It seems to me that people are, deliberately or not, missing the themes of this movie so that some of the actions seem inexplicable, as in this case. And it’s odd, because in the best zombie movies, each character tends to take on an archetypal human role to further the filmmaker’s point. Selena has been the die-hard survivalist of the group, advocating that she’d ‘kill them in a heartbeat’. The director doesn’t support this mode of thinking, and has her fall back from that when really tested.
Well done, Weird_Al.
I agree with you. I just thought this was a fairly unremarkable movie, and I was really looking forward to seeing it. The two people I saw it with were even less flattering in their reaction to it. I’ll just never understand what people found so fascinating about this movie. I thought it pretty boring myself and the subject could have been explored in an infinite number of more fascinating ways. Pity, too, as I quite liked Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.
Minor Point -
We do have baseball bats. I owned one when I was about ten. As far as I know nobody in the country actually plays the game - if somebody has one in their house its more than likely it’s some attempt at home defence.
The sergent that Jim’s locked up with hints at this, but the real answer is still somewhat speculation. Basically, with a disease that was that contageous and quick to outbreak, the rest of the world put the UK on quatantine. All other nations closed off and stopped sending any signals to, or answering from, the UK in hopes of making sure the virus didn’t spread. I don’t know if that can be done in real life, but I even if someone was able to get a satelite phone or radio set up to get a signal of ordinary life outside the UK, I don’t think there was anyone in power or anyway for them to spread that information to do anyone any good.
And just out of curiosity, for all you people that found this movie too much of a stretch for your suspention of disbelief, would you mind sharing what kind of movies you do manage to enjoy? I mean, outside of documentary, historical drama and slice-of-life films, I can’ think of anything that doesn’t require a large amount of suspension of disbelief to enjoy.
Miller , thank you, your post was all you promised!
Jack Ketch said:
I’m all for suspending disbelief for a movie but this movie really pushed the limits.
psst steer cleer of Star Wars, and most other films.
I am with El Elvis Rojo here, please defend your position with some examples of splatter/horror flicks that are tighter at the seams and more believable, I would probably really enjoy them.
I love the empty streets shot, I love as well that they achieved this by being up way to early in the morning and having cute girls distract the drivers and ask them to not drive where they were filming. For me it works brilliantly. I love that they don’t show me corpses, cos I don’t want to know what has happened yet, they are reeling me in slowly. Something has happened, what is it, where is everyone, is that car just abandoned, why would somone just leave their car?! I share in Jims confusion. Sure I know that something happened in the lab, I have a little heads-up, but I don’t know exactly what is going on. If the streets are littered with corpses, then its answering all the questions in advance, it would be like somone in the queue to the cinema saying “it’s a virus thing, and it makes people kill other people and infect them, and in the end the Selena and Jim and the kid make it out cos it never spread beyond mainland UK!”. Sure, it tells me what happens, there isn’t much to nitpick, but it’s not much fucking fun either.
Ftr, the streets are empty because people fled the city. The dead are lying in huge waist deep carpets of corpses at the channel tunnel, the ports, Londons airports etc. Machete-fodder-guy painted us this picture and it works for me. As London emptied, the chi-chi poodles of Knightsbridge would go feral and begin to roam the streets, dragging away any eventual corpses and tearing them to shreds in alleys and doorways.
For me, the degree to which I can “suspend belief” depends on the movie’s premise. For that reason Star Wars was not the least bit of a problem. It was a long time ago in a galaxy far away. How should I know what could be possible in that setting? I’m willing to give a lot of freedom to the movie in that case. This movie was set in a time I know and it wasn’t advertised as a zombie flick. It is a “what if” flick. That means plausibility enters the picture.
IIRC, Omega Man was a very similar movie. A key difference was that radiation caused the “zombies” instead of a virus. They still stayed out of sunlight and attacked at night. The protagonist went out by day to gather supplies and look for survivors. He created a fortress with bright lights around it to keep the “zombies” at bay. The whole thing seemed much more plausible.
It’s not that every detail in a movie needs to be perfectly logical. It’s that the movie has to be largely true to what we would reasonably believe should happen. I’m reminded of the effect that a penny had on the Christopher Reeve character in that time travel movie (sorry, can’t think of the name right now). When he saw that it was out of place in time it broke the spell. The same thing happens to me when I see one of those “555” phone numbers in a movie. All of a sudden you remember your just watching a movie. Many of the flaws that Wierd Al mentioned had the same affect on me. I’d liked to have lost myself in the movie but couldn’t.
Scary movies that don’t require you to bend your brain into a pretzle to enjoy:
Alien
Jaws
The Exorcist
Psycho
The Silence of the Lambs
Hannibal (maybe)
The Shinning
Cape Fear
The Omen
I’m sure they all have their own flaws but the flaws don’t kill the movie.
Ummm…then what’s your beef with 28 Days Later? All anybody’s doing is picking apart the “flaws”. If the flaws don’t ruin the movie, what’s wrong with it? It had mood, a good story, and was great technically…if the minor details aren’t capable of destroying the enjoyment of the film, why did they ruin this one?
Jack, I see the problem. The problem isn’t with the film, it is with classifications and preconceptions. You went expecting a what-if movie, I went expecting a horror movie. When asked to name horror/splatter movies you enjoyed you talk about scary movies (some great choices there, btw) that I would never classify has horror/splatter despite the fact that some of them are indeed horrifying and some of them have a lot of splattering going on in them. 28 days later surpassed entirely the expectations I had of it. I understand that it didn’t live up to the expectations you had, but I don’t think that makes it a terrible film.
Iteki, I think you have it right. I was expecting something different than a slasher movie. I had the impression it would be a bit more heady.
Elvis, I think you miss my point about the flaws. I don’t expect a movie to be perfect. That’s why I’d admit the movies I mentioned probably have a few. However, I do expect the flaws to be kept to some reasonable level and not interfere with the magic of the experience. Wierd Al did a great job pointing out the fact that this film was overwhelmed by them. In this case the mistakes ruined the movie for me.
Yeah, I also noticed your movies were all a different genre than 28 Days Later. With the exception of The Omen and The Exorcist, they’re all suspense movies that are more likely to happen. I mean, how far of a stretch is The Silence of the Lambs from real life? There are very famous cases of someone kidnapping, murdering, and skinning people to make outfits out of their skin. Not much of a stretch for the imagination to accept when the story’s based on historical fact and not science fiction. So, think more about it…are there any slasher type horror films, or even action/romance films that you like that are just completely out there? The Matrix, Dr. Strangelove, Amelie, anything like that?
As for your other statement, this is where the problems with all debates come because it’s all a matter of opinion. What you see as “mistakes”, I see as tid bits that didn’t need to be explained, because to do so would bog the story down with grituitous information and detatch from the story. I already talked a lot about how I don’t view the lack of corpses and such a “mistake” because it was done intentionally to help set up the mood, and the effect of that kept me on the edge of my seat. I didn’t need Jim to wake up to the end of Resident Evil. I needed him to be bewildered, confused, and in a state of “What the Fuck?”, not “Oh my god, I’ve slept threw a war.” And I didn’t need shots of the infected sitting around having coffee with one another or enjoying their afternoon cup of tea so I could be shown that they actually ate and drank in order to survive. Just because I don’t see characters in other movies or t.v. shows taking a piss doesn’t make me think that they never use the bathroom.
And I kinda thought of something the other day, which could be a spark of inspiration to help explain something, or just one huge stinky brain fart, but I’ll share it anyway. The thing about rage is it essentially breaks down the infected person’s mental blocks of control over intense emotions (more specifically, anger). Now, say there’s a guy who’s a typical guy and one day he finds out he’s carrying the HIV bug. This sets him into a state of depression and anger, and he kinda snaps. Which reaction is more realistic? He goes out and finds other people infected with HIV and takes out his revenge on them; or, in his anger, he goes out and tries to infect other people, either by drastic means, such as poking them with a dirty syringe, or by more subtle means, such as punching holes in his condoms and not informing his partners that he’s a carrier? I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard a lot more of the latter stories in the news over the past couple of years. Now, imagine if everyone infected with the HIV virus had this same mentality? Okay, so let me just stress something real quick…I am in NO WAY saying anything more than an incredibly minute percentage of the HIV population do this (I’ve only heard of about two stories in the past four years or so), but what if all the infected have this same kind of mentality going on in their head? They know they’re infected with something, but they see each other as fellow victims and see uninfected as “snooty little fuckers who deserve to get theirs.”
It’s a mode of thinking that some people do go threw and has been documented, so it’s not that much of a stetch and may help answer the question for some of you. Of course, you could just accept the “zombies don’t kill other zombies unless they’re hoarding all the food” concept, but for some reason, that seems to baffle a lot of you.
What? Are you kidding? It was advertised as “Danny Boyle re-invents zombie horror.” Saying 28 Days Later wasn’t advertised as a zombie movie is like saying Star Wars wasn’t marketed as science fiction.
I thought it was a pretty good movie…
I was wondering, though, how they did the shots of downtown London without anyone in them. I could understand a shot of the skyscrapers without lights… that could be done by computer graphics or models (correct me if that’s not how they did it), but how did they do the scenes where he is walking around downtown without anyone around and also with the added props like the trashed bus and other assorted post-riot trash.
I posted in the other thread but dropped it since people were getting a wee bit defensive over the movie. I enjoyed the movie and thought it was well done to a point but do agree that it had serious problems. In the end, these problems can be overlooked and don’t really detract too much from the movie.
What I don’t get are the people who feel the need to invent out of movie explanations for everything. The movie had plot holes, deal.
I’m sure that some of the points being made about inconsistencies are on the mark.
But screw that; i thought the movie was fantastic, and nothing’s gonna change my mind.
They did it by filming very early in the morning. You will notice the the sun is quite loq in the scenes. The held the traffic and people back. They had quite a problem with drunk clubbers IIRC. They also did it quick. One of two attempts and that was it. Some of the scenes also had the cars and people digitally removed from the background.
I really liked the film. Yeah it has plot holes but so what. I looked at it with my sister who is a jumpy screamy wagon when looking at these types of movies. The movie freaked her out. Her reactions and the movie freaked me out. I looked at it to get a bit freaked out and it worked.
Oh and great work Miller
What? Come on! That woman was so stupid! What rational person would book into a hotel in the middle of nowhere with a creepy clerk who seems to have some abnormal relationship with his mother, and then take a shower?
Hasn’t she seen any movies?
I think what attracts the kind of nit-picking I did to the movie is that the really major flaws weren’t with aspects of the film like, how long could the infected survive, or why didn’t they attack each other, or why weren’t there any radio/satellite broadcasts. When you go to see a horror movie, or science fiction or fantasy, you start with a blanket suspension of disbelief on the “physics” of the movie that make it what it is, whether that’s undead monsters, warp drives or dragons.
But then you expect the characters to live by the internal logic the movie establishes. You especially expect them to react in ways that any person would – that is what allows you to sympathize with them and their conflicts. This is true regardless of whether the main characters are actually human or not. They have to have understandable motivations for us to identify with them as characters.
28 Days didn’t keep the characters tight. The easiest example of this to look at is the cab driving father. He holes up in their flat because he fears for his daughter’s life, he believes leaving would be riskier than staying. This is a great set-up. We can all identify with love of family, and the difficultly of weighing known risks against mostly unknown risks. But then the first thing he does when he makes the decision to leave the flat is to act like an idiot and drive through that tunnel and pretend he is at a monster truck rally – all with his beloved daughter in the car.
Its not the inconsistencies in the “zombie logic” that bothered me (those got covered under the blanket suspension of disbelief), it is that the main characters seemed to have no consistency to their motives and actions. This movie had awesome potential, the mood the director set, the slow reveal of information so that you were as much in the dark about things as Jim – all that was good. If the main characters had acted in a way that made sense, that you could have looked at and thought “yeah, I would have done the same thing” then this could have been a really great movie. It just wasted its potential with really dumb mistakes.
rainy
weird_al – you ask some pretty good questions in the original post, but whoever you got to answer them for you seems pretty stupid.
Q: I just saw Cold Mountain.
A: Ummm hmmmm
Q: Pretty unrealistic.
A: What do you mean?
Q: Well, he walked from Virginia to North Carolina, across fields, mountains, dirt roads, through the snow, and I only saw him drink water once. One drink of water over a month, and he was walking every day?
A: Pretty unrealistic. That must be some kind of super hero walker. That’s all I can think of.
I have a question that I asked once upon a time, but it never got answered so I’m going to try again.
It’s been a long time now since I’ve seen the movie, but IIRC, wasn’t there a scene where Jim comes across a family who are all dead? Some lying in bed. Some at a dinner table. (my memory about this is suspect). If they died of the virus, why weren’t they filled with Rage and become Zombies? If they didn’t die of the virus, what did they die of? IT didn’t appear that they died violently, so they weren’t killed by Zombies.