Maybe the zombies are worried that sick people are trying to sap and impurify their precious bodily fluids.
This movie is full of Lindelof holes?
This is a movie about hordes of zombies that flow like fast moving water, I’m not sure I see the point of getting stuck on the virus detection ability.
As to why, well, there’s that whole zombies moving like fast moving water thing. Maybe the ill/unhealthy can’t get in the proper zombie groove, so even though the transmission part works well no matter how ill you are, you can’t contribute to the horde that swarms. So they pass over those people.
As why it can’t be just in Philly, look at the fast moving zombies! No one is going to see anything useful in the few seconds they have before either escaping or getting swarmed. Pitt sees it only after a long period of travel, catching bits here and there. Because he’s on that particular mission, to find patient zero, he has the potential to spot that aspect of the virus, something no one else in the world is in the position to see. Everyone else is either locked into a position where they can’t see anything or stuck in a fight where all they can concentate on is surviving.
To Ginger Yellow: No I’m not kidding, wasn’t that Pitt’s big epiphany after seeing a young boy in Jerusalem get ignored and remembering the old guy in Philly? Or was his epiphany not to give a scientist a loaded weapon?
Don’t ask me, I haven’t seen the movie. Mainly because it has asinine shit like that in it, though I didn’t know about that particular part.
Gameoverman: My big problem with the ill person conceit is that it would be immediately obvious, to everyone who was monitoring the situation, that there are a lot of super sick people not being attacked. It doesn’t matter how fast the zombies are as it would seem to me that in any major city there would be hundreds or thousands of terminally ill people asking for a pick up. Considering that hospitals would be a likely starting point for a outbreak it seems like the consistent survival of the terminally ill would be even more prominent. The whole patient zero mission was meaningless and after SoKor was completely dropped it seemed. Nothing about what Pitt did in the movie gave me any reason to believe that Pitt was in a better position to make that discovery than anyone else.
EDIT: Ginger Yellow: Ah my mistake. I misinterpreted what you wrote. Yeah the whole plot is completely asinine.
Going by what we see in the movie, specifically the opening in Philly, the zombie wave hits very fast.
So I ask, who in the hospital will be standing around and observing who the zombies attack and who they don’t? They will have to be making these observations while an equally fast zombie horde is swarming through the hospital. Personally, I can’t see how anyone would be able to survive in a hospital long enough to make these observations, then manage to escape the hospital, then manage to get somewhere else where they can report these observations to someone in charge.
I think it’s more believable that many people would see the zombies ignore some victims, but then those people never understand the significance. Meanwhile, other people see it and they are able to understand what they saw, but unfortunately they are killed before being able to do anything with the information. Finally, it’s possible that some people HAVE reported it, but it’s going to be a while before that information makes it to headquarters. Pitt’s character has a direct connection to those in command, which is the only reason he is even in contact with anyone at all.
Probably one of the dudes who is terminally ill but still well enough to stand up would be like “Uh hey, UN? None of us sick guys got attacked. Good luck with zombies, we’re having a block party outside city hall.”
Exactly, even if no one else saw the terminally ill get away unscathed, wouldn’t they themselves be contacting people trying to get rescued? I mean there has got to be at least one cancer ward in most cities. I would think once you got your 100th phone call from terminally ill patients saying their whole group just walked through a storm of zombies unscathed you could start putting things together.
Even that soldier, up and around and in sound mind, not to mention as ‘safe’ as anyone in the zombie apocalypse, didn’t put two and two together about being ignored by the zombies. I still think that in the heat of the moment, most people would probably just think it’s a random thing who gets attacked and who doesn’t. No one is going to default to thinking “I wasn’t attacked, I must be immune in some way”, they’re going to think they got lucky. The ward in the hospital with the terminally ill will think the zombies were attracted by the noise or some other thing in the other wards. They aren’t going to immediately guess that being ill has something to do with it.
Of course people wouldn’t immediately guess why they weren’t attacked. The point is that sufficient time passes in the movie that someone should’ve noticed that a set of people routinely do not get killed by the zombies and that the common link is that they all have terminal illnesses. One or two people escaping unscathed wouldn’t set off bells, but you’d think that EVERY hospital would have a score of people that got ignored.
Why are we still in Afghanistan?
because Lindelof…
The answer to all the worlds problems.
Does this mean Obama is off the hook?
I don’t know, THANKS LINDELOF doesn’t have quite the same ring.
To add to what I wrote earlier, the TV mini-series would have looked good, i.e., following events in the book but also incorporating some of the escape scenes and the search for a cure from the movie. The format would have also allowed for better character development.
Absolutely. The book was a much better fit for a mini-series. But Pitt would never lower himself to mere TV.
I went ahead and picked this up since it was on sale and I am a sucker for zombie movies. Not a good film, but not really a bad one either. There were flashes of what could have been a much better movie inside of it somewhere.
The action sequences were really well done, from the opening scene, parts of the Fall of Jerusalem, and also the decent (if logically questionable) scene in a plane. Unfortunately, the connective tissue between those scenes was pretty bad in general, with questionable logic by a host of people and and a great deal of non-zombie magic science. And of course, being a “zombie purist”, I am not too pleased with the whole “oh, we’ve found a cure” thing at the end… zombie moves are not supposed to have a happy ending.
So… it fails as a traditional, Tin Wisdom-approved zombie movie, it fails as sci-fi, it more or less fails as drama (since I really didn’t care too much about Brad Pitt’s family), but it was one hell of a good action movie.
A couple points:
Earlier in the thread, people noted that they really wanted to see what happened in some of the “special” areas of the world that are hinted at in the film: North Korea, India, etc. I’m kind of “meh” about that… I didn’t care for it in the book, and even the weird Jerusalem wish-fulfillment thing where they managed to build a massive wall in a week based on questionable premises rang pretty false.
As a gamer, I did appreciate the nods to Left 4 Dead that they threw in here and there… but quite honestly they just served to show that the plot in the L4D games is better than that in WWZ. I think Pitt should have made THAT movie. He would have made a good Nick, and he might have been able to pull off Francis.
Just saw this tonight for the first time, and, as I expected from the trailers, the film had absolutely nothing in common with the source material. It’s probably the worst adaptation of a novel I’ve ever seen. However, as a fast zombie movie, it’s tolerable if uninspired. The high production values somewhat compensate for the uninteresting characters, PG-13 rating (seriously? PG-13 zombie films are like PG-13 porn), and enormous plot holes.
This movie could have been so awesome. Take what has mostly been portrayed on a small scale like the Walking Dead i.e. a small group of survivors in the zombie apocalypse and go big cause that’s what Hollywood can do. But just showing several large set pieces tied together by a flimsy and frankly pretty lame story sinks it.
To totally derail this thread, the last sentence in my previous post reminded me of this short film classic starring Nathan Fillion (of Firefly and Castle fame), Nailing Your Wife. It’s from a series entitled PG Porn, and the few others I saw were terrible, but this one’s great. It’s almost but not quite work safe (innuendo) and very funny.