For instance, at first the destruction and re-creation myth seems to carry an ironic charge because the consequences of the animal rights' activists were unforeseen by them, and, at a higher level of irony, because it wasn't an angry God who had destroyed the world to punish his creatures for their sins, as with the flood in Genesis 6:1-8. The situation seems clean--there's no reason for it. It's bracing to be reminded that a rampaging virus could take humans back into the realm of nature where we would lose our dominance; I think in the very long run this must prove true, though perhaps not by means of a virus. But finally you have to realize that there is a punishing moralism at work in 28 Days Later. Implicitly the movie is saying we deserve to die because we do such things as experiment on chimpanzees, and once we get to the compound with wacked-out military men, you know the movie has had the paranoid-left filter in from the start in order to make advanced civilization look barbaric (Major Henry West).

In this interview with UnderGroundOnline the producer Andrew Macdonald offers a sampling of the connections you could make from the situations in the movie, which only points up the intellectual clutter:

UGO: Did you have any fear of this film coming out after anthrax and SARS scares?

AM: Well, this film was done pre-Sept 11. But in the United Kingdom, we've had this foot and mouth disease. There were piles of burning animal carcasses on television. We seem to be becoming the leader of these kinds of diseases in the world. Genre films like this come out of fears like that; Omega Man coming out of the Cold War and Romero's films coming out of the Vietnam War.

UGO: Danny described this movie as the worst possible case of road rage.

AM: It's all about being intolerant. When Danny read the first draft, to him, it was a film about human rage. A psychological virus. The virus has been growing inside people. Everyone wants everything now. There are more and more cars and less and less room. Someone who doesn't move fast enough will get beaten up. It's the same in hospitals when they don't get served enough. It's an instability and intolerance that we have more and more in the west.

"Someone who doesn't move fast enough will get beaten up"? "It's the same in hospitals"? What the hell is he talking about? It all sounds vaguely plausible if you're skimming, but in the end he says too much, verging on free association. Most importantly, none of it feels necessary as an explanation of your experience of the movie.

Boyle develops scripts with catchy stories within a certain range. His movies are nonetheless hard to categorize because he combines ancient tropes--original sin; destruction and re-creation; the original paradise; the first, fratricidal killing--with the cruel disinterest of the ironist, who watches like an entomologist until the members of the tight little community start turning on each other. Unfortunately he doesn't have a literary mind and so doesn't know how to put the elements together. His major failing is coarseness. He appears to think that if you slam two ideas together they'll stick, and if they don't they'll at least strike sparks. That's a valid way to work if what you care about is effectiveness, no matter what.