28 Days Later
Director Danny Boyle returns for a haunting look at our possible future. After animal rights activists release some rage-inflicted apes, its virus quickly spreads around the world. It simply takes the introduction of infected blood into the blood stream to get rage, something easily done with the inflicted being bloody and vomiting blood non-stop. 28 days later, Jim, a bike messenger, wakes up from a coma only to find the hospital and the entire city of London deserted. Church won't do any good; it's filled with dead bodies and beady-red-eyed humans inflicted with rage. He soon meets up with a few unaffected people, Selena and a father-daughter duo, and make their way toward a radio broadcast calling out for help. What they find is a small group of soldiers questioning their future in a world filled with nothing for them. Jim and his group must fight off the inflicted and the uninflicted in order to survive.

Though with flaws, Boyle returns from the disastrous "The Beach" to deliver a solid and scary thriller. His digital camera work, blurred and shaky with closeups galore a la Blair Witch, adds a level of tension to an already scary situation of zombies roaming around and soldiers being absolutely controlling. It's hard to tell what keeps these zombies going except to seek out living beings and spit blood all over them, but these encounters are few and far between in the movie as most of the first 2/3rds of the movie is characters roaming around looking for other people, a storyline that takes an hour to tell even though it could have done in half that time. But the true scary aspects of the film lie not with the red eyes of the zombies (yes, scary enough), but with the shocking reality of the situation they're in and the things humans do, such as the soldiers, in reaction to it. Boyle thus sees this as an opportunity to do something big, almost epic, with this film, evident from the wide shots of a deserted London and the unnecessary length of its climactic bloody scenes, when all that's needed is something smaller. 2.5 stars