Headscratchers / Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Andy trying to thin down the crowd and why it wouldn't work

• Why didn't Gun-Store Andy try to thin the herd a bit more? As funny as the "celebrity" pot-shots were, Andy had a whole gun store full of guns and ammunition, he was an expert marksman, and they weren't exactly dealing with an endless horde. Even if he couldn't wipe them out, it seems that with half-a-gun-store's-worth-of-ammunition's-worth of zombies dead and gone, their ventures outside would have gone more smoothly.
  • How many rounds does a gun store generally stock? Milwaukee has more than 600,000 residents, so if the gunshots were attracting them all to the mall it might not have been worth the effort.
    • It's a fair point, but a gun aficionado like Gun-Store Andy would probably have a suppressor or two handy... based on my rather limited knowledge of gun stores.
    • Along with the below statement mentioning suppressors wearing out, suppressors are NFA items (like machine guns, some semi-automatic shotguns like the Striker, and short-barreled shotguns and rifles). They're very expensive, also requiring a $200 tax stamp and a lot of paperwork to acquire. Most NFA items that aren't simply held by rental ranges for a fun weekend are in the hands of private owners, and even major firearms retailers will only have one or two at the most. Then you have to assume that Andy would even have a GUN that fits any of the silencers he has.
    • Suppressors wear out after a while. But anyways, I fully agree Andy should have tried mowing down the crowd during the days he was trapped. IF it has a negative impact (such as summoning an even bigger group of zombies from the city), fine, stop it, but that's no reason not to try.
    • Suppressors don't really work that way. They bring the decibel level down to the point it doesn't cause physical damage to your ears, but the muzzle report is still as loud as a jackhammer.
    • See below re: "hearing range".
    • He was trying. They were making a game of it, even.
    • That wasn't a serious effort at all, just picking off a few zombies for fun. Considering all the ammo and guns he has, a real attempt to thin the herd would have probably involved him head-shooting the zombies closest to him repeatedly for a few hours every day.
    • Apparently Andy the gun store owner has never heard of a .22. All day plinking and no sore shoulder from the recoil.
    • And no guarantee of penetration of the skull from a distance. If he uses a bigger round and gets a headshot, it kills the zombie. He uses a .22 and gets a headshot, it maybe kills the zombie, or maybe just cracks its skull a bit and makes it really pissed-off and more eager to find out where those gunshots are coming from.
  • For that matter, why didn't they drop a few propane-tank bombs into the parking lot? They seemed pretty effective.
    • Because that would be a really really good way to destroy a good portion of the building they were taking refuge in, killed maybe a few dozen zombies at best, and attracted a whole lot more of them.
    • Even if they could throw a propane-tank bomb into the lot at a distance safe enough that they can avoid being in the blast radius themselves, that bomb would definitely shatter the mall's windows on the first floor. Not only would zombies who avoided the blast then enter the mall, but so would other zombies who heard the blast go off and were attracted to the mall as consequence.
    • How many propane tanks did they really have at their disposal to turn into explosives?
  • In the DVD they have an extra, a video diary of the movie from Andy's perspective. In one the entries, he talks about how he spent something like 600 bullets trying to thin them out, but that everytime he killed one, two more would show up. Another diary has him state how he tried to use a molotov cocktail, but the zombies didn't budge, and instead only made him hungrier because they smelt like Jimmy Dean sausages.
    • Still doesn't work: even if the gunshots attract every zombie within hearing range, that still only means he has to kill all the zombies within a several-block radius, not every zombie in the damn city. So it takes him a couple days, instead of one day. "Hearing range" is not infinite! It gets even worse when you consider that its hard enough for human beings to pinpoint the exact direction of a distant gunshot, so why do 600,000 mindless zombies all get to home in on it like a smart bomb? Hax.
    • Only has to kill every zombie in a several block radius? What is keeping other zombies from wandering within that several block radius and hearing the gunshots while Andy is still working on the first bunch of zombies that were originally in hearing range?
    • Assuming Andy had over 600,000 rounds in the store and didn't miss a shot, it would take him a very long time to clean out the city. If it takes him only 3 seconds to move on to the next zombie and kill it (not counting time spent reloading, getting new guns, cleaning the guns, eating and drinking, defecating, or sleeping), it would take 1.8 million seconds (3.42 years) to clean the place out. Even if you sent enough soldiers in that you kept up a constant rate of one kill per second (meaning enough soldiers that you could let them all eat, sleep, do their business, reload, and clean and repair their weapons), it would take 1.17 years to exterminate the entire city with small arms fire. Assuming none of them die in the process of fighting these fast, extremely durable monsters.
    • 1.8 million seconds is about 3 weeks, not 3.42 years.
    • In short, assuming that one man could do anything to thin out a constantly increasing horde of zombies that numbers at LEAST 600,000 by just sitting on his roof and plinking demonstrates a very bad understanding of math, human skill, and human endurance. Zombies will be constantly reentering the area, attracted by various sounds. A platoon of Marines would take ages to clean the place up enough for human habitation, let alone one guy with a gun store.
    • You're still forgetting the mental effect this was having on the poor guy. He spent hours and hundreds of bullets and he didn't even make a dent in them. Sure he could have eventually thinned them out, but for every zombie he killed he saw two more take it's place. He had no way of knowing just how many zombies there were, and from his perspective he was getting nowhere (His first words after spending 600 bullets were "Well that's what you call an exercise in futility"). Plus, he doesn't just need to kill all the zombies between him and the mall (or somewhere with food that hasn't gone off), he needs to kill all the zombies in the whole area so that none jump him when he leaves the store.
    • Easy; when a zombie hears something and follows the noise, it starts moaning. The moaning attracts more zombies, and they in turn attract more, until the entire city and then some are moving towards the same location, if there aren't several "signals" confusing them. The original Day of the Dead (1985) aptly demonstrated this scenario at its opening scenes.
    • Get some long-lasting batteries, jam some Public Enemy ("Night of the Living Baseheads"), hook it up to a few loudspeakers, and you have an instant zombie distracter. The best part is, even if any of them do see you, the others can't hear it moan over the music.
    • That's no better than drawing them with the gunshots. The only advantage I can see in that plan is that he would have some kick-ass(and appropriate) music to either starve to death or get eaten alive to. Noise is noise. Playing loud music to "cover up" the sound of the moaning so other zombies won't hear it is like dumping a bucket full of mud onto your carpet to hide a little mustard stain.
    • You misunderstand. It's not to drown out the zombies. It's to distract them. Play something to attract the zacks, and then skulk around in the area they vacate. Their inability to signal other zombies means much more leeway in dealing with them.
    • Ultimately, the reason why Andy doesn't do it is because, being a Romero zombie film, using the tools at your disposal in a logical, rational way directly impedes the plot of the film, and so the characters can't use the tools at their disposal in a logical, rational way. (Btw, this sounds meaner than I intend, but I think it should be expected that Romero doesn't make Zombie Films wherein the survivors have the ability to succeed.)
    • Technically, he didn't make this one. He made the one this version was based on.

Why even leaving the mall

• Why for the love of christ did they leave the mall!? The mall would be an ideal place for surviving a zombie seige, with access to canned food, supplies, medical kits, radios, clothing, everything. And yet they leave it all behind to go to an island despite not knowing if the boat is still in the marina, if the island even exists, if the island is uninfected, if they could even survive on said island and if they're even capable of getting through all the zombies. And the reason for this is what? The nurse saying "I don't wanna die here"? The zombie baby squicked them too much? The quote on the Let Me Get This Straight... page even has the characters notice how stupid the plan is. If you're leaving a safe and supplied location to reach a place you're not even sure exists, at least give them a damn good reason!
  • A mall is actually a pretty shitty place to fortify. The gang was unbelievably lucky (to the point of divine intervention) that the mall was empty instead of filled with dozens or hundreds of people who all thought that the mall was a great place to survive the zombie apocalypse. It's loaded with entrances from every angle, including the roof, and it would take a great effort to locate and fortify every single entrance against creatures that have demonstrated the ability to shatter glass and break through interior doors with their bare hands. Chances are, unless you work at that particular mall you will have missed at least ONE door or window.
  • I thought they were running out of supplies which is why Ving Rhames said there are worse things than dying and sitting here waiting to die is one of them.
    • Nope, he just randomly said that after the zombie baby incident. Their supplies are never said to be running short; other than the lack of electricity, they were hanging on pretty well. And anyways, if their motivation had been a supply shortage, they should have tried going to a different mall or something - NOT going to an island that might not even exist and from which they probably have no freaking idea how to get food from.
    • Well, morale was at an all time low, and they had gotten sick of living the mall life. They knew it was only a matter of time before it was their turn to die, and they seemed to prefer to die on their feet than to slowly go insane.
  • The worst part is that they could easily have provided a situation that gave them a reason beyond being stupid.
    • Ennui is just as real a threat as the zombies. The original at least made it a point to show them all slowly succumbing to boredom, though.
    • When the survivors first entered the Crossroads Mall, the infection was only in its first day, meaning that there wasn't a large amount of zombies to fight through. They managed to lock it down before the main horde came. Searching out for another mall might've proved futile; you've got to fight through the zombies outside and inside the mall, as well as lock down the entrances...difficult to do when you've got a lot of running corpses chasing you down!
  • They were trying to save Andy, the gun store owner. He was starving to death across the street, and they knew that in trying to rescue him, they wouldn't be able to return to the mall without letting the zombies in. The attempt to send him food caused a chain reaction of events that let zombies into the mall early, and so they had to go. Besides, being under constant siege for a month is extremely stressful. Getting out of that situation is a legitimate goal, even if the journey is risky and the destination is unknown.
    • They had arrows from a sporting goods store, didn't they? Why not tie a line to one and fire it over, then set up a pulley system to get food to him?
    • They were way too far away to do that unless Legolas happened to be hiding somewhere in Andy's shop.
    • Then build a mortar on the model of a potato canon and use that to lob a line to the guy. Kids used to build all kinds of fun things that use explosives before people got so...whimpy.
    • No, they tried to get food to Andy after they planned to escape - they were just giving him food to keep him alive and strong enough until they did the big rescue. That's when everything went to hell and they had to flee early. And besides, while I understand that being under siege by zombies would be hell, fleeing a safe place into a zombie infested world because you're bugging out is stupid. Like said above, it'd be simple to give them a good reason; the mall caught fire, the army was carpet-bombing the town, the sheer mass of zombies were forcing their way in, a radio call from other survivors, etc. Even if they showed the characters undergoing severe mental erosion and insanity from the stress it would go a long way to explaining why they'd try to escape. Just having them say "Screw this, I wanna leave!" just makes them look like idiots who ruined their chances of living, not desperate and stressed survivors.
    • I just assumed they needed a way to end the film in a hollywood way, having them stay there indefinitely would be boring, though realistic.
  • The simplest answer is that they're not the brightest bunch and they didn't think the whole situation out, being blinded by their own emotions stirred up from their own lack of guilt of not keeping up with the pregnant woman and her husband. An example of their lack of actual thinking is this: They send a dog to give Andy food, water and a radio (which in turn gets him killed), yet they didn't think to attempt to use the truck or the hidden underground tunnels to get over to Andy's store with supplies instead, allowing for said second person to get over to the store and help Andy load up as much guns and ammo they could use instead when they went to leave as planned (It easy for Nicole to climb down from the roof, start the truck, drive over and then get into Andy's store without allowing any other zombies to get in and without being bitten. It was easy for the rescue party going after Nicole to get in with minor problems, again without getting bitten. Sending one person over either way would have allowed Andy the supplies he needed to be in top shape and allowed for more ammo and supplies to be taken).
  • I feel it was more a snap decision, borne of losing 3(4 if you count the baby) people in one go, they probably knew the bus thing wouldn't pan out, but they needed something to keep their minds busy, they had probably more death in their lives than anyone, except Ana and Kenneth, have dealt with in their lives, within days, think about it this way, a relative or friend dies, how is your thinking working for the next few days, probably not at 100%.

Fast zombies can't exist, or the misplaced realism

• Okay, I'll be that guy. Fast zeds can't exist. Zombies are literally decaying pieces of meat; they have no motor skills. It's a miracle they can walk upright in the first place, let alone haul ass faster than the living beings they chase. Yes, it makes for a terrifying new concept on everyone's favorite reanimated corpses, but the biology fail irks me to no end.
  • Zombies can't exist. They have no functional circulatory system, no functional respitory system, no functional digestion system...Need I go on? They are impossible perpetual motion machines with no source of fuel, no means to move, no means to think anything even as simple as "brains!" - they are dead bodies that have been magically animated! Willing Suspension of Disbelief is a must if you're going to enjoy a zombie film. Fast zombies are no less credible than zombies themselves. They're zombies! They're magic!
  • The explanation that Max Brooks uses in his Zombie Survival Guide (which, incidentally, doesn't support Fast Zombies due to lack of coordination) is that a zombie can exceed a human's limits initially due to lack of fatigue and pain. While they will eventually tear their muscles apart from constant strain, it allows a powerful and enduring first strike. My thought would be that until their nerves and muscles deteriorate more, they can push their bodies beyond what they could in life.
  • You know what really bugs me about the films (or rather, the fanbase) is people who hate the remake primarily because the zombies can run. When in fact the original Dawn of the Dead had running zombies as well. What? Nobody remembers the children that sprint out of the closet at Ken Foree's character like he was the Easter Bunny or some shit when they stop to refuel the helicopter?
  • Fast zombies ARE realistic. That is, of the 28 Days / Weeks sort. They're technically not dead, so there's no reason they couldn't exist. It's just that Dawn of the Dead made them dead AND runners so you had to kill them with headshots.
    • Fast and agile zombies miss the point. The reason zombies are dangerous is not because they are fast or tough. A single zombie is generally a pushover for anyone with the physical ability to heave a blunt object, much less use a gun. But you never deal with one zombie; you deal with hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of them! So it's their numbers which makes them such an unstoppable force, not their speed or physical prowess. So even though humans are faster, can wield deadly weapons and can kill many many zombies, they'll still lose since they'll eventually be overwhelmed. While I agree that it's unfair to hate the film purely because the zombies are fast, my opinion is that fast zombies are flawed from the git-go.
    • Fair enough. It is true that zombies are dangerous because of numbers, but remember that you're combining that in addition to the speed and strength required to make even an individual zombie a legitimate threat. I always argue that the fast zombie is more terrifying(not creepy, terrifying), and people always give me that same "It's when they build up that it gets bad" argument, as if they think that sprinting zombies never grow in numbers and overwhelm. Which situation is more frightening: You have to get past seven-hundred zombies that can only stumble at a pace slower than a toddler and can be pushed over, or you have to get past the same amount that have the ability to sprint at speeds of at least 25mph? I don't know about you, but as an out-of-shape geek, I'd rather take the ones that I could avoid easily just by walking and keeping my eyes open. Also, remember that most of the reason why the slow zombies overwhelm people in the movies is because the protagonists suddenly grab onto the Idiot Ball and think that they're safe while they hide in shelter, even though they can see the bastards building up outside. The only thing terrifying about those movies is that, depending on how cynical you are, people really will act that stupid once the dead start to rise. It's even more clichéd than running zombies. Maybe it's time for a change.
    • ^I'm working on something. Gimme a few years. Also, the fact that zombie are somehow able to take over most of the population overnight generally defies all logic. If someone is stumbling toward you and moaning, it's generally easy to just stay away from them, especially if they can't climb over barriers.
    • Escalating threat levels don't necessarily make something scarier, at least in terms of viewing fiction. A movie about, say, a killer with a nuclear missile stockpile isn't necessarily going to be scarier than a movie about a killer with basic hand-to-hand weapons.
    • A lot of things make sense if you allow this thing or that. But where the remake lost me was the doggie door. I mean, putrefying brains manage to reason this out?
    • You mean like they'd already figured out how to yank on boarded-up doors until the boards came loose in the original Night of the Living Dead? Grabbing a doggie-door's edge isn't much different.
    • So, what did you think of a zombie figuring out how to fire guns in Land of the Dead? And Romero made that one!
    • I seriously don't mind fast zombies, it gives some needed variety to a monster that has been done to (un)death. Just imagine if every vampire movie has been made in the exact same way as Lugosi's Dracula.
  • Honestly, zombies wouldn't be able to be up and walking around, since due to a lack of oxygen going to the brain from the moment of death to the moment of resurrection, which would have caused damage to voluntary motor functions, meaning they wouldn't be able to walk, let alone run, when they came back.
    • Disregarding the obvious fact that zombies in general can’t exist, I always felt that “fresh” zombies can run fast, as they’re not decomposed yet and are not really different from a living human physiologically. Old zombies -those with many days, months or years of existence- wouldn’t be able to run because of rotting. But zombies without a food source wouldn’t be able to move anyway because, as anything with a body, they require energy to move.

Why not building more barricades

• Am I the only person who cannot fathom why, after her initial encounters with the zombies, Ana was not BEGGING them to barricade all those huge glass windows and doors when they first entered the mall? In the first ten minutes of the movie, her zombie husband breaks a wooden bathroom door and shatters her windshield. I refuse to believe, even in light of all the other concepts I must swallow, that not a single zombie even accidentally broke one of the many, many, many feet of plate glass every mall ever built has on the ground floor. None of them accidentally stumbled through Ana & Co's original break-in spot either. Shenanigans. But even if they couldn't break the glass, why wasn't she terrified that they might?
  • You may as well ask why didn't they create fortified/concealed fall-back positions, destroy a few staircases, "hope for the best, prepare for the worst"?
  • Regarding the barricades: A deleted scene shows the gang fortifying some doorways with furniture, but it was cut out as it felt like it broke the flow of the film. As for the gang's original break-in point (the door by the service entrance), they locked it. It was a solid metal door, too; so the zombies couldn't break it down.
  • In any case, it's durable plexiglass that could take a brick thrown at it barely taking a scratch. Very different from the cheap window glass used in private homes to avoid replacing them due to vandalism all the time.
    • That's true, but the Max Brook Zombie Survival Guide points out that riot-proof glass keeps out humans, not zombies. All human rioters would eventually give up and go home. Those hundreds of zombies will keep pounding on that glass nonstop until they rot away into nothing, putting the glass under way more stress than it was designed to handle. Besides, riot-proof or not, would you put all your trust in plexiglass alone?
    • Ugh. Not this shit again. How many times do I have to explain it to people? Max Brooks is NOT the God of zombies! He wrote one book. ONE. A parody of those DIY survival guides that rednecks and conspiracy theorists are always treating like bibles, using zombies vaguely based on Romero's classic shamblers as a way to make it entertaining. And now every fucking zombie fan in the world is treating it like it'll really help them in a real zombie apocalypse. It won't. If you want to scrutinize zombies based on tropes that ONE MAN has created, why not look upon the real God of the Zombie: George A. Romero? You know, the guy who actually made the original Dawn of the Dead?
    • Just because he's not "God of the Zombie" doesn't mean you can just dismiss everything he said. He clearly did a lot of research into the subject if nothing else, so please quit whining when people use it as a point of discussion.
      
      As to it being just a "parody," and therefore dismissable, here's a little note from the guide's own page:
    Brooks has stated in multiple interviews that he was writing it as a straight survival manual because he's just that obsessed with the topic. The whole parody angle was wrongly assumed by horror fans when it came out, offending many of them, and he had to go on his survival lecture tours and make multiple interviews to get them to believe he wasn't making fun of it and was actually one of them.
    • Andre explicitly calls the glass "Shatter-proof". Whilst Andre might not have installed the windows (although being a criminal, would certainly know the usual types of glass used in stores through burglary and such), then the windows would hold. Zombie or not, they're still human bodies with human limitations. Breaking through plexiglass by punching and kicking is difficult for a full-strength, non-decomposing human; so naturally, the weaker, decomposing zombies would be unable to apply enough force to shatter the glass or force it out of its frame.
    • This would be correct if you were talking about weak, decomposing zombies. Except as the OP noted, the film BEGINS with a zombie tearing through an interior door with its bare hands in seconds and severely damaging a windshield with one punch. The zombies in the remake are not only not decomposing (they seem to be more of the Hate Plague type from 28DaysLater than any kind of reanimated corpse), but they have strength and endurance that almost borders on superhuman, and is the absolute peak of adrenaline-pumped human strength at a minimum. Not only do you have the possibility of the entire horde of hundreds outside basically pushing their combined weight against this glass (worse than any Black Friday panic you've ever seen), but all of the members of this horde are powerful enough to tear through barriers like a wrecking crew. And it only takes alerting a single zombie of that gigantic horde and attracting it to the doors to cause every single member to join in.
    • On another note, this is exactly why malls are such a bad place to hole up in case of a zombie apocalypse: even if you magically found a mall that was 100% abandoned and gave you free reign (not going to happen, since dozens and potentially hundreds of other locals will flee to the mall or be trapped in it during the initial panic; do you REALLY think you're the only one with that idea?), it's loaded with entrances on all sides. You won't necessarily have the keys to access the full building, but even if you could roam anywhere in the mall you'd still have a hard time locking down every single door, window, roll-up gate, and crawlspace that leads outside. It's very possible that even if you found an empty mall to hide in, the hordes would break in through any space they found (especially if you made ANY noise or activity that they could notice through all those giant plate glass doors and windows) and either smash their way to you or spend their days idling in locked back rooms and loading docks until they either found a way in or you accidentally opened a door.
    • Even the most durable glass will break if enough pressure is put on it. But even assuming that the mall for some reason used polycarbide (which would take heavy ordnance or a truck to break), the window doesn't have to break for the zombies to get in. Enough pressure against that very large pane will eventually cause its mounts to fail. The pane doesn't break, but the window frame tears free from its mountings and the state of the glass itself becomes moot. (As an aside, having read his book cover to cover, I found that the sheer number of factual errors Brooks made - from firearms to non-zombie survival strategy to basic mechanics - renders him at absolute best an unreliable narrator.)
    • That was actually a plot point in the original Dawn of the Dead, where the protagonists wound up blocking the entrances with commandeered trucks to prevent the hordes outside from breaking in by putting too much cumulative pressure on the entrance doors and windows. Granted, that's a whole lot less feasible with the remake's fast zombies, so you'll have to bring it up with Snyder as to how the mounts held up for weeks while being continuously beaten on by rabid undead hordes.
    • Also, as explained by Peter in the original, having the trucks in place of blocking the doors, it doesn’t give the dead any leverage to be able to break through if they tried banging on it.
    • Mythbusters actually put zombie wave pressure to the test in their zombie special, a wooden barn door couldn't be broken through with a mass wave of "Zombies" pressing on it, so non-hinged riot proofed doors would probably hold up for quite a good while.

Getting supplies to or from Andy

• Nicole catches a lot of crap for her actions with the truck because she's the easiest target to blame when things go wrong, but in truth everyone is to blame for how far south things went. None of the mall survivors ever show any concern for Andy, they just ignorantly assume that he's as well stocked on food and water as they are, when there's no way that can be the case. They never ask him how he's holding up, if he needs anything, etc. they just play Zombie Celebrity Squares with him. Had they asked, they would've known early on that he's low on everything but ammo. They could've looked for ways to try and get him supplies to tide him over. It's a freaking mall they're in, they don't have a toy store with RC cars that could be used to try and ferry a couple of sandwiches over? They couldn't make use of Norma's truck to drive over to Andy's, block the front door, drop off a backpack full of foods loaded with carbohydrates for him to grab, and then drive the truck back to the mall's fire escape ladder?
  • The gunshop was quite a distance from the mall; probably out of range for RC cars. As for the truck, it was probably deemed too risky. Sure, Nicole did it, but she came close to dying and then the rest of the group had to go save her.
  • It was shown when the truck first arrived that Nicole was very lucky to get to the gun store unscathed, when the truck arrived the zombies could and did catch up to the truck and climbed onto it with only getting shot off helping to make sure the zombies didn't bite the driver.
  • This is the one thing that puzzled me, why didn't they try and get to Andy back when the truck first got there, when the zombie count was still kind of low? It would've solved a lot of later problems if they took the truck loaded it up as much as they could with Andy and as much of his Guns' n' Ammo as they could take. All it would take is one person driving, it would have a decent chance of working, and they would have guns, then the whole climax wouldn't have happened. But in hindsight, "of The Dead" films tend to work with the theme that the human element always does things really stupidly. Take Luda's sad fate, if anyone had noted that Andre was acting weird and the fact that they had seen hide nor hair of Luda since she was moved into the baby shop, they wouldn't have been able to stop her and the kid's eventual zombification but they would have been able to at least deal with Andre's Sanity Slippage.
  • It should be said that while the OP says the mall survivors never think to ask Andy if he needs supplies, you could just as easily say it's on him for not telling them before he actually did state he was hungry.
  • What many people miss is the fact that we are never shown conversations with Andy, but that doesn't mean there weren't any. Andy writing "Hungry" doesn't mean they just learned he never had food. It means they learn he run out of his stock recently. They might be aware he's low on food and simply trying to work things out before it becomes an issue. So Andy giving them "Hungry" message might be just as well read as "Please hurry up with your escape plan, because I have nothing left to eat" rather than "We never talked about it, but I am out of supplies, so help". Them using Chips might be their first attempt to solve the issue or the hundredth.

• Oh, and about that island? Apparently it's in Lake Michigan. Guess what's on the coast of Lake Michigan? Chicago. Yeah, that little island is going to be totally safe and secluded when 2.8 million people are desperately trying to escape the zombie plague on every sea-worthy vessel they can get their hands on.
  • More like ten million in the greater Chicago area.
  • Like above, they're clearly not the brightest bunch when it came to thinking the whole situation out.
  • It's NOT safe. Post credits scene shows them landing on the island and zombies running towards them.
• Why is SO much stuff on fire and exploding during the opening credits? I feel like they just had extra budget laying around and decided to blow some stuff up.
  • To let people know that the world is going to hell in an impactful way.
  • First sign of zombies, you'd have people shooting up the place. And driving away. And shoot-driving. Car accidents, explosions of petrol/gas stations, molotovs...
  • It's a typical movie formula: get the audience to go "Wow, this is awesome and huge!" right from the beginning, spend the middle of the movie introducing the rest of the plot and characters and building up to the climax, then end with a huge finale. The lion's share of the budget (and effort) goes to the beginning and end, to grab the audience and give them a bombastic and satisfying ending. That's why the film starts with explosions and car crashes and zombies running around and ends with explosions and car crashes and zombies running around, but the middle is mostly talking and characterization with a few minor action sequences to keep the audience from getting bored.

• How different would the movie have been if Ana and Luis had been in the habit of locking their doors at night? They've apparently heavy sleepers, managing to snooze through their little suburban neighborhood literally going to hell overnight, awakening only when their zombified neighbor girl manages to waltz right into their bedroom.
  • Probably not much; the outcome would have still probably been the same.
  • I think they would've gotten as far as after breakfast, maybe, judging by how little either of them seem to pay attention to actual news, they probably don't turn on the TV until after they have eaten, and then Luis goes out for his morning jog (they seem like the type), he gets dogpiled and they get overrun, movie over.

• Why do we never see Kenneth with a handgun? Not simply why does he seem to favor the shotgun over any other armament, but he's a police officer and yet we never even see so much as a holster for a handgun on his duty belt.
  • Perhaps another cop/other survivor wrenched the sidearm off Kenneth's belt but then zombies overwhelmed them, and Kenneth went for a long enough period of time without a handgun that he decided he just didn't need one, or would get one later. So he took the holster off so there would be less things on his person for a zombie to grab onto.
  • Police are taught to aim for the torso, not the head, which works fine against criminals but does jack-squat to stop a zombie. Possibly Kenneth gave his sidearm to another survivor when he realized that his muscle memory for use of handguns was working against him.

• Does anybody else have a problem with the televangelist? I mean, there are zombies running around and he starts spouting biases and baseless assumptions about the situation. And the worst part is, he doesn't even look like he's in a bunker or a refugee camp, or even a shelter.
  • How is him spitting out biases and baseless assumptions about the situation any different from what they do in real life?

• Why did nobody punch out Steve and take his damn keys? They already seemed to know which boat was his, so it's not an issue of he hadn't told anyone which was his, would've saved a massive headache latter and prevented Micheal being bit.
  • They really wanted to save as many as they could, even the jerks. If they knocked him out they would have to either take him along, which defeats the purpose of taking the keys, or leave him to die, which they really didn't want to. Plus, Steve may have threatened that he lied about the boat and they had to bring him along to be certain. He seems like that kind of guy.
  • As pointed out in the main article, Steve is the only person in the crew that knows how to sail. It's the boat version of Always Know a Pilot. And both Steve and the rest of the group are fully aware of this, which is why he keeps acting like a jerk: they can't leave him, because they really damn need him.

• Was Steve just a truly dumb jerk, or did he actively and deliberately tried to get majority of the group killed? He might be an asshole, but he's not a complete idiot, quite the contrary. Him getting rid of majority of the group by not being at those doors and simply waiting things out means he's left with Ana, Monica and Glen. That's far less mouths to feed and much easier to control, especially since he's sleeping with Monica anyway. He is the one that has a yacht, so he's more than aware how the Lake Michigan looks like and what are the islands on it. Him going for a coffee would even fly with other characters, who would get mad, but it would be still perfectly within his asshole tendencies so far.
  • Because he is a coward and he only has his own self-interest in mind. No other reason than that.
• So, since people don't revive if they die for any reason in this version, and they removed the plot point about the infection being passed through blood, that made me realize something vital that never gets brought up: if you can only become a zombie if you're bitten, then how did the zombie apocalypse even start in the first place? Who was bitten first? Because someone had to have been bitten from the start in order for more zombies to be created through biting?
  • Could be from insect bites. The Black Plague was spread by fleas so this disease might have spread similarly by something common as a carrier. Something that could find its way to people with ease and/or by accident.
• Why did Andy's gunshop feature an armored doggy door?
  • It didn't. That's something he fashioned on his own. The real question is - how the hell did he manage to pull that off, given he's barely able to stand from hunger and the zombies are flocked around his store.

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