WMG / 28 Days Later

Jim dies at the end.

After receiving a nasty gunshot wound to the stomach, the camera freezes as Jim's friends desperately try to rush him to a hospital. A caption appears with '28 days later...' written on, just like at the beginning. After a quick-cut summary of Jim being patched up at the hospital, he wakes up in a little house in the country with his friends. They're soon spotted by a plane sent by the outside world, with the possibility of rescue on the way. Notably, this last sequence is shot differently from the rest of the movie; the rest of the movie is shot with a 'rough' digital camera, but the epilogue sequence is shot with traditional film stock. Some believe this indicates that Jim didn't survive his injuries; this is his idea of 'paradise' after the weeks of torment he's just gone through. It helps that, in the original drafts of the script, and the alternate endings shot and, in some screenings and on the DVD, played after the credits, Jim did die; the film-makers decided this would be a bit too much of a Downer Ending.

• Note the camera panning over them at the end. They've written "HELLO" on the hill, but the O is strangely cut out of the shot. That's what happens when you punch a priest...
  • The effect is driven home with a flash of these green pastures during the rescuscitation scene. While the viewer is still not sure if Selena was able to revive Jim, an idyllic landscape flashes on-screen; but it's upside-down and has HELL written on it in pristine white. It doesn't take WMG to see the effect was intended (moreso considering that the rescuscitation scene and the landscape are basically parts of Jim's REM dream. If noted, his awakening itself doesn't really convince the viewer he's not really dead, hence the awesomeness.

Jim is dead before the movie starts.

The movie opens with Jim, naked, in an abandoned hospital, having apparently woken from a coma caused by his getting run over by a car. This raises a few questions - why is he naked, and not in a hospital gown? Why was he seemingly the only patient left in the hospital? Why is his room so trashed? These points — coupled with the surreal, hellish experiences he goes through before the ultimately hopeful ending and the slightly Jesus-like way in which he is framed in the opening shot — make it look like Jim died when he was hit by the car. The entire movie is his soul going through torment in purgatory before finally being accepted into paradise.

That's right, folks - it's an actual Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory story we got here...

• It makes sense. Selena is essentially good but thinks only of herself, making her self-centered and proud; she later mellows and redeems herself. The guy who got bit back at Jim's house lied about it and promptly died for it; the balances of his good qualities versus his bad (hitting on Selena, for example) finally tipped in a 'downward' direction. Major West is well-intentioned but less than ethical. The soldiers are all desperate and frightened, but still crazy, base rapists. And so on. Jim's naked because he's played by Cillian Murphy. It's the scariest scene in the entire thing.
• This troper thought the Cillian Murphy nudity was a thing of beauty.
• Furthermore, the other people he encounters could either be angels and demons sent to try and tempt him to go either up or down, or fellow souls who are hung by their sins and judged accordingly.
• Souls in Purgatory are often depicted as being shown suffering the torments they experienced in life- the lustful buffeted by winds where in life they were swayed by their desires, and so on. So maybe it's a mix of both- the damned trying to drag him down and the few still-human survivors. (What's sad is, this totally makes sense now. :: facepalms :: )
• The only problem with this is that in religions that believe in a Purgatory you can't "be pulled down", by being in Purgatory you've already proven you're not bad enough for Hell and you just have to continue trying to reach redemption. That being said those who died could have failed for the moment and "respawned" elsewhere.

Jim is crazy as a bag of hammers.

The zombies are real, but Jim is not a good guy. All the male competition for the few female survivors? Dead as hell.

• That may be canon.
• Jim killed all the other guys and hallucinated it was zombe-monsters or other crazy humans!

This movie and I Am Legend take place in the same universe

Scientist developed a cure for cancer. In the USA, they tested it on humans; in the UK, they tested it on monkeys first. The Dark Stalkers and the "Infected" are the same, only the American Infected developed an allergy to the sun due to its cure being tested on people with cancer. Jim wakes up at the same moment I Am Legend starts.

• Guess the cure worked then.

Left 4 Dead takes place in the same universe as the 28 series

Self explanatory, really. The special infected and the change in infection times can be hand-waved by the virus adapting to the new environment of a fantasy-counterpart Pennsylvania. That new government health agency that you see on all the evacuation posters was formed after all the stuff that happened in England.

The Rage 'virus' isn't a virus at all

Rage is a curse carried by blood. It releases the negative energy in everything it touches. This explains how it works so damn fast.

• Also explains why contact with even a drop of infected blood is invariably fatal.

A side effect of the Rage virus is increased production of blood.

Or alternately, the body expelling all its bodily fluid, not just plain blood and vomit. Private Mailer should not have that much blood in him.

• Another possibility is increased fluid production in general, with the extra fluids either being infectious themselves or just a delivery system for the blood.

Jim is a long-term guest at Arkham Asylum

He got dosed with his own fear toxin in Batman Begins. Everything that happens in 28 Days Later is what his mind is experiencing while he is having his drug-induced Freak Out.

• 28 Weeks Later is what happens when the rest of Gotham gets dosed, obviously.

Finland survives the virus.

The fighter pilot in the end speaks Finnish in the radio. This suggest the rescue operation is not an international effort, but Finland as a country manages to keep its government and infrastructure intact, while the rest of Europe is ravaged by the Rage virus.

Finland becomes the leading nation of the rebuilt EU, although graciously accepting American assistance with troublesome outer island regions like Britain.

The virus mutates before it gets to the United States...

Everyone there turns into a shufflin' zombie, though.

• Now the movie and Music Video are united.

Sgt. Doyle was once called Clint Barton

Purely based on the fact that he is an expert marksman and sniper... who's actor became the World's Greatest Marksman

The infection takes longer to kick in than it appears.

The virus works by causing the body to overproduce aggression-related hormones. These hormones are present in the bodily fluids in sufficient quantities that contact with them can affect others. This is why people show symptoms so early. It's more like a drug taking effect.

The infected go into a state of hibernation when there are no uninfected humans around.

If there's no one for them to infect, their metabolism drops to extremely low levels to conserve energy. This explains how they are able to survive so long without eating or drinking.

This movie is in the same universe as 28 Days.

The stories don't cross, but the rage virus is released the same day that movie ends.

In the early days of the outbreak, the virus was also airborne and, in most cases, fatal

That's how it was able to spread so fast to so many different places and attempts to contain it failed. People caught it, got sick, spread it to others, and occasionally those they infected became rage zombies. Otherwise, they just got sick and died. That explains all the masses of dead in the church and the diner. The rage zombies didn't kill those people, who looked like they died while they were in the middle of eating. After 28 days, the airborne variant died out or became dormant, leaving only the virus that's already in the bloodstream of those already infected, and it's a different strain that ensures transformation into another rage zombie only when fluids are exchanged (like a bite), not from airborne transmission. The tie-in comic included in the official soundtrack seems to support this where we see someone just vomit blood completely out of nowhere.

The cameraman is an unmentioned character

The movie was shot with a handheld camcorder, after all.

The soldiers were already at the blockade before Frank got infected, but waited until they knew he was infected so they could kill him

The soldiers want women to repopulate, and upon seeing this group with two young beautiful females, they knew they'd found their prize. But, there were also two men with them, who no doubt would object to using the women as breeding stock. Because of that, they stayed back to try and devise a plan to get at least one of the men out of the picture (particularly the bigger stronger one), and avoid just gunning them both down and kidnapping the ladies, as they want to maintain a sense of civility as they restore society. They also didn't want to fight the ladies (at least not until the raping started), lest the fight go too far and they end up killing one or both women. Serendipitously, a crow feeding on an infected corpse gets a single drop of blood in Frank's eye, infecting him, and they wait until he shows clear undeniable signs of rage, and they swoop in to "save the day", taking out the biggest threat to their imminent repopulation.

The Rage Virus research was preserved and eventually used to make the Reavers

Serenity explained that the Reavers were made when their attempts at dosing the population of Miranda with an anti-aggression drug went horribly wrong, resulting in nearly everyone becoming so docile they simply lay down and die, and a tiny portion going the complete opposite existing in a perpetual state of Unstoppable Rage. Similarly, the Rage Virus was the byproduct of an attempt to do the same thing centuries earlier.

After the outbreak ended on Earth, someone went back to the original research facility and recovered all the data on the Rage Virus, but refrained from direct human/large animal experiments after seeing the devastation the first wave of infection caused. Eventually the research was abandoned after yielding no positive results. Centuries later, someone in the Alliance found the research in an old archive, and got the bright idea to try it out, hoping their futuristic technology would help improve on the first attempts, only to end up making it significantly worse.

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