Danny Boyle's new movie 28 Days Later opens with video images of civil unrest--street mobs stringing a man up, burning tires, throwing rocks at police. These scenes of turmoil aren't really "happening," they're being shown on TV sets arranged so that a chimpanzee, chained on a table and connected to monitoring devices, must watch them. The chimps in this lab have been infected with a virus called "rage" and when animal activists break in to liberate them, they liberate the virus, which turns exposed humans into mindlessly ravening homicidal maniacs who wipe out most of the population of England in four weeks.

This "Clockwork Banana" opening, with its ironic kicker about the naïveté of the animal rights group, is mostly beside the point. Boyle and his screenwriter Alex Garland don't care so much how the end of civilization arrives so long as it does. The movie really gets going when Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma completely alone in a hospital and stumbles through an equally deserted London. This gives Boyle the opportunity first of all to create a capital city vacated so fast that the streets are littered with signs of humanity but no humans. (As Boyle points out in an article in This Is Lancashire, in Britain film crews may not close off streets to accommodate filming, so he had to get these fascinating vistas quickly in the early morning.) The movie was shot on digital video and this gives it an undernourished look that's especially good for a post-apocalyptic vision of what Boyle evidently considers a wasteland now.

Boyle has a talent for getting from one eye-catching composition to another fast without lessening their impact as compositions. (The effect can be like going through a modern art exhibit on a motorcycle.) But the sumptuous vacationland cinematography of his last picture, The Beach (2000; adapted from Garland's book), wouldn't do here. The definition of digital video isn't great (the revelation of the fate of Manchester, Boyle's hometown, in particular is lost in a long shot that simply doesn't scan) and the result is claustrophobic. But that's okay because the movie focuses on what happens to the random survivor abandoned to his own devices. In a situation with such limited possibilities there is no big picture. It's also okay because the videographer Anthony Dod Mantle is a master of poetic desolation--e.g., people seen through dirty glass--that the watery light of the imagery makes even more piercing, as if the last chance for human contact might not be discernible after a long blink. The look of the movie is perfect for experience closed in by devastation, for the shock of going from the most advanced civilization the world has known to nothing, with no transition.

Jim is saved from an attack of the infected by Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley), who explain to him what's happened while he was asleep. (Garland has written speeches for them that sound like audition monologues, but he gets over that.) After a trek to Jim's parents' house, and another attack, Jim and Selena find Frank and his teenaged daughter Hannah (Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns) and together they head up to Manchester in response to a radio appeal on the part of a surviving military force that claims to have the answer to infection.