In the violent prologue, a ski-masked commando team of animal-rights activists storms the Cambridge Primate Research Center to liberate the experimental chimps, heedless of the attendant's warnings ("You've no idea!") that the chimps have been "infected" with rage. Sure enough, the chimps do not exactly embrace their liberators. Twenty-eight days later.... A stark-naked patient (Cillian Murphy) awakens from a coma to find himself in a completely deserted hospital and a depopulated nation but for roving bands of blood-lusting zombies and isolated pockets of hunkered-down humans. Forget the superficial likeness to Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. The tradition of English literature here invoked encompasses the futuristic survival tales of John Wyndham, John Christopher, and (more pretentiously, less eventfully) J.G. Ballard. The prevailing standards of gratuitous gross-out, however, tend to obliterate the tone of civility that gave those tales much of their inner tension and conviction. Director Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, etc.) seems all too eager to surrender himself to the New World Order. Still, the last-man-on-earth images of a post-apocalyptic London (ankle-deep litter, overturned bus, an eerie absence of people alive or dead) are highly evocative, even if what they evoke is not so much a dread of the future as a nostalgia for the Golden Age of the genre. And the narrative incidents are grippingly plausible, at least up until the messy -- in both logic and choreography -- climax. It's all done on the cheap, which these days doesn't mean black-and-white photography, a location on a ranch outside Oxnard, and a lead actor of the caliber of a Richard Carlson or a John Agar. It means digital video. It means blurriness. It means fuzziness. It means (not in a sense that enhances the end-of-the-world theme) ruination. But that means there was something, in the first place, to ruin. With Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd