Headscratchers / Rampage (2018)

Gloves

• Kate puts on a glove on one hand to hold the cryogenic refrigerator that stored the R-19 bottles but why does she leave her other hand bare and ungloved to pull out a few of the R-19 bottles?
  • Possibly may have been dry ice, therefore the glove.
    • But the question is how could she touch the bottles with her bare hand, if she'd just taken them out of a refrigerator that is so cold that she needed to wear a glove to pull out the canister?
    • The canister appears to be metal, while the vials with the antidote appear to be coated in a thick plastic shroud. Anyone who's touched cold plastic and metal parts in winter can immediately tell the difference.

George's mutation

• Ralph gained wing membranes and porcupine quills while Lizzie gained gills, tusks, and a tail club. How come George just got bigger?
  • Lower dosage? Ralph's canister was empty when found, George had barely touched his.
    • Makes sense. Lizzie probably had the most changes, and she ate the entire canister.
  • Alternatively, Kate does mention that they were testing multiple mixes. Probably the basic package plus several variants.
  • While nothing to this effect is mentioned in the film, perhaps the mutagen also causes the infected animals to develop secondary traits copied from other animal species that they eat? George never developed any secondary traits because he was in captivity until the plane crash and never ate any other animals (he did attack and kill the grizzlies in San Diego, but didn't eat them), plus a gorilla is not a naturally carnivorous animal like a wolf or crocodile. The forest where Ralph's pack lived could conceivably contain porcupines (for the quills) and flying squirrels (for the wing flaps) that he might've eaten. Lizzie would have no shortage of fish to eat (for the gills) and could've picked off a whole pack or two of wild boars (for the tusks) along the shores of the rivers that she swam through on her way from Florida to Chicago.
  • For that matter, maybe the mutagen grafted in traits from prey animals whose remains were already in Ralph's and Lizzie's stomachs, when they were exposed to the gas. Which would explain why they never took on any human traits, despite gobbling up people right and left.

Rapid size growth

• How did the three monsters get so big so quickly? Ralph is rather justified, as he was shown hunting elk and later eating people as he got bigger, but what about George? He doubled in size while in the zoo, and and after the plane crash he is Ralph's size when he is next seen.
  • George could have grabbed plenty of plants, animals, and perhaps people even as he ran off from the crash site. Lizzie had all the fish she could grab while moving through the Everglades and up the coast. Still not realistic for how much mass they gained so quickly, but its something.
  • If anything, it's the rat's rapid growth that's hardest to account for. Diet for lab animals is doled out in very precise quantities, to ensure consistency during experiments, so it couldn't have had more than a dozen-odd rat blocks in its enclosure. Even if it also devoured a few cagemates, it shouldn't have been able to grow to human size, or at least, to do so fast enough that the astronauts had no time to euthanize it.

Very trusting refugees

• In the final shot of the film, George helps rescue people trapped in the wreckage. Said people jump into his palm without hesitation, despite him being the same gorilla who wrecked the buildings! Yes, he's been cured, but they don't know that...
  • Maybe the people who climbed onto George's hand witnessed the interaction between George and Davis and so that's how they concluded it's safe to trust George now.
  • He's a fifty foot tall ape who could pop a human body under a single finger, but instead is calmly offering his hand for the people to climb on to. At the very least, they don't want to piss off the giant by snubbing him or seeming ungrateful.
  • We don't know what state the ledge they climbed down from was in at the time. Could be that it was on the brink of collapsing out from under those people, and they had no alternative but to risk trusting George.

Your oversized "monkey"

• Russell tells Okoye, "Your oversized monkey is old news" - why doesn't Okoye get mad that he just called George a monkey? Okoye is a zoo primatologist, he should be quick to discern between monkeys and gorillas. Primatologists usually can get very annoyed if someone incorrectly says apes are monkeys.
  • Even if it is technically wrong, the word "monkey" is commonly used by many people in the general public as a generic term for any primate. Also, the revelation (to Okoye, at least) that George is not the only (or the most dangerous) animal being affected by the mutagen is a much more pressing concern than arguing over the semantics of George being called the wrong type of animal.
  • Being pedantic about things that your average layman is going to get wrong, no matter what you do, isn't actually a requirement to be a zoo primatologist. Okoye isn't a docent charged with educating the public, he's a behind-the-scenes handler and researcher. Plus, if he has had much contact with tourists visiting the zoo, he's surely heard that monkey/ape mistake so many times that it's a Never Heard That One Before-by-proxy scenario for him, hence not worth bothering with.

Carnivorous George

• Gorillas are vegetarians, and George had never been shown to have a taste for meat any time previously in the movie. What made Kate think George would even want to eat Claire, rather than just throwing her off in some random direction?
  • Cuz he's both hungry, rabid with rage and has been eating people so far.
  • Most Gorillas are hervibores, but East Lowland Gorillas are known to compliment their diet by eating ants, termites and other insects. Plus, there is a recent claim that they may be occasional meat scavengers.
  • Presumably the giant growth made him not so picky. He needs all sorts of food to sustain his enormous body, be it plants or people. How they figured he's going to eat Claire specifically rather than toss her away is unclear, though.
  • Maybe George is really fond of apples and strawberries, so Kate figured he'd want to eat anything red?

Falling building

• I don't understand how the building fell down. Those monsters were big but compared to the building their mass was trivial. It's not like they were Godzilla-sized.
  • About halfway up, Lizzie takes a detour through the building to the other side. This likely weakened the structural integrity of the upper part, which is what fell off.
  • I'd go with the explanation above, after all only the top half of the skyscraper fell down.

Lizzie's path to Chicago

• There are no bodies of water connecting Everglades, Florida to Lake Michigan, Illinois. How did the giant crocodile Lizzie get there without being detected by humans? Let's assume that Claire's ultrasonic sound transmitter is all Lizzie needed for navigation.
  • I speculate that she burrowed underground (for a minimum of 800 miles stretching from the East Coast to Lake Michigan in just 2 days) Then that would mean Lizzie would've had to forgo going without water for a long time, which would explain why rather than go for the Energyne skyscraper first, she instead popped up in Lake Michigan due to dehydration and thirst.
  • Or she took an alternate route via the Gulf of Mexico, swam up the Mississippi, Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers, and bulled her way through the canal system's locks. There's an easy-to-miss radio snippet about the moving bogey in the river moving north, which is consistent with this route, and incompatible with an entry from Lake Michigan (which would have entailed Lizzie going west).

Ralph's durability

• Burke is able to make Ralph feel immense pain with just one shot with his Daniel Defense M4A1. Then, Burke shoots at Ralph a lot more (without missing) and the chopper sprays Ralph with a M240D machine gun yet Ralph proceeds to attack and acts as though the bullets have no effect on him??
  • Maybe the first hit just took him by surprise and resulted in a startled yelp and falling over?
  • The mutagen gives the affected animals rapid growth and a powerful Healing Factor, but does not make them Immune to Bullets (at least until the climax when they're big enough that the bullets are only minor annoyances to them). Burke's first shot did injure Ralph, but the Healing Factor meant that he'd already recovered from it by the time Burke's team landed and tracked him down on the ground.
  • The first shot, Ralph may not even have connected with the gun; he just knew something he couldn't see "bit" him and made him hurt. Once he comprehends what the pain's source is, he's going to eliminate it as fast as possible, same as any injured animal will lash out at what it perceives as its attacker.

Ralph's strategy on attacking aircraft

• When Ralph is being hunted by the Wydens' Black Hawk, he charges at it and brings it down in spite of the Black Hawk spraying him with the M240D. When the U.S. Air Force sends in a Warthog-1, why does Ralph run for cover and react like "Fuck this! I'm running!"?
  • For one thing, the GAU-8 Avenger is a much bigger gun than an M240. One is used to kill people, the other is used to kill tanks.
    • 7.62mm Machine gun vs. 30mm uranium core gatling cannon...do the math.
    • I think the headscratcher is this: Yes, we do know the difference in power between both guns, but the monsters do not. It would be justified if Ralph had been shown taking some 30mm rounds and that those hurt him, so he'd be trying to avoid more. But in the movie the moment the A-10 arrives, both Ralph and George take cover. How do they know?
  • Ralph still has some of his wolf instincts. There's nothing inherent in that instinct that would tell him to be wary of helicopters - although humans occasionally hunt wolves from choppers, they haven't been doing so for long enough to change wolves' natural reaction to such aircraft - but eagles are something that a wolf on its own probably wouldn't want to tangle with. The plane's raptor-like silhouette might've triggered that cautious response.

Curing Ralph and Lizzie

• Is there a reason given in the film (beyond the need for a Kaiju brawl) as to why Ralph and Lizzie couldn’t have been given the cure like George was instead of just killing them?
  • The Wydens interrupted Davis and Kate in the lab and Kate only managed to slip one dose of the cure (the one they later used on George) into her pocket before leaving the lab. Even if they'd been able to cure all three animals, George is a tame gorilla who has a preexisting friendly relationship with his human handler (Davis), but Ralph and Lizzie would still need to be put down as they are dangerous wild animals that are now hundreds of times heftier than is natural for their respective species. Confining them would be well-nigh impossible, and transporting them out of the city even more so.