Too, Too Many Plot Holes

Rating: 4/10 (16 February 2010)

I spent most of this movie scratching my head and asking, "But..." as a continuous stream of implausible events over-tested my ability to suspend disbelief.
1) One of the major plot flaws is the use of measles as the agent of destruction, which is ridiculous for a number of reasons, the most important being that virtually everyone in the developed world with the exception of people with compromised immune systems and a few anti-vaccer nuts, is completely immune to measles. Aside from that there are other esoteric problems such as the fact when infectious agents are used in this way their ability to be infectious is completely destroyed.
2) Robert Neville drives around Manhattan hunting feral deer and harvesting his own maize in the warm summer days, retreating to the safety of his bathtub when the sun sets. But Manhattan gets an average of just over 72 cm of snowfall a year, which means that with no one left to plow or shovel it that there is going to be a coating of snow on the ground from mid-December to the beginning of March. Even if the roads were clear he could not risk going out to hunt on a cold day for fear that it might start to snow while he was out, giving the dark-seekers an easy track to follow once the sun set.
3) How did the dark-seekers survive the winter? For three winters they have survived freezing cold in unheated, open buildings, with no appreciable clothing. With elevated body temperatures, no less. Note that they avoided doors, and preferred to tunnel holes into the tops and sides of their nests. This does not make for a cozy environment. They would need to produce (and consume) ten times as much as an ordinary human in cold weather. This would have been very difficult on the coldest days, assuming that they needed to sleep. The kind of disregard that they display for their own health would not likely enable them to survive their first winter, never mind three.
4) I know they wanted to avoid an -R- rating, but having the clothes on the dark-seekers decay so modestly was just silly. The rags were not offering any thermal protection and would have been difficult to manipulate in their unfortunate state. I find it hard to believe that they would bother to put them back on after answering a call of nature. If they had the presence of mind to do that then they could at least have found some more clothes in better repair.
5) Anna seems to be experienced in dealing with dark-seekers. She has a flashy truck armed with bright UV-emitting lights and seems to be armed with some kind of phosphor weapon for really effective vampire repellence. She has seen them up-close before, mentioning that they always seemed to want to bite. But she didn't realize that the dark-seekers would follow her back from their encounter to Robert Neville's house. What?
6) All the bridges and tunnels to Manhattan were gone. How did Anna get her truck there? Or did she just happen to find and hot-wire a fully-equipped anti-vampire vehicle after it had been sitting around for three years? An impressively resourceful task for someone who didn't realize that the dark-seekers would follow her at night. She might have used some kind of ferry, but once again there is the issue of getting it running. Certainly Neville would have been curious, but he doesn't ask.
7) While it is theoretically possible (but not plausible) that the original cancer treatment somehow mutated--perhaps by mixing with another virus inside a patient--the idea that it could gain the power shown in the movie is beyond any reasonable stretch of the imagination, at least without some kind of explanation. The ability to kill 90% of the population is very strange. Even the Black Death only managed 30%-50% in an age of poor medicine and nutrition. Ebola can be as deadly to those it infects, but measles is not ebola even on its best day, so you have to assume that a nuisance virus that had lost its ability to be infectious not only gained it back but became much more virulent. Then there are the other symptoms: permanent modification of brain function such that the victims are converted into hot, murderous, blood-drinking vampires. Robert Neville is supposed to be a smart man, but after explaining to Anna just how awful and impossible this apocalypse has been, he draws the conclusion that "There is no God." Perhaps he meant that God was powerless in the face of this disaster, but given the implausibility of the events, wouldn't the correct conclusion be that this apocalypse could only have been brought about by God in the first place? Perhaps what he meant was that the "God of Love" that he had been brought up to expect obviously did not exist, and instead there was only a god of whimsical and malevolent destruction. But that wouldn't have played out very well with the end of the movie.