YMMV / 28 Days Later

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Major Henry West really a Manipulative Bastard, or is he a good man driven insane by the situation surrounding him?
  • The rest of the soldiers too. Are they really driven mad and gone monstrous enough to rape innocent women? How many of them would have actually gone through with it? Some theorise that they may have raped Selena but would have stopped short of raping Hannah too. Notably one of the soldiers is seen shaking his head sadly as they leave Hannah and Selena to change.
• Applicability: The last part of the film involves an Irish man massacring a number of British soldiers portrayed as the real monsters of the story. He also does this to save a black woman and a working class girl (all three examples of oppressed people within British society, though there is a black soldier too). In an upper class mansion no less! The Token Good Teammate of the soldiers is also Scottish.
  • Although this would overlaps with Death of the Author, but YouTuber Huntress X. Thompson gave an absurdist interpretation of the somewhat Broken Aesop Focus Group Ending, where Jim, Selena, and Hannah waves their hands at a Finnish fighter jet flying above for the rescue even after they faced some abuses from their own country's military, as Full-Circle Revolution after the hierarchical status-quo has fallen down. It raises a question to the viewers: "Wouldn't it be fucked up if people didn't learn from history or from their own past experiences?"
• Awesome Music: "In the House, In a Heartbeat," a steadily increasing anxiety attack of a song that perfectly matches the climax.
  • The film also uses "East Hastings" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor to haunting effect in the beginning, as Jim wanders the deserted streets of London.
• Broken Base:
  • Fans generally debate whether or not 28 Days Later is a zombie movie. This has largely died down as most categorize the infected in 28 Days Later as Technically Living Zombies to distinguish them from their undead counterparts.
  • The third act revolving around the soldiers. Some fans hate the fact that the film takes a break from the infected to focus on Jim trying to stop Hannah and Selena from being raped - while others feel that it's a great direction to take the story in. A large amount of Danny Boyle's films - The Beach, Slumdog Millionaire, Sunshine feature a seemingly insignificant plot element coming into the forefront to be the main conflict of the third act - so fans can't agree on whether it works or not.
  • Fans tend to go overboard blaming either the activists or the scientists completely. The scientists are the ones who created a deadly virus that ended up causing a nationwide catastrophe, and kept it contained in a facility with very poor security. By contrast, the activists are both violent and very poorly informed about what they're actually doing, and refuse to listen to the scientist at all. And they are the ones who let the virus loose.
  • Is Jim a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass? Or just a moron of a chav thrown into an extreme flight or fight response that makes him snap in a vicious fashion? It doesn't help his character as his idiocy gets Action Survivor Mark killed, requires constant babysitting, and very nearly drags Selena down with him. Hero or Villain, everyone dies around him. This is one of the reasons why some fans prefer the alternate ending where he dies, and the film poetically ends where his journey all started - in a hospital.
• Catharsis Factor: After watching for half hour as the soldiers are anywhere between plain jerks to willing rapists and murderers, the finale, in which Jim kills or cause death of all of them in quick succession while saving Selena and Hannah is immensely satisfying. On top of it all, the two worst of the lot get the most gruesome and unpleasant deaths possible.
• Delusion Conclusion: The presence of a deleted ending in which Jim dies from the gunshot wound inflicted in the finale has led some viewers to theorize that the happy canonical ending is just a Dying Dream or perhaps even an afterlife.
• Ending Fatigue: For "surviving the apocalypse" movie fans, this movie starts off great but then makes a hard left midway through, sticking the main characters with the soldiers who take the forefront as antagonists and carries a different tone to match.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Frank, full stop.
  • Sergeant Farrell, the Token Good Teammate.
  • Jones as well, from his Adorkable scenes in the frilly pink apron. There are many that view his death as Alas, Poor Villain.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Not the movie itself, but rather the sequel tie-in comic book series by BOOM! Studios. A lot of the fandom likes to ignore the comic book series' events, even if fanfictions like Death of a Nation still make mythology gags to it, primarily because of the massive (and illogical) Happy Ending Override the comics pulled with Jim getting arrested and sentenced to death by firing squad for the justified killings of Major West and his men. It probably didn't help that the comics had an original character supplant Jim as Selena's love interest. This is, however, a matter of Broken Base - the comics themselves were pretty well received by the fandom. It's just that Jim's fate wasn't.
• First Installment Wins: None of the sequels, be it the film or two different comic book series, managed to achieve the success or acclaim of the first film.
• Genre Turning Point: Most prior film depictions of zombies had followed the template set down by Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequels, where zombies were slow and shambling, had little-to-no capability for thought, and Zombie Infectees could last for days before succumbing to their infection. This film's template of fast, extremely aggressive zombies who can turn other victims in much faster timescales (hours at best, seconds at worst) became more the norm in the decades ahead, though by no means universal. Most notably, when Dawn of the Dead (1978) got a remake mere year later, it used fast runners, knocking down society within a few days, rather than months.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Jim savagely beating Corporal Mitchell down before gouging his eyes out leads to Selena briefly mistaking him for an infected before he manages to assure her it's really him. Pretty harsh, but awesome. But in the sequel, Don delivering an even more brutal beatdown to his wife Alice and gouging her eyes out is even more horrifying considering Don is indeed infected by this point.
  • Selena's cold and cynical attitude is explained in a backstory that Naomie Harris and Danny Boyle came up with together: she had to kill her whole family in one afternoon, including an infected little brother. Knowing this makes her reaction to Frank's death even harder to take, as she's suddenly going through it all over again.
  • The iconic scenes of Jim wandering around a deserted London are eerily prescient of the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020 which saw London streets largely empty as a result of lockdown (brought on by a virus, no less).
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: There is something heartwarming about three then-unknown actors playing people trying to survive in an After the End scenario - now with the hindsight that all three are now established in the film business.
• Ho Yay: Henry seems really fond of Jim, constantly touching him, and while he promises women for his soldiers, he himself doesn't seem that interested in them beyond some vague rambling about "The Future".
• It Was His Sled: The message is a fake and the soldiers are just looking for a chance to rape the women.
• Moral Event Horizon: Major Henry West reveals that he put the announcement on the blockade solely to attract female survivors - and that he's going to allow his men to do whatever they want with Selena and Hannah. This of course solidifies him as the new antagonist.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The idea that a contagion could turn the populace into red-eyed murderous psychopaths was around since Quarantine (1994). Both experiments had Gone Horribly Wrong from their original purposes as rage suppressors, into something quite the opposite of an inhibitor. The only difference is the film uses a virus whereas the game uses a behavior altering chemical.
  • Similarly, George Romero's other zombie movie The Crazies (1973) featured a man-made virus that turned the infected into homicidal killers.
  • While this movie popularized fast zombies, it was not the first to do so as earlier zombie films, like Nightmare City and The Return of the Living Dead, had zombies fully capable of running.
• 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, Jackson Rippner from Red Eye, Damien O'Donovan from The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Pieter in Girl with a Pearl Earring, Capa from Sunshine, Thomas Shelby in Peaky Blinders, J Robert Oppenheimer in Film/Oppenheimer... let's just say that while the role of Jim didn't make him a star overnight, it still kick-started his career, as he received a big push after this movie.
  • Naomie Harris played Tia Dalma in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean films. She portrays Moneypenny in Daniel Craig's James Bond films (specifically, Skyfall and Spectre) and received an Oscar nomination for her role in Moonlight (2016).
  • 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 and Ken Daley in In Bruges. Gleeson, an Irishman, also played Winston Churchill in the HBO TV movie Into the Storm.
  • Christopher Eccleston (who was also featured in Danny Boyle's first film Shallow Grave) went on to play the Ninth Doctor and is known as this for British audiences/Who fans. Americans would know him as Destro in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Claude from Heroes, and Matt Jamison in The Leftovers.
• Signature Scene: Jim wandering a deserted London shortly after waking up is easily the most memorable scene of the movie.
• Spiritual Licensee: This is a pretty good adaptation of The Day of the Triffids, don't you think? Both are set After the End and start with the protagonist waking up alone in a hospital and emerging into an abandoned London.

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