an analysis into how the RAGE virus spread

After watching re watching 28 Days Later awhile ago I was curious on just how fast the RAGE virus could spread and why it wasn't stopped.

Okay some background, the RAGE virus is basically follows the road of any zombie virus, it's an infection in the blood, when a host is bitten by an infected they turn into an unstoppable RAGE infected killing machine, the virus in the movie was introduced through chimps and some animal right activists breaking in to free the chimps from a research center, they ultimately end up with the chimps infecting them and a scientist, then as this virus spreads from a single clinic to infect 99.9% of Britain's population in 28 days.

This brings into question, those three infected manage to infect (lets say a village of about 300 people) and let it spread from there, did any farmers not have a shotgun, don't people not have any knives or anything to defend themselves?



I've pointed out several problems with 28 Days Later before but when our characters in that movie encounter the British soldiers who've secured a Victorian style mansion in the woods are armed with just their SA-85's seem to have no problem defending their area.




Yet at the start of the same movie it was stated that the main infection had sparked and rampaged throughout the countryside, and that the army blockades had been overrun, of course the mansion one we saw in the movie was overrun from an internal dispute and a chained infected being let loose, but surely the entire British Army could have at least protected London from this outbreak!

Now onto 28 Weeks Later, this was probably the biggest crap fest of a movie I have ever seen in my life, it could have been brilliant, even though it was action packed (towards the second half that is) it was the biggest disappointment of a sequel I have ever seen since Alien 3, it just reeked of bad writing.

The story focuses on 28 weeks after the initial infection had broken out (hence 28 Weeks Later) and shows the US Army securing London, District One (based on the Green Zone in Baghdad apparently) is set up to house civilians being imported into the city, the infection is dead until some woman who is immune to the virus is found, kisses her husband, he becomes infected and less than 10 minutes all hell breaks loose!

The extreme lengths that the writers go to to make this disaster happen is just unreal, apparently the woman who had been quarantined didn't warrant a guard or any kind of surveillance, this one lone infected manages to take down several armed American soldiers almost instantly!



Then when the Red Alert is actually issued every single civilian freaks out, you think a closely guarded military complex would at least give the civilians a drill in case you know, SOMETHING LIKE THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, and putting over 200 civilians in one confined area is obviously the best thing!
Sure when was a containment room set up to actually contain something!?!

And just to make the situation worse the commanding officer actually orders that the whole city be plunged into darkness. How does this help the situation? It panics the survivors and makes it even harder to see whats going on. This makes less than no sense.

While the US Army snipers guarding District One are ordered (wait for it) not select the tenth of the people infected but shoot everybody!
As if the whole containment strategy couldn't get any stupider it did!



Why not just drop napalm around the areas were the infected (and those fleeing civilians are), on screen I counted about 10 infected running and getting burned, and then after it a bigger horde of about 60 running towards the underground.

So there you have it, the danger of the fictional RAGE virus even though the writers set it up (well in 28 Days anyway) is made to be ten times as dangerous than it could have possibly been!

8 Things I learned from 28 Days Later

Its a movie that rocked when it came out, and a sequel that didn't rock so much but it was still a great movie for its time and it thought me eight things!

8. A London taxi is the best transport post RAGE apocalypse



Think about it, you're alive in Britain and as far as your concerned the world has ended after a RAGE virus pretty much turns everybody into crazy infected monsters that will attack and pounce on you and the best vehicle you can think of to drive from London to Manchester is a fucking black London taxi, it fits in well but c'mon, you get all of London to yourself and any car you want and they pick a black taxi!

7. Camping in the open with roaming infected is completely safe



So as we pretty much saw from the start of the movie when Jim lit a candle it caused three infected to literally burst into his house and pin him to the ground and try and kill him and took two others to finish off those infected, not long later on the trip to Manchester the four survivors set up camp in the middle of the countryside outdoors, why weren't they jumped by hordes of or even a handful of infected?

6. HELLO is more sufficient then HELP or SOS



Near the end of the movie we are introduced to the fact that the infected are slowly dying out and the now three survivors are residing in a cottage somewhere in England, anyway after knitting loads of fabric together they spell out HELLO in block capitals and lay it across a field, each letter is massive and looks like it took ages to fix together, they signal to fighter jets which comes across the valley and calls for a helicopter to come out and rescue them.

Here's the thing, you'd look pretty distressed to spend enough time spelling that out instead of HELP or SOS, and personally if I was that Finnish fighter pilot they'd be the last people I'd rescue.

5. Pepsi is the post apocalyptic drink



Wake up in a hospital with nobody there whatsoever, why not have a drink of Pepsi to refresh yourself, your immune shutting down from having no proper food in 28 days?
Why not have some more Pepsi instead of Lilt!
The movie briefly entered a period where we forgot about the murderous infected for a few minutes and were reminded of drinks like Pepsi, Tango and Lilt oh and Terries Chocolate Orange (that one bit of dialogue was cringe worthy).

4. 15-Year-Old Girls show no emotion



Apart from being happy sometimes the British girl Hannah in 28 Days Later never seemed to show any emotion, especially just before a mother figure to her was about to be raped, obviously the script writers were afraid of the character showing any emotion in that scene so gave her some pills to make her have NO EMOTIONS WHATSOEVER for the main shootout scene at the end of the film.

3. PETA will lead us to the apocalypse



Yes a little incident involving PETA resulted in the deaths of over 60,000,000 British people, at the start of the movie the animal rights activists break into a Cambridge facility holding RAGE infected chimps and end up freeing them starting off the deadly virus, believe it or not this I thought was a rather amusing way to blame somebody apart from some crazy German scientist or the French.

2. When Britain falls so will all media communications world wide



That's the most baffling thing about the entire movie, the fact that it was only the UK that had fallen pray to the virus even though we were told at the start infection had spread to Paris and New York (fans claim it was a diversion of some sort), so the British army unit in the movie obviously have no proper radio or TV to find whether or not everybody is alive ignoring the fact across the channel people are watching The Simpsons, it was a stretch that went way too far to ignore.

1.British soldiers will ruin your day and steal your woman



Yes the army unit in the movie nearly pretty much ended everything for the protagonists in the movie, first they are shown to be arrogant and killing infected gets them horny, when one Scottish guy attempts to do the right thing it results in him and Jim about to be shot in the woods (Irish and Scottish!), anyway Jim escapes the rest attempt to rape the two women since they needed to repopulate Britain to continue being arrogant pricks (that's the best explanation I can come up with).