Quote:
Originally Posted by folkhemmet
If you look closely at the part of the preview where Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) is pumping gasoline at a filling station you will notice on the sign that the price for a gallon of regular gasoline is $6.63. Now, albeit, the movie is depicting a time 5 years in the future, but even with inflation a rise in gasoline prices to nearly seven dollars a gallon implies that the supply is not keeping pace with the demand. We are currently, as a thread in this section points out, facing $100 a barrel oil and the newspapers, the NYTimes included, are calling this the first demand led energy crisis. I doubt the Peak Oil theory plays any role in the the story's plot, although I cannot help but wonder if anyone else noticed this subtlety from the preview and, if so, wondered, like me, why the director chose to include this higher price for gasoline.
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I don't know what the writers were trying to imply, but in the face of a disaster, that seems a very low price. Assuming the plague wasn't instantaneous, there would be a period with increasing numbers of people filling the hospitals, supply lines starting to break down, but society still holding on for a bit. Barring legal sanctions not to raise prices, they would rise very quickly and many people would be willing to pay a lot to get out of the city