So, without further ado, read on for our reviews.
Jon's Review:
28 Days Later is a fine, entertaining movie. It's not the second coming of Jesus, but I don't think any of us really expected that anyway. I mean, it's a zombie flick, and Jesus was certainly the most famous Zombie of them all, even though he was a good zombie that didn't eat anyone (although he did ask other people to eat him, which I guess makes him sort of an inverse zombie), but he's just not in the movie at all, and there's no way to change that.
But I digress. Let's get the obligatory complaints out of the way so that I can tell you why I liked the movie with a clear conscience. And because, like Jesus, I am a Jew, and if there's one thing that Jews do best, it's complain. Actually, I should probably give you a little bit of background on the movie first. The movie portrays a post-apocalyptic view of London after a virus has spread through the population and turned them all into mindless, murdering fiends. We follow a handful of survivors on a happy-go-lucky journey through this wasteland as they try to figure out what the hell they should do with all this free time they suddenly have.
Now the complaints. First off, their empty, silent London doesn't work for me. I understand that they had budget constraints, and that a London devoid of life works from an aesthetic viewpoint, but part of this movie is that they try to give a veneer of scientific reason to why zombie-like creatures might come to pass. If you're going to try and redesign a concept that I've already invested some suspension of disbelief in several times in the past, you'd better go the whole nine yards and be extremely detailed. Stephen King does a great job of describing what the streets of cities might look like after a fatal virus sweeps through in his novel The Stand -- cars in the middle of the road, bodies strewn will-nilly, unburied, general chaos. Londoners must be extremely polite and tidy, because most of them have dragged their own corpses off the streets.
As long as we're nitpicking, why don't the zombies ever attack each other?
All this can be overlooked. The one thing I can't overlook is the almost complete lack of character development. if you want me to connect to your horror flick, you have to make me connect to your characters. You have to make me care about them. These characters, with the single exception of widowed father Frank (played by Brendan Gleeson), are drawn in the boldest strokes. The fiercely independent street-tough lady. The blank-faced hero onto whom we're supposed to project ourselves. The sullen daughter. The cruel military folks. Two lines of dialogue apiece, and that's about it. At least Frank has a nice speech about single malts, with which I can identify. He's someone I would want to hang with if the world ended.
Alas, this can be said about most movies these days, so there's no real news here. Aside from that, it's lots of fun. Having been made outside of the Hollywood system, this movie avoids a lot of the formulaic stuff and keeps you guessing the whole time. That's a good thing for a suspense movie. it has its own look and feel and is better off for not having had a bunch of movie execs butchering it. The actors do a great job with the limited dialogue they're given; it's a testament to their abilities that I did care about them at all.
And, of course, the zombie action is first rate. Scary stuff -- these aren't your father's zombies. They move fast.
Would I recommend the movie? Yes, if you're looking for a fun way to spend two hours over the weekend. If you're looking for something a bit different than the typical fare we get crammed down our throats. And especially if you've got a squeamish date. I give the movie seven turtles and a toaster.
Phillip's Review:
Unlike Jon (and Jesus, for that matter), I'm not a jew, and yet I seemed to have more complaints about the movie than either of them did.
Jon came out of the movie all full of nice things to say (as he did above) about how he really enjoyed the unpredictable-ness of the non-formulaic-ness of the movie. I came out of the movie berating him for making up words, and complaining that I thought the timing was off, and that overall the movie just never got going. The whole film was shot in DV, for budget constraint purposes, and I felt that there was a number of times when that showed, and the film work was trying a little too hard to be fancy, distracting me from what was actually happening. I guess, I'm just not as cool, avant-garde, and hip as your local neighborhood cartoonist.
Conversely, because I've been so well trained by the establishment, Jon's nit-picks didn't bug me as much. I have enough suspension of disbelief that I can come up with reasons at least as plausible as a virus that takes over your body in 20 seconds to explain those things away if I want to. What bugged me was the story never sucked me in. I think this is where Jon and I agree, I never cared about the characters or the events they were going through.
Overall, if you really want to see a somewhat interesting, first draft reinvention of the zombie movie format, go, watch, and enjoy. However, if, like me, you think that $10 is better spent on two pints of beer, then go, drink and enjoy, instead. Because I reserve the beer for the "however" case, I give this movie 3 stale croissants and a pot of coffee.
