28 Weeks Later/Headscratchers

28 Weeks Later

• Why is Don set up as a craven, cowardly bastard by the movie for being forced to abandon his wife? I'm sorry, but the previous movie has already shown that taking on an infected unarmed is pure suicide, and the only hope of survival if you're unarmed is to run away or barricade yourself in a safe place. Don does exactly that and still barely makes it out. But the movie sets up Don as a bad guy because he did what any person would do in that kind of situation, by refusing to get himself infected trying 'save' his wife from a hopeless situation she put herself in and then tear her to shreds too. The movie then "punishes" him for this later on by getting him infected because of his wife. The very exact thing he had tried to save himself from. Riiight.
  • Also, why wasn't Don the main character? He's the only interesting character in the movie!
  • He's pretty much set up as being cowardly because he lied to his children, again I don't think its the worst idea in the world.
  • I guess I'm the only one who thought his obviously real regret for his actions was supposed to make him sympathetic. I felt BAD for him when I realized he was going to be infected.
  • He's not actually set up as a coward, exactly, at least not in a negative sense. By abandoning his wife, he survived to look after his kids. By going back to her, he ruined everything. Yeah, the film had a pretty bleak moral landscape.
  • The false premise seems to be that Don is portrayed as a coward. He isn't. He's just the character who's been stripped of his Shining Armor and Grim Determination and hasn't been given anything else. In a war zone. With zombies. So Yeah.
  • Considering the war zone conditions he faced, it's pretty obvious to this ex-military troper that Don was clearly suffering from both survivor's guilt and PTSD. It's very likely that regardless of pragmatism, he sees himself as a coward and tries to justify his actions to get some peace of mind.
• How did Don get out of that room to attack the soldiers? There was a thick pane of glass (possibly bulletproof?) that he couldn't break through, and doors needed keycards to open. Also wouldn't the soldiers be able to see the obvious carnage through the huge window and know something was up?
  • It's a bit of a stretch, but the scene at the beginning where Don traps his kids in the revolving door for kicks (yep, shining example of parenting) explains how he let himself out and subsequently got the drop on the guards. Supposedly, he has all-access field-sensitive keycards that work by proximity, and not through physically-operated door handles.
    • Again, though: HE'S A FUCKING JANITOR.
• Speaking of which, what the heck was Alice thinking? The cottage they were hiding in had dozens of infected swarming into it and she runs off to search the house for a small boy who had run off to hide. While it'd suck to leave the kid behind, Alice definitely should have known better at this point after living in infected England for weeks.
• How did Alice escape the infected? It's true she was infected by a bite and therefore might be considered 'one of them', but we see a flashback where she's being chased through the woods. If she's still being chased by that point, how did she make it out of the house without being mauled to death?
  • This is really more of an Epileptic Trees, but I think the infected let her leave alive. I know they have no higher brain functions left, and there's no "Zombie Master" to guide them or restrain them, but she is considerably different from normal humans already-- she's immune. What better way to propagate the virus than to let her live? Considering how quickly her son became a carrier, all she'd have had to do was dodge and hold them off for 20-30 seconds so that they'd see her as a fellow infected... at which point, they'd "chase her" because they would think she had seen an uninfected human.
    • What's even worse is he wasn't even her son, it was just some random kid who entered the story and screwed everything up for them.
    • The "son" being referred to is Andy, not the boy in the cottage.
• Why in the world did the US military leave an infected woman in an unguarded, unmonitored cell in the safe zone overnight instead of immediately destroying her? Why did they shut off all the lights when the alarm was raised, making it much harder to spot the infected? The actions taken by the US military were so inept it was ludicrous, from the easily breached 'containment areas' to hiring soldiers who are too weak-kneed to shoot civilians in a 'Code Red' emergancy.
  • Leaving the woman unguarded was a pretty dumb idea, but they kept her alive because she is the only known person to be infected with the Rage virus and keep her sanity. She's necessary as a test subject.
    • I'm pretty sure that the military general in charge of the recolonization zone actually ordered her to be killed, over the protests of the medical officer, because she's too much of a security risk. Which just adds to the Idiot Plot, because the man acknowledges the massive risk and yet still leaves her unguarded.
  • More to the point, though, why in God's name would they attempt to contain her right in the middle of the main base? Prudence should dictate that any sort of quarantine area should be geographically isolated from the main populace. In this case, they had the whole of Great Britain to work with. Instead, they put her in the middle of a building right in the center of the only populated area left. Idiocy piled on idiocy.
  • Unguarded possibly because if she did turn, the guards, following protocol, would most likely need authorisation to shoot to kill her. No point in waiting for them to become extra ammunition for the infected whilst waiting for a response. Don't forget she was in a high security sealed medical booth, which Don did open, hence his subsequent escape. Also, the whole point of the clear zone is that there is no Infected blood there, thus the quarantine can't be outside the safe region, but I do get what you're saying.
    • While I understand that the military would need protocols for permission to fire, it would be foolish to have the same standard for the infected. They know that an infection can get out of control very very fast, and therefore would have a general 'shoot an infected on sight' rule. Heck, they knew she was there and a threat, they could have permission beforehand. Secondly, there should have been guards there to prevent a guy like Don from wandering in.
• And here's another thing: Why did the US military treat the population like sheep to be herded as opposed to arming them to defend themselves? Common sense should make it obvious that in a situation where anyone might get infected, the only way to counteract an infection while it is happening is to arm everyone so they can shoot any infected the moment they see them. Instead, they leave them totally unarmed, herded together in a single chamber without a single soldier in sight to protect them?
  • If they armed the civilians, I'm sure they'd be firing idiot balls at each other. Although it didn't make sense to keep them all stuffed in a single room, stuffing them all in a single room with weapons is just asking for someone to panic and start shooting others.
    • Really, they could have only allowed people back to England unless they had weeks of responsible survival and firearm training, just so they could defend themselves without panicking.
    • Yeah, giving panic-stricken civilians firearms would've just been asking for it.
    • A bunch of civilian corpses because they all panicked and shot each other is better than another zombie horde. I would have considered it worth the risk (and maybe trained them, as referenced above).
      • You're missing the point. The NATO forces supervising the repatriation and protection of the British civilians had a plan in case of the worst case scenario: Code Red. If things got really bad, they were given clearance to give the order to kill everything moving. Arming a populace that you may be killing later on would allow them to kill you back. Not smart.
  • Well heck, that's how the British government treats it's citizens now - there are more cameras to monitor the populace than citizen-owned guns to protect them. If the Limeys had guns to begin with, instead of their government acting out Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the outbreak may have been contained in the first place.
• It is established in the previous film that while the infected are agile,they don't really utilize fine manipulation/other skills due to their mindless nature and rage. Then WHY did a FREAKING HELICOPTER try to gun down the survivors while they are driving their CAR? Infected can't drive! There was an order to "Kill them all" issued by the government early in the film, but that was a totally different context.
  • Because it's the American military and Americans fire on friendly Brits! It's more of the same illogical stupidity seen everywhere else in the film.
  • Remember that the "modified" Code Red was an order to kill ALL civilians. The commander gave that order when he realized that not only were the infected spilling out of control, but also that ordinary people could be carriers. That's the main reason Alice was fumigated when she came out of the infected zone - it was already procedure to take precautions against "carrier infection" even before the military actually KNEW it was possible.
  • As the track on the soundtrack says aptly, Abandon Selective Targeting. Even thier own soldiers on the ground were targets, remember poor Doyle?
• Why do idiots keep refering to the Rage-infected citizens as zombies? They aren't. They aren't dead, or undead, they are alive, but infected with pure Rage. They are not zombies. They have memories of their life. They continue to remember things. They still feel pain and remorse. They can be killed in the same ways un-infected people can, from a single gunshot to the chest, to being poisoned and gassed. They aren't zombies, just people who are really, really angry on a primeval level. Are people to dumb to figure it out, even though it is explained in the plot, or too lazy to notice? Or are they so dense that they have to label every virus in movies as being 'zombie'.
  • It's probably because, for all intents and purposes, they really are almost exactly like other 'fast' class zombies. Maybe it the movies had actually done something to illustrate the differences, people would see them as something separate from the undead.
    • Like what? Have the father follow his children without attacking them? That happened. Killing the infected in conventional ways that would kill the average human? That happened. Have them actually die of natural causes and starvation? That happened. Have them retain a level of their intelligence? That happened. Have people with immunities to the virus? That happened. The only thing even remotely zombie-like was that the infected could infect others, but the same is true for most viruses and diseases. They are people, alive and intelligent as ever, just really, really angry. If being angry makes a zombie, then most people on earth are zombies.
    • You say follow without attacking, I say stalk, which some zombies do. As for killing zombies in ways that would kill humans, most 'fast class' zombies are fragile like that to make up for their speed. I have no idea where you're getting the 'they have intelligence' bit, though plenty of zombies, fast and slow, retain intelligence (heck, I can recall one that learns how to use a gun). And normal zombies do the whole 'some people are immune' thing as well. These are all zombie traits.
    • Sigh. In the film, Don follows his kids around, not doing anything until the very end. Even then, he does not attack the children straight away. There is even one point where he watches from afar and then leaves. If he was a zombie, he would not just stand around doing nothing whilst someone was a short distance away, he would journey towards the food. As for intelligence? Word of God. And zombies don't retain intelligence; they aren't sick people, they are dead. Dead people do not retain intelligence or memories. What examples do you have of other so-called 'fast' zombies being killed by something as simple as being gassed? And what zombie movies have people who are immune? Don't say Resident Evil; Alice's strain was mutated. She is infected, but in a different way. The virus works in the way in which it was originally intended. She had no natural immunity.
      • On the 'dead people do not retain memories' bit, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead would like to have a word with you. Both by modern-zombie codifier George Friggin Romero.
    • They're called zombies because zombies have an entire genre of movie dedicated to them and Rage virus victims don't. It's an imprecise way to classify the film, but it works for some people because of the similarities in tone, implications and setting.
    • "Zombie" does not mean "undead" or "dead"; it means a mindless person. Under voodooism (you know, where the word "zombie" comes from) a zombie was just a regular person under the domination of a Bokor's magic. In the truest sense of the word then, the only modern movie that could be called a true "zombie movie" is The Serpent and the Rainbow. The Romero model of zombie (which Romero took mostly from VAMPIRE folklore) is NOT the only model of zombie. People can try all of this genre gerrymandering that they like but it just looks laughably nitpicky.
    • Exactly. No, they're truely undead zombies, but it's a zombie movie in spirit and more-or-less fits the genre.
    • And to be honest, if I was in the position that those guys are in, I'd want something pretty simple to call the enemy- 'mindless and really angry people' doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
      • How about "Infected" Its short and sounds better than zombie.
      • Since 28 Days Later, I think that Infected has become the de-facto name for zombies-that-are-not-zombies-because-they-are-alive, it worked for Left 4 Dead.
• Why don't the infected eat each other? Even animals and humans resort to cannibalism when faced with starvation. And why don't they attack each other, if not for food, then out of pure rage?
  • While not addressed in the film it is possible that the flesh of the infected is toxic and would be pretty undigestable. That and the virus might cause the victim to emit a scent that makes a victim not want to eat another infected to allow for better spread. If that's the case that's a pretty nasty virus.
  • In fact, forget starvation - if the Infected cannot ingest food or drink, wouldn't they have died within a matter of DAYS from dehydration, rather than weeks from malnutrition?
    • The majority of water the body loses is lost through excretion (feces and urine), so if the infection simply stops the digestive process altogether it'd slow down dehydration while also making the victim unable to process food and drink.
    • Not eating would only slow down defecation, reducing water loss by about 4%. Urination is a separate physiological process; shutting that down would cause death from accumulated blood toxins within days, especially in a starving subject. The Infected must've been slurping up water from puddles and so forth on the sly.
  • Remember, the virus was Rage, eating the victim wasn't their goal, just killing them to satisfy their rage, though the food was just a bonus. Word of God (28 Days Later: The Aftermath comic) states that Infected detect non-Infected by smells of deoderant, perfume etc, Infected aren't prone to splashing some on, given their somewhat dying, bloody bodies. Perhaps they simply don't feel the Rage towards their own kind?
• The whole movie was written in the era of everyone blaming America for everything. The writers deftly managed to find a way to make a virus invented by British scientists America's fault. While not actually ret-conning it to being an American-made virus, they brought the US military in to be the idiots of the movie. Hopefully this helped the whiny far-left writers blow off some steam and maybe their next project won't be such a transparent "America Sucks"-a-thon
  • Well, if you put your far-right rage aside for a moment... a pair of British kids left the "safe zone" to retrieve their infected, British mother, and her British husband subsequently tongue-hockeys her and gets himself infected. The Americans are only responsible in a very roundabout sort of way for the whole thing, and in fact the American commander had the right idea, which was to just kill the infected woman and destroy her body. Which would have prevented the whole mess from starting off again, if not what what that silly British dude did.
    • Also, far-left? I must have fallen asleep during the bits where Robert Carlyle advocated collective ownership of means of production.
    • Both movies make a pretty good case for why gun control is a suicidally bad idea. Or as Jim from 28 Days Later would put it, "This is a really shit idea. And you know how I know? because it's a really obviously shit idea."
• It's quite strange that the helicopter so easily makes it to France at the end. One would imagine that the French are quite eager to prevent the infection from spreading to their country, so it is more than likely that any unidentified aircraft would simply be shot down, while passengers of regular flights would at least be quarantined upon arrival.
  • It's not that far from London to French soil, and IIRC they had a military pilot flying a US Military helicopter. Any allied officer would probably be hesitant to fire on Americans without clear authorization, which may not have come down fast enough. On the other hand, they helicopter was wrecked, so it's entirely possible that it * was* shot down, and the infection spread from people attempting to help the injured kids.
    • The British Channel is the last barrier between The Virus and mainland Europe, Africa and maybe even Asia. At this point, having observed the events in the UK, everybody must be aware that this would lead to the near extinction of whole continents. I think, it can be safely assumed that the French would pursue a strategy of "shoot first, ask questions later" in that case.
    • Exactly. Cause a minor international incident, or possibly introduce the worst virus on the planet to your country? Hrm.
      • Yes, but would a French SAM missile battery operator necessarily know that the situation had so throughly deteriorated in the last day that they should fire at will at all helos coming over the channel? And wouldn't the military-trained pilot flying the helo specifically try to avoid being shot down? And isn't the whole point moot anyway, because the helo crashed? They may have very well swatted it out of the sky.
        • The helicopter WAS shot down, hence the scene with the shot down helicopter.
• The authorities picked the worst possible emergency plan for this situation. They're worried about a disease outbreak so their solution is to put everyone in the same room together. When you do that you allow a single infected individual to infect everyone else in one go, which is pretty much what ended up happening in the movie. They would've been better off telling everyone to lock themselves in their rooms.
  • A room secured only by a standard set of fire doors, no less. Oh and kept in darkness, to keep them nice and panicy. At least if it had been a reinforced bunker, then maybe it wouldn't have been such a wall banger.
    • Seriously. When the alarms go off, everyone goes to the nearest windowless room (or even preprepared saferooms) and locks the door. They form a roster, communicate to central command and wait for the all-clear. Boom. Nice, isolated population, and you can determine who the Infected are by the process of elimination, so you can communicate back who exactly to watch out for. Problem solved.
      • One would think the first three rules for re-settlement would be this: 1: Ensure all living quarters are isolated and able to be completely secureable, 2: Have each of these quarters stocked with enough emergency supplies to keep the occupant alive for a few weeks, and 3: when alarm sounds, everyone goes back home and locks themselves in until further notice. Then all the army has to do is use a check-in system or physically check each room to see who survived and who didn't after everything is relatively secure.
• For such a horrible disease that they contained to a single island why not hit it with a neutron bomb or give it a mass chemical weapon bath to ensure it wouldn't get to the rest of world. Gee look a virus that spreads so fast its overtaken a whole nation and then some. Nuke the island bet the virus dies in the atomic fireball.
  • Honestly, this bugged me too. You'd think that they'd quarantine the island for at least a few decades and spend that time razing the entire country to a cinder. But then apparently in 28 Months Later (the planned sequel) the virus has managed to get to Russia. Guess these movies are set in a world where people haven't invented bombs.
  • Fallout. So glad you don't run the world.
    • Fallout from a high enough airburst is minimal, but then again, try explaining that to the politicians.
    • Maybe fuel bombs then?
    • Fallout from a single bomb is much better than a worldwide pandemic. Plus, if done high enough (where it should be done anyway, because it increases the effective radius) little to no fallout is produced at all.
    • May I point out that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thriving urban centers today?
  • And a slight increase in thyroid cancer rates downwind of Britian is so much worse than inevitable zombie apocalyse.
  • Razing a country built to house 60 million people would produce enough smoke to lower global temperatures for decades, causing worldwide famine. It would be the equivalent of a nuclear war/winter.
  • Since the infected are still alive and still human, they should still be susceptible to nerve gas, which dissipates quickly, leaving no lasting danger.
    • Indeed. Which is why they used nerve gas in 28 Weeks Later. The thing that's throwing people here is that the Code Red would have worked, if not for a military pilot breaking orders and bringing a carrier over the channel.
  • Two words: neutron bomb. Kills non-plant life while leaving infrastructure mostly intact (well, more intact than a regular nuke, anyway).
• Why the hell did they try to resettle England a mere 28 weeks after the outbreak? There's nothing in England that is so important to take that risk, and I couldn't imagine that anyone would want to step on England again after escaping certain death. The rest of continental Europe would be far too nervous to allow anyone there anyway, considering it was a miracle it was contained only to England. Raze the damn island and leave it alone!
  • England, Scotland and Wales were all down. I hate to tell you but there is a hell of a lot going on over there. Important stuff.
    • Not after the infection has wiped out/evicted the entire population.
  • There was no need to write off England as a whole. All the infected had died, except for one woman who was immune, which no one could have predicted. But even that situation was perfectly containable, as she wasn't actively trying to spread the infection. The only reason it went wrong was that the Americans failed to keep her isolated and under guard, especially when they knew her husband was in District 1.
    • No one could have predicted it? Asymptomatic carriers are not uncommon today, nor are virus mutations (see the panic over Swine Flu). When you're dealing with an extremely dangerous virus, things like mutations, asymptomatic carriers and other complications would be at the top of your list of priorities. Plus they have no idea of how long the virus can survive outside the human body, if it can/has jumped to other animal species, and so forth. You can't say a situation is 'containable' when they've had barely 28 weeks to study this virus and what it can do. There is nothing in England so valuable to take risks with such a deadly virus. If the movie was set around a team sent to study the virus and not rebuild England, that'd make more sense.
      • They knew what the virus was and what it could do, it was released from a laboratory.
      • Yes, but the additional backstory tells us that the creation of the Rage Virus was an unintended accident. Even then, a virus running free in the outside world is totally different from it being tested in a sterile lab.
  • Because it was simply free land? Why do other countries invade another, for the resources, simply. London already had buildings etc, so why not?
  • For morale people!Remember how the world felt with 9/11?Now imagine that happened in the majority of the British Isles! People want hope, rebuilding and everything-is-over clean ups.The inclusion of civilians is clearly a political move, and it shows from the atittude of the soldiers (they think the civies are burden).Well that backfired.
  • "Nothing in England so important"? A completely abandoned nuclear power with millions of refugees swarming around in its neighbors? London is one of the co-capitals of the world economy (along with New York), so you can imagine the valuable information that it holds, information stored in highly vulnerable electronic storage that degrades extremely quickly, assuming it isn't below the water table and thus destroyed as soon water pumps fail. Luckily, the UK's nuclear arsenal is confined to its submarines (which I assume would be quickly directed to France or the US), but there are 24 nuclear reactors in the UK that certain parties would be very interested in ransacking. Going back so quickly is one of the few realistic elements in the film.
    • What is the deal with needing refugee camps anyway? There wasn't enough time for any meaningful evacuation before the borders were closed with extreme prejudice, most of the people that were out of the UK would have been out of it anyway. There is more than enough British Ex-pats out there to put up the few tourists that would have been caught out the country. And even if there was the need for refugee camps, why tents? There are huge caravan(trailer parks) sites and hotel complexes that do nothing but hold UK tourists in the summer seasons. All plumbed and with all mod cons, assuming that there were need for refugee camps then you could house all the tourists in those complexes with room to spare. Especially in Spain where the kids were mentioned as having spent the time.
      • It's unclear how many people became Infected, but it doesn't seem anywhere close to a majority of the island-even if 10% of London's population were Infected, that would be 755,000 people running around-so where are they? 10% of Great Britain would be 6 million people-where are they all? Did they all run out into the country? And if it was a majority of the population, where did 30 million+ Infected go? It's a bit of a catch-22, because if they didn't get Infected, they must have evacuated...but how did millions of people get clear of Great Britain in less than a month?
    • Boats. In 1940 Operation Dynamo evacuated over 338,000 men from the beaches of Dunkirk in 9 days. The infection began in the South East of England and even at a fast run it would take several weeks to spread North and West. There are a lot of ports in Britain.
    • Those aren't good reasons to bring civilians back in to settle so soon. Commando teams/military to retrieve information, secure important locations, etc, sure, but not families.
  • Of course there's important stuff in England. The correct procedure for dealing with that is to send the US military in and loot it all. (Also, electronic information? Have you never heard of offsite backups? Because, trust me, anyone with information worth saving would have.)
    • There is plenty of info that is not backed up because it is sensitive, copyrighted, or it's too expensive (small businesses, anyone?). And it's not just London-a country has plenty of information that is backed up only within the country itself. You think the British back up all of their data in Northern Ireland or Gibraltar? And if you're sending in troops to loot, then why not have them clean up since it's apparently safe enough for them to be there in the first place? And what about the refugees? Their homes still exist, yet they're in cramped, dirty refugee camps. They'd want to go home at the earliest opportunity, especially when they hear that US troops are running around on the ground with impunity. The countries spending billions of dollars to support them would want them gone, too.
• Why do people run around with infected blood on their skin, especially their face. Wouldn't you want to wipe it off as soon as humanly possible?
  • That drove me nuts. Only one drop has to get in your mouth and you're screwed.
    • Or an eye...
      • Well the infection spreads at near light speed, so if you get blood spattering your face and a few seconds later you are still you then it is probably best not to go wiping it around risking it reaching an open wound or eye. Plus blood dries fairly quickly, when it is wet is when you are still fighting the infected which is not the time to worry about personal cleanliness, and once you've stopped fighting them you are probably focusing on staying hidden from them so it drops down the to-do list.
• The final shot of the movie shows a mass of infected "zombies" rushing out of a tunnel overlooking the Eiffel Tower, showing that the infection has spread to Paris. Um, how? I understand that the main horde of the infected ran into the Chunnel (The underwater train tunnel connecting France and England), although I can't fathom why. There's really nothing drawing them into it, but I digress. Seeing as how the Chunnel exits in Calais, France and Paris is over 150 km away, were the French simply not informed about the massive wave of infected individuals carrying the most deadly virus known to man rushing underneath the sea towards their country? One has to think that there would still be some fortifications underground from the last time England was quarantined, or this should have happened in the original movie.
  • Assume the infected ran full speed the whole way there (due to the virus making them unable to be tired or some random idea) and give them a speed of say...15mph. That 90-ish miles could have took them about 6 hours to run it. Could they have properly sealed of the Chunnel in that time? Probably, but let's say they were just carrying the Idiot Ball and filled it with soldiers with shoot to kill orders. Zombie Movies 101 says that ends badly.
    • You're both forgetting one important thing- Andy is technically infected too, and since the ending is 28 days after the kids and Flynn escape London, that's plenty of time for Typhoid Andy to accidentally spread the infection all over again. This of course assumes you're okay with the chopper getting across the Channel.
  • They ran into the Chunnel? I assumed they just ran into the London Underground, which is why they bumped into Don. I also figured the French infected were sired by Andy somehow accidentally infecting people post-crash.
    • If the helicopter crashed, maybe a first-responder tried giving him CPR, and then got infected via the saliva?
  • I'll bet the moment the Infection in 28 Days Later was known, the Chunnel was blown away, flooding entirely, to prevent the only form for Infected to cross to the mainland. Even if they couldn't make it through the tunnel, one could have got on the Eurostar by accident. Most likely, the Infected had come out of a Metro station, having already being spawned days earlier from Andy spitting/kissing/bleeding on his sister/doctor/pilot near Calais...
  • In 28 Days Later Selena mentioned that infected were spotted in Paris and New York after just a few days. Seeing as it couldn't have spread to New York by walking it could've spread a different way. Another thing, maybe some bird had gotten blood on them and then flew to Europe.
    • Actually, that was confirmed to be false reporting. It's only in Britian.
  • The whole point of the end of the movie was the the little guy was infected, but what asymptomatic. It was kinda the point.
  • In any case, you're all forgetting Movie Geography.
• You know, most of this stuff I either ignore, didn't notice, or can rationalize away. That's fine. What's not fine is the fact that this page doesn't have a listing for that absolutely retarded sequence where Flynn uses his chopper to puree the infected. I'm not even sure that's physically POSSIBLE- maybe one or two, sure, but a whole heaping horde of them? What? No. What? Goddammit.
  • It's not possible at all, even with only one. Helicopter Blender fails miserably in real life.
    • It's made even worse when you consider that the whole reason he was doing it was to try and kill the innocent civilian hanging onto his helicopter. The infected he managed to kill were just a bonus.
    • No it wasn't. Before the aforementioned Helicopter Blender moment, Doyle clearly says "Flynn, we're gonna die down here! Do somethin'!" And, while Flynn doesn't want to take the other people, he IS trying to save Doyle. The helicopter had no weapons on board, so he tore the infected apart with the primary rotor.
    • What always got me was, it is known that the infection is spread by a single drop of blood getting into the human body by open wounds, eye fluids, mouths, etc. So what do you do? Turn the air into an infectious blood fog while piloting an open-sided helicopter. Was he trying to get himself and his buddy infected?
• The movie establishes that the infected do not attack and kill each other. They only target people not infected with the rage. The wife was infected with the rage, so why did the husband kill her?
  • Well, the wife doesn't show a certain symptom (the rage), so we can only assume she also doesn't show the symptom which makes her unattractive to the other infected. Further up on this page someone theorized that the virus makes their flesh highly toxic.
    • Which causes another Plot Hole, because as mentioned near the top, how the hell did Alice escape the cottage without being horribly killed by the dozens of infected surrounding the building? If she escaped because she 'passes' as one of them, then Don had no reason to kill her. If Don kills her because she doesn't 'pass', then she should have been killed in the cottage. Nice one, writers.
    • It could be that the ability to tell the difference between an infected and a non-infected doesn't come until later on, because the virus is still working to take over.
  • It's a common interpretation that the rage virus amplifies anger and that is the reason he killed his wife after being infected. She infected him on purpose and that made him angry, so he had no reason not to kill her.
• Where are the main characters from the first movie? I know its George A. Romero tradition to simply ignore each cast of characters in each new installment, but why not even give them a cameo or something here?
  • Because then we can assume they live happily ever after and far away from the zombies. I'm betting that as some of the few survivors of the zombie apocalypse they were given citizenship and refuge in another country rather than resettled in England, so that they could be debriefed and give useful ways to survive/stop the plague. Plus, the actors don't get the sequel dragging their reputations down.
  • Given how 28 Days Later ended, do you think there is the slightest chance those characters would want to live in a military-run quarantine zone?
  • Fridge Brilliance^
    • It was later explained in the comic that they were arrested for killing the rapist soldiers. Selena and Hannah were eventually released(the comic stars Selena and Hannah is in protective custody), but Jim wasn't and is currently awaiting execution by firing squad. The series really seems to have a hard-on for wanting Jim dead. First the alternate endings(one of which is stated to be the "real" ending) and then this. Wow.
• I know everyone was herded to a large room for the Rule of Drama - Tropes Are Tools after all - but putting everyone on lockdown in their own apartments would have made a lot more sense. Everyone would be at home with toilet facilities and food, and access to a telephone. Once everyone was in their domicile with the door locked the soldiers could ensure the hallways and public areas were clear and then go to the apartments door by door to clear people to go out.
  • True - but there would be some people who obviously won't listen and try investigate on their own, putting themselves in potential danger.
    • So? Let them. As long as the majority of people lock themselves out of harm's way, the infection will be be much easier to contain. If some idiot wants to find out what's going on and gets himself infected, the rest of the population smart enough to isolate themselves will be in only slightly greater danger than before.
  • Plus, can the Infected smash through locked apartment doors easily? They obviously didn't have much trouble smashing through barricaded windows early on in the movie. Sending troops out in the apartment hallways would have posed extreme risks as well, due to the closed space - unless they happen to be wearing hazmat gear. It'd make a lot more sense to draw them out into one huge area with anything that makes loud noise and shoot everything up. The Infected are attracted to smell, aren't they?
    • Even if the Infected can break down doors, having everyone barricade themselves in small groups in separate apartments means that the Infected would have to break down fifty doors to infect everyone rather than just one as in the movie. It would give the military lots more time to evaluate the situation (especially if they're in contact with each small group and know where each is) and pick the best course of action. And the Isle of Dogs is a military-occupied safe zone, so would it be too much to ask for fortified shelters? Even a simple windowless room with a steel-bolted door would suffice. Have one or two per floor per building, and you've got a quarantined population.
      • I suspect that internal politics and cost cutting determined the provision, or rather lack of, shelters from the infected.
      • How did they fit 15,000+ people in one room, and so quickly for that matter?
• Given, herding people into the big room was a problem, but they knew of the quarantine plans in the first place. These people know how dangerous the infected are, how fast it spreads, and have almost certainly been shown footage of the infected. So naturally the second the military says "There's a breach! This is not a drill! Everyone to the quarantine zone!" what does everyone do? COMPLAIN!