28 Days Later (2002)
Apr. 30th, 2011 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miss_haitch posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
bechdel_testI recently rewatched the horror film 28 Days Later and was impressed at how well it stands the test of time. Jim, a bicycle courier, wakes up alone in a London hospital, and things have changed. A lot. People taken over by a lethal "rage" virus run rampant, attacking and infecting anyone in their path. Running from the infected, Jim teams up with Selena and Mark and hides out in a newspaper kiosk. And then the scary really sets in...
It's the low-key and character-driven moments that make 28 Days Later so effective - it's fairly quiet for a zombie film, which for me makes the suspenseful bits almost unbearable (but also a lot of fun). The main characters are likeable, and there's very much a sense of ordinary people having to deal with an utterly extraordinary situation.
I really appreciated having two major female characters - Selena, a pragmatic survivor and Hannah, a teenager still numb from the apocalyptic events. They talk to each other about varied things - surviving, driving, food-foraging and more.
Content notes for the film: rated 18 in the UK, it includes explicit language, graphic gory violence, and threat of sexual assault - and is very bleak in places.
It's the low-key and character-driven moments that make 28 Days Later so effective - it's fairly quiet for a zombie film, which for me makes the suspenseful bits almost unbearable (but also a lot of fun). The main characters are likeable, and there's very much a sense of ordinary people having to deal with an utterly extraordinary situation.
I really appreciated having two major female characters - Selena, a pragmatic survivor and Hannah, a teenager still numb from the apocalyptic events. They talk to each other about varied things - surviving, driving, food-foraging and more.
Content notes for the film: rated 18 in the UK, it includes explicit language, graphic gory violence, and threat of sexual assault - and is very bleak in places.