I just got back from watching 28 Days Later.

Good movie. I liked it. Not as scary as I expected, but quite suspenseful. It was also an intelligent movie, which is always nice. Horror movies present a unique opportunity to comment on humanity's condition, especially zombie movies like this one.

The zombies in this movie are explicitly an incarnation of the violent nature of man. They become senseless violence itself, and thus doing, warn us about our tendency to be like them. This is developed much more fully than this in the movie, which is interesting. It may even have commentary on the proper use of violence in society, though I'm on the fence in committing to that.

The major theme of the movie, though, is hope. Hope being one of the cardinal Christian virtues, it's always fascinating when a post-Christian society (the movie is British) puts out a new movie that comments on it. How can a society infused with a Christian ideal of happy endings reconcile a world-view that is inherently hopeless with a story that still compels. This movie doesn't, I don't think, offer a sufficeint explanation.

A common answer, one which is seemingly rejected in this movie, is that mankind is inherently good, or good enough at least, within itself, to bring hope. The enlightment ideal of the progression of man is an example of that sort of ideal. In this movie it sets up other men as hope, but then convincingly destroys that hypothesis. The zombie within us all will never allow us to be at peace.

Thus the ending, which brings us back to hope in living with man, is merely a hope in continuing the way we have, killing each other these last 28 days the way we had the 28 days before that, and the 28 days before that... and so on for the history of man. It's curious, given this perspective, that you would make the movie at all. For what?

There's more to the movie, but it's always difficult to tell which is just done to get people to sit through a film, or pay money for it, and which is done to present a thesis or contribute to a discussion.