Movie Reviews

Having never seen a "zombie movie" before, I was curious to see what all the hoopla surrounding 28 Days Later was about. Unfortunately, if this is what's considered a "good" zombie movie, I'm not sure I'd care too much to see many others.

The problem is that there's such a great setup in the film, but the plot consists mainly of the small group of main characters just running away from zombies. At the opening of the film, a group of extreme environmental activists breaks into a research laboratory itent on freeing the animals within. The animals have been given some kind of strange drug called 'rage', however, and twenty-eight days after the first 'liberated' monkey attacks and bites one of the environmentalists, almost all of England's population has been infected with zombie-disease.

Cool! Post-apocolyptic London, zombies on the loose, a small group of uninfected strangers banding together to find a way to survive, and a mysterious radio transmission alerting that a cure has been discovered at a remote miltary outpost. But once that cool stuff has been established, not much else really happens. Zombies attack, the group runs away. Other zombies attack, the group runs somewhere else. Apparently there seemed to be some attempt at establishing more of a story with the people at the military outpost, but most of that stuff fell kind of flat for me.

The zombies themselves were fairly cool too, I guess. There's something kind of creepy about watching an otherwise-ordinary looking (but perhaps a little dirty and scruffy) person lurch and stumble mindlessly (or single-mindedly...) towards an intended victim. But I didn't find the movie nearly as scary as I was hoping it would be. It's too bad that the filmmakers weren't able to either: a) ratchet up the tension to make this more of a 'jump-scare' kind of movie, or b) flesh out the more disturbing elements of the spreading infection and resultant zombies.

I certainly wouldn't say that 28 Days Later was a terrible movie, because it really wasn't. I think I was just pretty dissappointed that it wasn't as good or as scary as I hoped it would be.