28 Weeks Later/Wall Banger
Wall Bangers from 28 Weeks Later include:
- 28 Weeks Later is one long Wall Banger mixed in with Shoot the Shaggy Dog. Two major points merit special mention:
- When the protagonists' mother is found, she is found to have the virus, however she is a partially immune carrier. So the medical staff and the army put her in a room, by herself, no armed guards or anything, where anyone can just walk in and contract the virus. Let me say that again: the most lethal virus in the history of mankind with a kill rate of virtually 100% and an incubation period of seconds had ABSOLUTELY NO ONE guarding it to make sure that it didn't escape into the general population.
- Because of the idiocy in 1, the virus gets loose. The army executes a procedure called "Code Red" to combat it. If you're thinking that Code Red is "confining everyone to quarters and shooting anyone on the street or in the halls because anyone who doesn't listen to the curfew must be infected," you're using too much of your brain (more than whoever wrote this movie). No, Code Red consists of herding all the healthy civilians, somewhere around 15,000 of them, into enclosed areas, using weak locks to seal the doors, turning off the lights, leaving them unguarded and defenseless, and then having snipers search the streets for the 4 or 5 infected that are running loose. Of course when one of the infected breaks into one of these dark unguarded enclosed areas, they quickly turn 1 infected person into 500 infected people. Snipers then try to pick out the infected from the healthy as the crowds burst onto the street. However this quickly proves to be an ineffective tactic, so they get the order to kill everyone, including people who are actively hiding, surrendering, attempting to evade gunfire, driving cars. You know, those things which it is established that the zombies never do. Eventually they firebomb and gas the entire population, complete with shots of fake remorse from the higher ups in the operation, as though this was something they didn't want to do, but were forced to by circumstance. Quite frankly watching the movie, up until the end, I assumed that the army wanted the civilians to catch the virus, and the whole thing was some convoluted twisted plot to get a new bioweapon for the US. But no, the army was just that inept.
- The way they kept the woman was only supposed to be extremely temporary, you could see them talk about it clearly for the first time as the guy broke in. Also bear in mind that it was behind unbreakable glass and only accessible to people with very high-level security clearance (which he had as it was necessary for his job). Not really sure what's meant by the "code red" thing, there was absolutely no time to quarantine people properly, they just did what they could.
- Temporary or not, you're kind of missing the point here: the woman had a virus that had wiped out an entire country in just under a month. If you had a vial of something that, if even accidentally opened, could wipe out your entire state or country, in days, would you risk leaving it alone and unguarded for even a second? The statement that there was absolutely no security was incorrect, but given the threat level, the fact that only a keycard and a handful of guards down the hall who didn't even pay attention to anything passing them was the only thing keeping literally the most dangerous thing in the world from escaping into the population was idiotic. So far as Code Red: that was the plan that they had set up in advance. The plan was to put everyone in containment, and try to find any infected. If more people got infected, they bomb the entire city. That wasn't some spur of the moment response they came up with that was the plan, and it was mentioned several times throughout the film. As stated above, the way they did it was stupid, because with all of those people in an enclosed area, as soon as one infected person breaks in, they've just made 500 more infected people. If they had told everyone to go to their rooms, lock their doors, and don't come out until further notice., there's no guarantee that more people wouldn't have been infected, however if one infected person breaks into a studio apartment filled with three people, by definition they can't make 500 infected people in a matter of seconds like they did the way they wound up doing it. They could easily track the infected in the streets, lock down any rooms and floors that were necessary, and pick off the infected at their leisure. Idiot Plot explains this better, as really, a whole lot of stupid stuff was done in this movie, and the above statement that this movie was Wall Banger mixed with Shoot the Shaggy Dog forgot to add in Idiot Plot and Idiot Ball.
- They had the woman chained to a bed in a secure cell, which you could only get into with maximum security clearance. As soon as they realised she was infected, the soldiers immediately ran over there to execute her. They had about a 30 second window to do it, and there was apparently no reason to hurry. This still doesn't excuse the rest through.
- If the soldiers had been ordered to "shoot suspicious targets", they would have had a bit more freedom to rock 'n' roll, but no obligation to slaughter everyone. They could have possibly saved most of the population.
- Back to 28 Weeks Later