (final stage only) – 1.85: 1 – Son DTS
• Genre: Horror , post-apocalyptic science fiction
• Duration: 113 minutes
• Release dates:
  •  United Kingdom :1 ^st November 2002
  •  Belgium : April 16 , 2003
  •  France : May 28 , 2003
  •  Canada : June 27 , 2003
• Film banned under 16 when it was released in France.

Distribution

• Cillian Murphy (VF: Adrien Antoine ) : Jim
• Naomie Harris (VF: Géraldine Asselin ) : Selena
• Megan Burns : Hannah
• Brendan Gleeson (VF: Sylvain Lemarié ) : Frank
• Christopher Eccleston (VF: Eric Herson-Macarel ) : Major Henry West
• Noah Huntley (VF: Bruno Dubernat ) : Mark
• Stuart McQuarrie (VF: Pascal Casanova ) : Sergeant Farrell
• Ricci Harnett (VF: Didier Cherbuy ) : Corporal Mitchell
• Luke Mably (VF: Bruno Choël ) : Private Clifton
• Leo Bill (VF: Taric Mehani) : Private Jones

Source dubbing : VoxoFilm (VF) ²

Production

Preproduction

Following the adaptation of the novel The Beach by Danny Boyle, writer Alex Garland approached the producer Andrew Macdonald to offer him a film concept zombies able to run ³ .

For Jim’s role, the first choice was Ewan McGregor . But since there was never an agreement with the British actor, the director chose Canadian Ryan Gosling, who refused the role because of scheduling conflicts and it was here that Cillian Murphy was finally chosen ⁴ .

Shooting

Filming began on 1 ^st September 2001 and lasted nine weeks ⁵ . This is inspired by the beginning of the novel The Day of the Triffids , where a man wakes up in the hospital and discovers that the entire population has become blind, that Alex Garland wrote the first scenes of the film ⁶ . The film was shot almost entirely lightly, in DV camera, in order to reduce the number of shootings (each scene is filmed by several cameras) and to limit their preparation time, which is crucial when it comes to emptying parts of the city or sections of motorways. The DV image also has the property of creating a documentary or reporting atmosphere. To turn his images of London completely deserted, the director obtained the collaboration of the London authorities so that the circulation is interrupted while he turned, generally the early Sunday morning, in places generally very frequented as Westminster Bridge , Piccadilly Circus , Horse Guards Parade and Oxford Street ⁷ .

The mansion where much of the second half of the film was shot is Trafalgar Park in Salisbury , while the last scenes of the film were shot near Lake Emmerdale in Lake District ⁸ . Originally, the second half of the film was to be radically different from the one that was shot: in lieu of the soldiers, Jim and his friends found the lab from which the virus had spread. A surviving scientist explained to them that the only way to cure Frank was a complete blood transfusion and Jim sacrificed himself to heal him. The original script was changed by Danny Boyle because the way of healing was not plausible, and the storyboardoriginal is available in the bonuses of the DVD of film ⁷ , as well as scenes cut from an alternative end where Jim, who is taken to emergency in a hospital by Selena and Hannah who try to save him after their escape from the castle, does not survive not to his injury.

Soundtrack

The music of the film was composed by John Murphy and also includes titles by well-known artists like Brian Eno and Grandaddy . A version of East Hastings from Godspeed You! Black Emperor appears in the film but not on the album because Danny Boyle could not get permission from the band to use their song for the movie ⁹ .

In popular culture, the title In The House – In A Heartbeat has become a musical reference of horror genre and zombie worlds . The anime Highschool of the Dead pays tribute to him in a scene of the first episode.

Home

Box office

The film was a major commercial success, earning US $ 82,719,885 at the global box office , more than ten times its budget, including $ 45,064,915 in North America ¹ . It carries 196,722 entries in France , 101,875 entries in Quebec , 92,171 entries in Belgium and 36,779 entries in Switzerland ¹⁰ . It exceeds one million admissions in the United Kingdom (1,367,717) and Spain (1,281,703) and half a million entries inGermany (551 898) ¹⁰ .

Home Review

It received a generally positive criticism, receiving 87% of favorable reviews, with an average score of ^7.4 / ₁₀ and based on 219 reviews collected, on the site Rotten Tomatoes ¹¹ . On the website Metacritic , it gets a score of ⁷³ / ₁₀₀ , based on 39 reviews collected ¹² .

The film is credited in general for giving a new impetus to the genre of the zombie movie . In 2008 the magazine Empire the class to the 456 ^th place in its list of the 500 best films of all time ¹³ . Bloody Disgusting , a horror movie website, ranks it seventh on its list of the top 20 horror movies of the 2000s , commenting: “Zombie Movie? Political allegory? Humanistic drama? 28 days is all this at once, and more – a real working artist by a director at the top of his ” ¹⁴ . In 2007,Stylus Magazine ranks second best zombie movie of all time ¹⁵ . In 2017, the magazine Time Out class in 97 ^th place in its list of 100 best British films of all time ¹⁶ .

In France , the film obtained more mixed reviews, obtaining a score of 3.1 / 5, based on 16 press reviews, on the site AlloCiné ¹⁷ .

Distinctions

Unless otherwise stated, this list comes from information from the Internet Movie Database ¹⁸ .

Awards

• Award for best British film at the Empire Awards in 2003.
• Prize for Best Photography at the European Cinema Awards in 2003.
• Award for best director at the Fantasporto festival in 2003.
• Prize for best foreign film at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival in 2003.
• Saturn Award for Best Horror Film in 2004.

Appointments

• Empire Award of Male Revelation for Cillian Murphy in 2003.
• European Film Award for Best Director 2003.
• Irish Film and Television Award for Best Actor for Cillian Murphy in 2003.
• Saturn Award for Best Direction and Best Screenplay in 2004
• Hugo Award for Best Film in 2004
• MTV Movie Award of the Male Revelation for Cillian Murphy in 2004.
• Chlotrudis Awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Photography in 2004.

Suites and adaptations

A sequel, 28 weeks later , was released in 2007 , and the project of a third installment, 28 months later , scheduled for 2012 at the earliest ¹⁹ , is now compromised, with Danny Boyle estimating at 40% the odds that it is done ²⁰ .

28 Days Later: The Aftermath , a graphic novel published in 2007 at Fox Atomic Comics, is the link between 28 days later and its sequel. The film also inspired a series of comics , 28 Days Later , which has 24 issues and was published by Boom! Studios between 2009 and 2011. These comics have Selena as their main character and take place two months after the outbreak of the epidemic. They have been translated into French by Delcourt Publishing House ²¹ .

References