Great Potential Ruined by Plot Absurdities

Rating: 2/10 (19 July 2009)

The first scene of the film was very well done; it set up what I thought would be the makings of a very intelligent theme for exploration. In escaping the zombie attack on the farm house, the sole survivor, having left his wife behind, has to live with himself. Given the circumstances presented, many viewers would be torn between hating him and understanding his decision. It was clear that in staying behind and answering his wife's plea for help, he would have died. He later tearfully apologizes to his surviving kids in what I felt was a very effective scene. The daughter tells him that she and her brother are glad he survived. And that is exactly the point, isn't it? Had he answered his wife's call, he would have needlessly died, and the children would have had no parents at all. Nevertheless, his guilt was clear and consuming. What a great potential issue to explore in a horror movie, and what immense possibilities it could have led to.
I was disappointed that such was not on the filmmakers' agenda. What could have been an intelligent and unconventional approach to such a film was abandoned in short order. All the more disappointing in that the movie devolved into just another guts/guns/gore flick, with much sound and fury signifying nothing.
Apparently that was all that the makers of the film were really interested in producing, with little or no point to it. Especially in that, in terms of the "plot" they threw logic and common sense to the wind. Apparenlty the mission was to ensure that the outbreak recurred, ensure mayhem and holocaust and death, no matter what. Perhaps in the midst of the chaos, the viewer would forget about, or excuse, the absurd liberties they had taken with the storyline and character development and motivations. I could not do it.
The great potential set up in that first scenes was spectacularly and almost criminally repudiated by the film, when the wife that the viewer thought was dead is miraculously found alive. Then found to be an asymptomatic carrier of the virus. Then, despite being of crucial importance as a source of a potential cure and a critical hazard in that she could readily infect someone, is left all alone and unguarded in a room for the husband/father to just waltz in with his access card, be infected, and then kill her. Huh?
It has also been noted by many here: 1) a military operation so lax and incompetent in terms of security and crisis response that one would be excused for thinking that the people in charge were actually yearning for, and actively trying to engineer, a provocation to give them an excuse to eventually blow everything up and kill everyone that they had been assigned to protect 2) the zombie dad who was apparently modeled after Forrest Gump, who appears everywhere, at the most ridiculously contrived times 3) two children who it is all but impossible to root for or care about, given that they, along with the mind-bogglingly incompetent military, were instrumental in reigniting the contagion 4) the million times before used plot device wherein the young medical officer (or scientist, cop, engineer-fill in the blank-) whose concerns are ignored or dismissed by superiors who are blind to what would have been obvious to any person with an IQ in the double digits.
A few plot holes can be explained or rationalized, but those in this film were so vast as to overwhelm everything. What started--I thought--as a thinking person's horror flick ended as just another mind numbing exercise in gore porn.