28 Days Later/YMMV

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• Alas, Poor Villain: Some of the soldiers when Mailer gets loose, especially Bill who can only hide in the corner as he has no ammunition for his rifle.
• Broken Base: Go up to a group of fans of this movie and ask one simple question - 'is 28 Days Later a zombie movie?' Then stand back and watch the ensuing punch-up.
• Complete Monster: Mitchell, the vile soldier who gets a kick out of raping women and brutally murdering people as they beg for their lives. It says a lot about him that, in a film filled with violent psychotic murderers, he is by far the worst as he does it entirely of his own choosing and has no excuse for it like Major West does. He gets perhaps the most brutal death in the film, and he completely deserved it.
• Downer Ending: Danny Boyle has stated that the "true ending" has Jim dying in the abandoned hospital after being shot by the soldiers. You can imagine why this was reduced to a mere Alternate Ending.
• Even Evil Has Standards / Pet the Dog: Major West comforts one of his dying men.
• Fan Disservice: First of all, when you get to see Selena in her underwear it's because the soldiers stripped her and are planning to rape her as well as Hannah. Jim spends the last 20 minutes of the film shirtless - only problem is he's covered in blood and going around killing everyone.
• Fan Dumb:
  • The at-times increasingly pedantic debates over whether this movie is a zombie movie or not can sometimes take on this edge.
• Retroactive Recognition: The film's four leads went on to bigger things.
  • Cillian Murphy is now known as Scarecrow in "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight". He also played Robert Fischer Jr., the physical MacGuffin of "Inception".
  • Naomie Harris played Tia Dalma in the second and third "Pirates Of The Caribbean" films. She will be a Bond girl in Daniel Craig's third James Bond film, "Skyfall".
  • Brendan Gleeson (the father who joins the first two midway through the film) is a well-respected character actor whose first major role was in "Braveheart" and went on to play Alastor 'Mad-Eye' Moody in the "Harry Potter" films. Gleeson, an Irishman, also played Winston Churchill in the HBO TV movie "Into The Storm".
  • Christopher Eccleston went on to play the Ninth Doctor and is known as this for British audiences/Who fans. Americans would know him as Destro in the GI Joe live-action film.
• Scenery Gorn: The directors in their commentary were amazed at how they achieved a sense of ruin by blocking traffic for a few seconds. The film also has some really beautifully framed and executed shots that they shot with DV cameras to give it a really gritty feel.
• Title Confusion: in 2000, there was a Sandra Bullock film called 28 Days, in which she played a woman who was court-ordered to go through a rehab program. 28 Days Later was released two years later in 2002, leading a few (before they saw any trailers or promotional materials), to initially wonder if a sequel to 28 Days had been made.
• Wall Banger: After narrowly escaping execution at the hands of the soldiers, Jim returns to the house for revenge, and to rescue Hannah and Selena from being raped. So why, why, why is Jim's first decision upon getting back to the house to shoot the infected Private Mailer's chain, which kept him from entering the house and killing everybody? Didn't Jim remember that the only way for Mailer to get out of the courtyard is through the doorway which leads into the kitchen area of the house? It seems that Jim thought Mailer could help him kill off the soldiers which were holding the women hostage, but did he even consider that with an infected, rage-filled person running around the house that Mailer could chew off Selena and Hannah's faces before ever killing one soldier? And if Mailer did infect a couple of soldiers, might they not then try to infect the women?
  • Jim was just a guy going up against a house filled with trained soldiers. Freeing the infected was by no means a guarantee at success, but it leveled the playing field and raised his odds at complete success from utterly impossible to pretty hopeless.
  • Mailer provided a distraction for Jim. While the rest of the soldiers were dealing with Mailer, Jim would attempt to rescue the women. It's a desperate ploy, but it's all he's got at this point.

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