I saw Shaun of the Dead earlier this year and loved it. I’ve just recently watched 28 Days Later and it’s odd because Shaun, though a comedy, is a more “authentic” zombie experience, inasmuch as a zombie movie can be authentic, anyway. 28 Days Later is rather grim and I enjoyed it (I find Cillian Murphy a strangely mesmerizing presence) but the fast-moving infected in the film never struck me as frightening, more just crazed animals. You almost felt sorry for them — until they got their heads beaten in with baseball bats. This approach to the “enemy” took away from the overall mood of the film but then I realized that director Danny Boyle may have been creating, whether by intention or accident, an homage to The Day of the Triffids. Both stories start the same way — with a patient alone in a hospital after some catastrophic event has struck the world.
Each story then follows the protagonist as he bands with other survivors and ultimately comes into conflict with groups that have differing agendas, so in a way it’s not a zombie movie at all but more of a study in human behavior when people are forced into constant “do or die” situations and there is no longer any established authority to appeal to or seek shelter with.
The “bad boy” military also came off as a bit too convenient for the story and it was interesting to see in the deleted scenes a “radical alternate ending” that imagined the movie going off in a completely different direction with no military present at all (for the record, that ending would very likely have been worse).
It was refreshing to see they also went with a “happy” ending by having Cillian’s character of Jim survive. Several alternate endings were filmed where his character perishes after taking a bullet to the abdomen. Downer endings have become so de rigueur that a happy one almost seems to be bucking the system.
Recommended.
