As with most here, I enjoyed the movie the most up until the dock rescue.
CGI
I really don’t know why Hollywood is so caught up with these crappy CGI effects. It sucks the life and character out of so many potentially awesome movies! Examples include the remastered Star Wars Episodes and the first 3 episodes, and especially this supposedly atmosphere-driven story.
There were several times when gazing into the unhinged jaws of the vampires that I felt as though I were back at home playing Resident Evil. In that case, I don’t expect the CGI to be so good as to be realistic. In a movie like this, though, is it so unreasonable to want to see the expertise shown in movies like 28 Days Later, The Birds, etc?
NOTE TO HOLLYWOOD: Great makeup, puppets, and guys in costumes combined with good camerawork/lighting will ALWAYS create better creatures than computers. I mean, just compare Alien to Alien Resurrection!
The Deer and Lions
It’s perfectly acceptable to have deer in the city. In fact, lots of regions in the US have a problem with keeping the deer population from dangerously overbreeding due to the lack of large numbers of natural predators. If human hunting wasn’t around to cull the populations, we’d probably have an ecological disaster of another kind on our hands until predator populations rebound.
The deer could have walked over during the winter, swam, etc. Hell, didn’t anyone catch the news article about the kangaroo being eaten by a shark recently?
As for the lions, it’s easy to figure out why they’d be out and about. Eco-nuts, convinced that the world is ending (this time they’re right!), assault the abandoned zoo to release the animals so they don’t starve to death in their cages. Either that, or the infected vampires try to get to the lions and the lions take them down and escape.
The Trap
The trap that catches Nevill is obviously not of his own making. As others have already pointed out, there is no bait for an infected. There is no cloak to protect the infected from being destroyed in the sunlight. Also, if it was one of his own, why would he set it up inside a rain puddle??? Remember, he doesn’t believe the monsters are intelligent enough to recognize a trap no matter how obvious it may be.
Oh, and something else I noticed… Was it just me, or was there a second trap in that puddle? Something that snapped into Will Smith’s leg to disable him? That kind of thing wouldn’t work on a vampire at all!
The biggest clue, however, is when the sun is setting and the leader vampire comes out with his dogs on chain leashes.
That being said, was anyone else curious as to why the leader then did not help his dogs finish the job on Smith? During that fight, he could have walked straight up to Smith and killed him.
The Bridges
At first, this disturbed me, too. However, I think it would make sense that even under a quarantine the US government would keep at least ONE land route. It’s just that the bridge that they choose for this role would be heavily restricted.
In fact, if I were the military, I would keep open one bridge and completely restrict boats and other water vessels. The military could keep tabs on the bridge route easily, but if there were any boats visiting Manhattan, it’d be all too easy for an infected person to randomly manage to cross to the mainland. Irrational relatives might make the run via boat, or cargo ships might get inadvertent stowaways.
This makes the most sense to me, because a single land-based bride route could have multiple levels of security redundancy. Boats offer too much mobility.
Sink everything.
If the bridge is blocked by vehicles, it’s a simple matter to clear it off using abandoned bulldozers, or, if the keys are still in them and the batteries aren’t dead, driving them away.
The Vehicle/SUV
It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me as to why the woman came back to the dock. I can explain away the UV lights as already being equipped (if everything went down relatively slowly, there are probably several car-owners who had the same idea and equipped their own vehicles); however, why the hell would she be back at the dock?
Furthermore, why would the vampires stop attacking her? They didn’t stop attacking Will Smith’s SUV even though it had UVs!
Will Smith
A lot of people have been praising Will Smith’s acting because of this movie, and I have to agree that it isn’t bad. However, it’s like no one’s ever seen him in a really good acting role before!
If you’ve never seen it, check out the 1993 movie *http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/six_degrees_of_separation/Six Degrees of Separation *, which currently enjoys a 93% rating on RottenTomatoes.com. It’s a great movie, and Smith does some magnificent acting in it. Plus it was filmed during Smith’s third year as the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!
Definitely a must-see 