28 Days Later/Fridge

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Fridge Brilliance

• At the barricade where Frank becomes infected, the soldiers have clearly been watching, camouflaged, the whole time. So why do they wait to show themselves until after he becomes an infectee? Perhaps so that there's less resistance when their plans for Selena and Hannah are revealed?

Fridge Logic

• It's shown repeatedly that the time from infection to Rage is never more than a minute or so. That should make detecting and isolating the infected pretty easy. This is the reason most real viruses have an incubation period.
  • In theory, but the infected do nothing but attack attack attack in a blind rage, and if they get so much as a drop of blood or saliva into an open wound (pretty easy to do in a fistfight), you're done. Now there's two of them attacking the next person. And then three attacking the person after that.
  • There's also the ever-so-common mistake of calling a virus an infection, when viruses and infections are completely different.
  • It also explains why the virus was contained in Britain. With practically no incubation time, there is (virtually) nil chance of infected people getting through the ports and airports undetected. With Britain being an island, they'd have to walk through the water or something!
    • The Channel Tunnel is preferable. Though either the British or the French would probably have done something to prevent this too.
      • Yeah, that probably would have been great. Unfortunately...
• After 28 days, the infection should have largely died out. Given that the Infected neither eat nor drink, and that they seem to barf up copious quantities of blood, their lifespan would realistically be mere days. Some of them are seen to rest (the ones Jim first encounters in the church), but still, there really shouldn't be that many left after a month.
  • The movie doesn't explicitly state that the infected in the movie have been around for twenty eight days. That is only when the infection began. The infected that we have been shown might as well have been people infected after the initial plague. There aren't many left during the film, and the ones we see are probably those infected later on. The original infectees would have died out days if not weeks earlier.
  • Or they conserve strength by simply sleeping all the time unless a victim is around, and they might eat corpses and drink water off screen or something.
    • The Answer To Infection involves waiting for the Infected to starve to death, something that would be impractical if they did eat and drink off screen. Furthermore, they are seen lying on the ground, dying of starvation close to the end of the movie.
  • The infection has largely died out. That's how Jim is able to walk through London, a city of several million people, yelling "Hello!" very loudly without being mauled in the first ten seconds. But there are still some more recent infectees hanging around.
• If the Rage Plague causes people to be mindlessly hostile and violent to other people, why aren't the Infected attacking each other?
  • A supplementary comic claims they are attracted to chemical scents like soap. Not sure how much sense that makes, but whatever. Also, a virus like that wouldn't gain anything from having its host attack other infected hosts.
    • It's an artificial virus, it doesn't have to behave like a natural one. As for why they don't attack each other one guess might be some sort of chemical Rage victims give off? Just a guess.
• So, they're keeping the Rage-infected soldier alive to see how long it takes for them to starve. Okay. You can't break his legs and arms or even just cut them off? You're putting a lot of faith in that chain...
  • Maybe the Virus was having its intended effect (Of mellowing them out and making them all peace loving hippies) ... But ONLY to others that are infected? To them, they are merely spreading the love, so to speak.
  • Well, no, you can't. They're living people, not zombies. Cutting off their arms would make them quickly bleed to death and breaking the limbs and leaving them that way could lead to infection, internal bleeding or maybe even something else screwed up because of the marrow. They want it to die of starvation, after all.
• Jim wakes up in a hospital bed after 28 days with an IV in his arm... but no catheter. So where does all that fluid that's been dripping into him go?
  • Everywhere...
• It's generally implied that most of London's population have become infected or are now dead, possibly both. This is relatively straight forward, yet London is a city of 7 to 8 million people, where did all the bodies go? Let alone in the rest of the country.
  • A great deal of people managed to escape the country. A great deal more dispersed into the countryside before getting killed or infected.
    • Or maybe they're all holed up in their apartments, refusing to let any other survivors know they're in there for fear of letting an infectee in.
  • The sequel confirms that many did escape the country.
  • And many simply were killed trying to hole up in their houses and apartments. Most of the locations visited were outdoors or public areas people would avoid once an epidemic was apparent (like a huge grocery store), and when they went into other buildings (like the church, Jim's house, or the gas station) they found corpses and/or Infected.