28 Days Later

28 Days Later is a 2002 post-apocalyptic science fiction movie directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland. 28 Days Later is set in England at the beginning of the 21st century.

The "Infected"

28 Days Later differs from many zombie films in that "the Infected" are not undead zombies, but living humans driven insane by a highly communicable virus. As a result, rather than lumbering towards human victims like zombies, the Infected move extremely fast; and, because of an adrenaline rush, they have great strength and endurance. However, as they are not zombies the "only way to kill it is to shoot out its brain" rule that applies to zombies does not apply to them, so any wound that would kill a normal human could kill them.

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A development that Major West pointed out is that the Infected are living human beings, but they never eat food (or human flesh like zombies do), either because they have forgotten how or are so consumed by rage that they do not bother. Major West correctly surmized that the Infected would all eventually starve to death as a result, though exactly how long was uncertain (one should point out that a human body is much more likely to succumb from lack of water before dying of starvation); he actually had an Infected-soldier chained up but not killed for the express purpose of finding out how long it would take for it to starve. In the flash-foward to another "28 days later" at the end of the film (2 months after the outbreak), the ground was seen littered with emaciated, immobile Infected that would soon die of starvation (who, speaking in biological terms, would most likely have been infected well after the initial outbreak, as a human body could not survive 56 days without food and water).

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The film is also ambiguous on how far across the planet the Rage-virus infection has spread, thus putting us in the position of the characters who also do not know now that communications are gone. Early in the film, Selena tells Jim that the infection spread across all of Great Britain, and that the day before all television communications went down, there were reports of Infections in New York and Paris. However, later in the film a dejected soldier laments to Jim that because they're radio-isolated, for all the characters know the infections in New York and Paris were contained and the rest of the planet survived, while the entire island of Great Britain has been quarantined. Another unusual fact is that the virus infects people so quickly that it could not possibly make it to New York on any kind of transportation. The other characters were skeptical of this; however, talks are going on for a sequel to 28 Days Later titled "28 Weeks Later" which seems to assume that the rest of the planet stopped the spread of infection and, now that most of the Infected in Britain have starved to death, are going to try to re-colonize it. Rowan Joffe is in talks to write the script, and Danny Boyle and Alex Garland will take a producing role along side Andrew Macdonald.

Related Topics:
Rowan Joffe - Danny Boyle - Alex Garland - Andrew Macdonald

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