28 Days Later was a huge deal when it came out. I remember people were talking about the "running zombies" and how innovative that was. It was British, which was different as well.
Danny Boyle was a director I had known for a while, as I loved Trainspotting and I had seen Shallow Grave when I was really young, at a ski resort where some weird ski guy put it on late at night and I watched it, completely terrified. At this point he had "done no wrong" and I truly don't think he had a even slightly bad film he'd made.
Cillian Murphy stars as a young hospital patient that wakes up to a seemingly abandoned, empty England. As he wanders the streets, he discovers he's not alone, there are in fact people who are infected with a virus. A virus, which is only identified as "rage" at one point, which makes them attack anyone not already infected and which makes them completely savage.
It's a fresh new take on the zombie idea, with a lot of small scale concerns taking front stage. My immediate thought as I watched it is that, this exact (and I mean EXACT) idea would later become two or three individual seasons worth of The Walking Dead. The whole idea of them finding a well fortified base of soldiers and/or survivors, and then of those guys posing a threat as well... suffice to say that Walking Dead copied the fuck out of this film.
I remembered the soundtrack to 28 Days being great, and it is. Minimalistic, strange, eerie, the soundtrack was a big deal then and is a big deal now. The editing, the acting, the pace, it's all absolute top notch. This is one of the films that helped "re-launch" zombies into the mainstream now, where they're fuckin everywhere you look. I give it a 4.5.
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