28 Days Later

Londoners, indeed anyone who has ever visited Britain's overcrowded capital, will get a kick out of seeing such places as Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street deserted and desolate. This is the sight that greets Jim (Murphy), a bicycle courier who wakes up in hospital 28 days after a man-made virus is accidentally released from a lab.

This virus is a distillation of the rage scientists had hoped to control. It has decimated the population, turning people into raving creatures driven by bloodlust. Jim barely escapes with his life when he first encounters 'the infected', and is saved by Selena (Harris) and Mark (Huntley). After picking up a lone message ("Salvation is here") on the otherwise quiet radio, the group - including cabbie Frank (Gleeson) and his daughter (Burns) - head to an army base near Manchester. Here they encounter the seemingly genial Major Henry (Eccleston, doing posh) and his small band of squaddies.

Of course, all this is closely comparable to such other horrific (whether explicitly or psychologically) tales of global doom and the struggle for survival. The novel 'I Am Legend' and its movie adaptations, stories from John Wyndham and JG Ballard, and the zombie movies from George A Romero all mapped out the efforts of desperate survivors. After all, this is a genre that can never go out of style - anxiety about some form of Armageddon is coded into society thanks to fear-inducing religions, war and terrorism.

Boyle and novelist-screenwriter Garland (collaborators on The Beach), despite recurrent nods to these movie and literary forebears, have found a new twist. 'The infected', red eyed and perpetually furious, are manifestations of social phenomena unique to modern, car-addicted, computer-dependent, urban life: road rage, impatience at the supermarket check-out, stress in the office, anger at call-centre queues, violent intolerance in the community.

The desolate wasteland Jim, Selena and co move through is not just devoid of people and the furniture of society (electricity, functioning fuel pumps), it is littered with the useless ephemera of consumerism. There's a hilarious irony in the product placement of cans of Pepsi, packs of Maltesers, boxes of Sharp VHS machines, huge Benetton billboards and a National Lottery kiosk when all this is being presented as useless crap. (There's a deeper irony that the film is half-funded by the Lottery).

The film doesn't confine itself to wry satire - it's an effective action adventure and an emotional journey for its protagonist Jim. It's shot on DV (by Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot Festen and Boyle's two BBC films) but has a fresh, appealing look at odds with much of the murk provided by digital filmmakers. Indeed, the film boasts some startling imagery - most notably Jim on a deserted Westminster Bridge at rush hour, Jim wandering London's City and West End, the group driving up an empty M6 and greeted by a burning Manchester (Boyle's home town). These strengths are undermined slightly by amateurish performances from Megan Burns (Liam) and some of the men playing the stereotypical meat-head soldiers.