This is kind of funny to read two posts after someone favorably comparing I Am Legend to 28 Weeks Later (also interesting to compare how the military seemed a lot more competently dealing with uninfected vs. infected people in IAL)
Personally, I loved I Am Legend, although I like 28 Days Later a bit more, but I just couldn’t stand 28 Weeks Later, partially because of it’s hammy use of the “Americans/Military Screws Everything Up”, a plot device that I’ve seen used far too much (and oftentimes much better) in anime over the years.
The response to the infection was realistic, finally. Bomb everything. Shoot everyone. Walk through the streets with fucking hazmat suits and chemically kill anything that happened to survive the previous destruction.
That’s exactly how you would expect to respond to that situation.
Also, you can’t believably “clean up” England after every single person there dies. Not in 6 months. Not in a year. I think it was totally believable for them to tidy up part of one city and not have made any progress in the rest of the country. Exactly how far should we go to hypothetically clean up an area that nobody’s living in, and is potentially dangerous on a “end of the whole fucking world!” scale?
The only unbelievable part for me is the initial infection spread, after the chick bites the dude in the medical room. “Okay, everyone crowd together in this big room! For some reason you can’t get out, but an infected person can magically get in.”
I’m hoping the third one will be fantastic, and this one is just suffering from second-movie-in-a-trilogy syndrome. (There will be a third one after that ending, right?)
A nitpick - the mother didn’t bite her husband; he kissed her nice and deep.
I think that the only inexcusable plot hole in this movie is the complete failure of the military to take real zombie precautions. The obvious way to deal with something like this is to compartmentalize and lockdown at the first problem. That keeps the zombies from spreading and lets you assess the situation while you call in the big guns.
Every apartment should have had an independent food/water supply that would last for a few weeks, and every door should have been reinforced. The “Code Red” response should just be “everybody go back home and lock everything. Don’t come out for any reason until the All Clear.”
You can still make a cool zombie movie like that. You can still have the overrun happen. It just takes a little clever writing to describe how the system fails. But don’t set the system up to be stupid in the first place.
I, for one, totally bought the medico’s motivation in trying to keep the mother, save the kid, etc. She knew it would get out someday. So it makes sense to try to make a vaccine/cure before that happens.
I agree that this was a much weaker film than “28 Days Later.” I too was rooting for both those annoying kids to get skewered.
A plot hole that I didn’t see mentioned above was that Robert Carlyle’s character was able to blithely stroll into the high security lab containing his wife. I know it was established that he had some job in the security force with a card that lets him into secure area, but this was major high security - a lab containing a possibly infected person whom the man in charge was contemplating executing. At the very least, there would have been armed guards placed outside the lab, with explicit instructions that Carlyle (who is known to be the HUSBAND of the infected) was not to approach within 100 yards of it.
At the risk of inflaming a huge controversy though, I have to say that real world events vindicate the portrayal of the U.S. army in this film. In fact, the short-sightedness of the military was probably a deliberate comment on the situation in you-know-where.
I also had big problems with the ‘shove all the civilians into a big room’ tactic. The lock-down mentioned previously would have been infintely better. The whole thing was utter stupidity, especially given that even the dumbest grunt has a clue about disease vectors.
The fact that there wasn’t even a guard over the infected woman was also dumb.
I also thought the zombies weren’t keen on daylight per the first movie, so why are they all out enjoying the sun when the little kid shows up at the house in the beginning?
Plus, who barricaded that house? They might as well have used tissue paper over the windows given how easily zombies broke in.
Well, if by “moderately faithful” you mean “took the plot line, put it through a wringer, chopped it up and threw away the important bits, then reassembled the rest using shit-for-glue,” then, yes, it was moderately faithful.
When they copied the ol’ thumb’y-eye’y bit from the first movie, I lost all interest. Can’t even think up some kills on your own? Plagerising death methods? LAME.
I got that distinct impression, too - “Let’s put the US army in charge of re-construction because everyone expects them to totally FUBAR it.” Holy cliché, Batman! I’m no apologist for the US army, but can we pick on someone else for awhile now?
I think you’re failing to seperate the army and the civilian leadership. Military planners described to Bush fairly accurately the problems that would be encountered in a post-invasion Iraq, and Bush made the call anyway. You can’t blame the military for poor decisions from civilian leadership.
Well, they DID kick around the British Army in the first movie (I can’t seem to muster any kind of annoyance over that, since the Ninth Doctor is just awesomely fun as a bad guy)
Honestly, it would make a bit more sense if it were some kind of multinational thing (UN or NATO, as a ferinstance).
Actually, one thing I was unclear on in the movie, how voluntary was the repopulation of England? Was it basically people coming forth wanting to move back into London, or all the Englishfolk in the world being rounded up to repopulate their homeland?
Mom was a carrier - she hosted the virus and maintained an asymptomatic state. However, her bodily viscera served nicely as a vector for the virus. Mom wasn’t about eating people or cats.
I certainly wouldn’t laud either of the “28” movies for their logic - but the movies are pretty in terms of cinematography, it is nice to not be fucking drowning in fucking soundtrack the entire time, and it is nice to see a movie generate a tense, grim, hopeless sequence of events without a fake, happy ending.
But yes, the plot was chock full of fatally idiotic holes, and the logic didn’t follow. And the science was bad. And the military bits were wrong. And the civilian bits were wrong.
The next likely zombie/undead/whatever project of note is the anticipated World War Z movie. Although it would work way better as a multi-part series.
I wouldn’t say that completely - she looked like she was having a very hard time not ripping open a jugular when she was hugging her kids when they found her. I’d say she had a modified case of the Rage Virus. It’s also possible that Robert Carlyle was able to be a smarter rage victim than previous ones because he got the virus from her and her virus wasn’t exactly the same as the other viruses. But everyone else who got it got it from him, so they were all having the same virus, so why weren’t they acting smarter, too? Except maybe they were, and that’s how they were able to walk all the way under the Chunnel and come up in France. I think I’m still confused.
My biggest beef with the movie is all the stupid coincidences. Yes, I understand the need for Carlysle, and I think he did a fine job, but does he have to be the one to release the virus and kill the doctor and chase the kids and grimace menacingly and…and…and…? Hell, there were a thousand ways to advance the story, 999 of them which didn’t rely so heavily on coincidence and which would’ve made much better sense.
lissener’s 100% right - they didn’t actually think through their ideas and go with good ones, they went with the first inane thing they thought of.
One thing that I don’t understand is the Chunnel concept. Of course it was meant to be open ended for another ending, but why didn’t the original wave of zombies just cross on through the chunnel?
This is one of those movies where if everybody did what they’re supposed to do and followed instructions and cooperated, the movie would be over. So you have to show people panicking and making mistakes, and everything basically going to hell.
I thought of this movie when I went to see Doomsday, but that movie wanted to be Mad Max Goes to Scotland, so it wasn’t the same thing.
