Both are wearied and trauma hardened by their ordeals, but have different perspectives on their suffering, with Mark’s gallows humor opposed to Selena’s more serious and pragmatic professionalism. He is rescued by two other survivors, the distinctly contrasting Selena and Mark. The notion of birth followed by christening is also prevalent. So far, Jim has been in the realm of a hospital and a church, and found no help or care in either. The first ‘zombie’ that Jim encounters, quite notably, is a priest. A visit to a church throws further analytic musings into the mix, as this edifice most commonly associated with sanctuary and hope is overrun by bloodthirsty infected and has its walls daubed with pessimistic, nearly obscene messages of fear and apocalypse. His inquisitiveness in the early stages sees him wander the empty streets of London, without care for his own safety, the innocent curiosity of a child. Having conveniently missed the outbreak and its aftermath, Jim wanders into the world ignorant to his surroundings and with no understanding of what life now holds.
The newborn symbolism isn’t just hinted at the film warps its own gritty reality to make it predominant. The simple truth is that under no circumstances would a medical patient find themselves in this state of undress, while said sufferer’s awakening after weeks alone in an abandoned facility following life-threatening injuries, shorn of vital treatment, is a logical jump too far. The main character Jim awakens naked in a hospital bed, completely vulnerable and defenseless. With this set up taken care of, we kick into the real plot, and perhaps the most symbolically significant shot of the film. Everybody, this sequence tells us, is guilty. The evil of the science sets up the blundering stupidity of the righteous, while the activists’ lack of care for the words of warning they hear represents an ignorance that borders on hypocrisy, so blinded by their moral crusade that they fail to take heed of the damage they will do. Even when we try to do a decisively right thing, we simply throw fuel on the fire of destruction. A combination of exploitative research, the scientists abusing nature in search of some form of advanced genetics, and naïvely good and blindly damaging intentions see the pathogen unleashed on the public. Then we have the spark that causes the outbreak of ‘rage’, a virus seemingly the result of poorly judged science. Not only do we do great evil to ourselves, it seems to say, but we cannot even allow the more benevolent animals in our midst to remain separated from that realm of inherent cruelty. The first thing we see is depictions of mankind’s privation, shots of rioting, fighting and violence, subjected to a barbarically restrained and imprisoned chimpanzee. While this theory may have been better justified had the film not featured its ultimately unnecessary prologue sequence, its presence does possess some traits which add weight to such a hypothesis, a quick stab at exposition set up used as the cloak for a 2001 style indictment of humanity’s failings. Interestingly, many of the crucial creative choices by Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland, here producing his finest script, lend credence to the notion that all is not what it seems within 28 Days Later, and that its bleak atmosphere and constant mood of perilous dread in fact serve to a more simple symbolic agenda this survival thriller is in fact a candid, misanthropic and brutally cynical metaphor for the grind of everyday, normal life in our very real world. Simple tricks such as subverting standardized niche tropes and avoiding use of the ‘Z word’ were combined with a sweepingly ambitious, more pragmatic route of plot as its small band of heroes looked for survival and hope in desolated Great Britain. The film that regained Danny Boyle his red hot status after the wrong turn represented by A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach, 28 Days Laterserved as a refreshingly original take on a zombie horror sub-genre that enjoyed a new lease of (undead) life in the intervening period following its success.
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