Unlike most people, I grew tired of the zombie genre long before most of the general public. I felt as though the genre had already been milked dry by the time this film was released in 2002 and the only reason I went to see it is because the film I had intended to see that day in Chicago was sold out (consequently, this was the first time this had ever happened to me in my life.) I didn't even know it was a zombie film. I had never heard of it as British films normally don't get a great deal of press in the US and A. However, i was on a date and I wasn't just going to leave the cinema.

The film starts out with a bunch of social justice warriors breaking into a medical facility in order to release some captive chimps. The researchers plead with the activists to not release them because they are infected with a highly-contagious rage-inducing virus. Being the good little uniformed hippies that they are, the completely ignore the researcher and release the chimps. One of the chimps infects a woman activist and she proceeds to infect the rest of the group. I can't say that I didn't applaud a little bit at that.

The screen goes blank and we are introduced to "Jim" who has been in a coma in a hospital for 28 days. He awakes to find the hospital deserted and wanders around a now destroyed London completely unaware of what has unfolded while he was asleep. He eventually comes to a church / cathedral which is an absolutely brilliant scene in this movie about Jim being first introduced to the zombies that now control the city.

Jim ends up meeting other survivors and they go on a quest to get out of the city as a team. Aside from certain scenes like when they decided to drive their car OVER other cars rather than find a way around the movie takes a bunch of very unpredictable turns (just a dumb decision that of course result in the destruction of their only vehicle and is frustrating to watch.)

The thing I like best about the zombies is that they really aren't zombies in the traditional sense (like a Walking Dead sense) they are still humans just faster because the virus has enraged them all. They still die by conventional means the same way that a human was, they just don't seem to be affected by fatigue the same way that a non-infected person would be if they also were enraged for some reason. In this regard it is a more plausible scenario (in my mind) than re-animated dead wandering around craving eating brains for some reason.

They also can starve to death the same way that non-zombos can, which eventually is the strategy for their elimination.

I don't know if this was Cillian Murphy's first breakthrough film but he certainly did a wonderful job. I really enjoyed him in later roles especially Scarecrow in the Dark Knight Trilogy. This movie was a fantastic box-office success, managing to pull in $85 million from a budget of a mere $8 million. Given the relatively small budget, I think that this film goes to show that you don't need to spend $100 million to make a visually appealing film.