28 Days Later (2002)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHETHER OR NOT ANYONE SURVIVES)

[Now for the movie that started the whole virus infected speed zombie controversy.]

28 Days Later (2002) Directed by Danny Boyle. Staring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson and Christopher Eccleston.

In the end Cillian Murphy and his two female companions survive to make contact with the outside world.

Following the animal rights activist release of an alarmingly violent chimpanzee from a medical research facility, cycle courier Murphy comes round from a road traffic accident induced coma to find himself completely alone in an abandoned major London hospital.

Dressing himself in green medical scrubs, Murphy sets off through a deserted city rife with signs of some chaotic catastrophe looking for help and answers.

Unfortunately for Murphy, the first person he encounters is a maniacal, blood splattered priest obviously intent on extracting more than just a confession from him.

Murphy's flight attracts an increasing number of similarly rabid individuals until he is rescued by a young pair who lead him to their refuge in a London Underground station snack kiosk.

Although unaware of the exact source of infection, Naomie Harris and her companion explain the rapid contagion that has spread uncontrollably through the population turning everyone affected into blood-crazed monsters.

The full horror of the situation is revealed to Murphy, first, when the pair help him to reach his parents' home, where he finds that they have committed suicide, and then, when Harris slaughters her companion without hesitation, as soon as she sees that he has accidentally come into contact with one of the infected.

Murphy and Haris's prospects seem bleak until they discover another pair of survivors, Brendan Gleeson and his teenage daughter, who plan to abandon their fortified tower block apartment in order to track down the origin of a prerecorded radio transmission promising a solution to infection.

Travelling north in Gleeson's black taxi cab, the group eventually reach a corpse strewn blockade that turns out to be the source of the broadcast.

When Gleeson is accidentally infected by one of the corpses, the group is only saved by the sudden appearance of a squad of soldiers, who subsequently take Murphy and the women to a nearby mansion that they have made into a base.

There they meet the soldiers' commanding officer, Christopher Eccleston, who explains that the promised solution is to wait for the infected to starve to death, while his men get busy repopulating society with the willing, or otherwise, help of the women that have been lured to their camp.

Realising their mistake, Murphy has to escape the now murderous squaddies and somehow free the trapped women, which he does with the help of an infected soldier who he lets loose in the mansion.

As the crazed soldier works his way through his former comrades, Murphy and the women take flight in Gleeson's cab, but not before Murphy is shot in the chest by a soon to be consumed Eccleston.

Harris is obviously no stranger to the emergency room, though, as she succeeds in saving Murphy's life.

The movie closes with the trio signalling their survival with a huge homemade banner spread out on the ground for a low flying jet fighter that buzzes the isolated cottage that they have made their home to see.


George A. Romero purists may have balked at Boyle's reinvention of the zombie horror movie. But there's no denying that his creation sustained a genre that became hard to take seriously after its superb spoofing by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004) which actually made an oblique reference to Boyle's contested premise that zombies could result from a virus infection and would die unless sustained by consuming others.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_of_the_Dead